People have been visiting me as well as me unlocking the chains from my workstation and got out traveling to a few different places to go to concerts, having cold drinks as the beach, enjoying hotels, attending art exhibitions and taking quite some photos (I got myself a new 24-70mm, f/2.8 lens for my DSLR) and ended it all with tons of great music at the Way Out West festival here in Gothenburg last week, held for it’s second year.

A few great, relaxing weeks to get some new energy and inspiration. Things got back to normal this week and I have had to catch up on some work, and have delivered four new projects already. I have started using a calendar now, hehe, so I have scheduled some catchup time for the website here as well.

The Cookie Monster attending a Barbecue at my place

I’ve been developing my workflow for my film project for some time. I want to have a rock solid pipeline setup so when I go full blast I can aim all my focus at the creative parts. So far I’ve concentrated mostly on the asset exchange, getting meshes and animations in and out of the different applications I am working with, as painlessly as possible. I am pretty happy with where I am at this point.

I’ve also put in much thought into the rendering pipeline, which of course also is really important to get right. So far I’ve mainly be working with animatics and test renders, so I haven’t had to set the rendering pipe in stone yet.

One thing I have decided on is to render everything to a floating point image format. Which has led me back into the dreadful lairs of color management. Again.

I did some lame attempts with color management a few years back, got myself a Spyder 2 calibrator to work with accurate colors. But after the calibration I couldn’t get my head around it with different profiles. Colors started to mismatch between applications and other mysterious things. I ended up uninstalling it and selling the device after a month. I’m pretty sure it was good hardware, but handled by a crappy operator. ;)

Anyway, when doing my initial tests with a floating point rendering pipeline, I encountered the gamma differences between the screen and the rendered images, as FP formats work in a linear gamma, and the screen does not, which led me back into reading up a lot on the subject. The gamma difference is an easy fix, but the control freak in me was not happy that I did not understand completely what was going on, so I’ve studied color management a lot more this time around.

A happy coincidence was that Gerardo Estrada just wrote an interesting article on the subject in the HDRI 3D magazine issue #18 and #19, proposing different workflows with linear color management in LightWave 3D, and have also been very active on the NewTek forums lately talking about the subject.

And that Sebastian Goetsch has just released an excellent set of tools for LightWave 3D, enabling an easy workflow for color management and ICC profiles right within LightWave 3D. Wow!

Well, well, as I’ve spent quite some time understanding the subject this time, and done tons of tests the latest week, I think I’ve actually got the hang of Gamuts, Gammas, ICC Profiles and a color managed workflow through the entire pipeline this time. Will even get myself a Spyder again to get my screen accurate, as I believe I can handle it this time. ;) In the end, which also my tests have shown, having a linear color corrected workflow do enhance both realism and quality of the renders and removes a lot of the obstacles associated with image manipulation. So it’s well worth the time to get it right.

As soon as I’ve implemented a decent, good quality, easy to maintain system/movie player to showcase animations and film clips on my website and blog, I’ll start posting some rendered sequences, and with that also write some more detailed text about my complete pipeline and workflow for my film project.

I’ll definitely also return to this subject and write a decent text or article in the blog about my color managed pipeline when I have had my film project in the rendering phase for some time.

I’m not posting any renders this time, but to not make this post lack images completely, I’ll just snap a photo of my latest McFarlane action figure I got the other week, standing happy on my work desk. :)

Latest addition to my McFarlane toy collection

Yesterday, my old friend Johan, a.k.a. Loxley told me our old Amiga demo, In A Dream, was online at Youtube. It was around 13 years ago we created this baby amongst tons of other productions on the Amiga computer platform. It was created in 1994 to be exact and was the last production I was involved with in the demo scene, ending my years there from 1987-1994.

Graphics from In a Dream - Click the image to see the demo on YouTube.

It was a pure pleasure to me to see that our old productions since the demo scene days are still working their way around. And I am amazed that some people actually are taking their time to record and upload our old productions. I just wish the video quality on Youtube was a bit better. All lovely details gets lost and are quite blurred out. Which reminds me of one of my future projects where I hope to find some spare days to go through all our old Equinox Demo floppy disks and record them all to high quality video files. Oh well, one day I’ll find the time. :)

Anyway, that’s all for now. For those old-skool guys who still have access to an Amiga or are using an Amiga emulator, all Equinox productions can be downloaded to be seen in their original glory from our memorial website, Equinox Official Website. Also tons of music and graphics we did back in the early 90′s are available there.

Now I’ll get back to work and keep pushing those polygons around!

/Johan – The artist formerly known as rioter of equinox.

Despite the awful weather on one of my days away, where things really got wet and muddy, a pair of rubber boots, quite some beers and lot’s of great concerts, it was no problem really. Just happy I’ve been around enough times to know what to look for in a good camping spot far away from places like these:

Ain't it cosy?

Anyway, I got some new energy, found some new inspiration and got a few new ideas going for coming projects. And of course, listened to tons of great music. Lot’s of great acts in a few days, so we had a hectic schedule to find the time to see all those band we wanted to see, a few had to be missed, but still, I got to see this lovely bunch of bands these few days.

• Wednesday (Warm-Up): Detektivbyrån
• Thursday: Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, Speaker Bite Me, Björk (some), Jeans Team
• Friday: Camera Obscura, The Sounds, Trost, Roky Erickson & The Explosives (some), Beastie Boys, Masher Shalal Hash Baz, Queens of the Stone Age, CSS, Booka Shade, Peter Bjorn and John, Nephew, The Brian Jonestown Massacre
• Saturday: Taxi Taxi!, Holly Golightly, The Whitest Boy Alive, The Who (some), 120 Days, Red Hot Chili Peppers
• Sunday: The Lionheart Brothers, Beirut, The Ark, Tunng, Arctic Monkeys, Timbuktu & Damn!, Basement Jaxx

Anyway, a few great days, great music, great drinking and so on! I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

And I got the opportunity to experiment and explore my latest camera a little bit better and I took about 3 gigabyte of photos, so time to start organizing and developing them in Adobe LightRoom. It’s pretty seldom I end up on photos myself, but I thought for once I’d post a photo of me from the Lounge Area when Taxi Taxi! was playing their beautiful music there. Just a tiiiny hint of a worn-out look, it’s from the fifth day living in a tent surrounded by rain and mud.

Yours truly at the Roskilde Festival

Oh well, time for me to get back in my real world again of 3D, animations, editing and everything else I do the rest of the year. But strengthened with new views, inspiration, ideas and energy since the last week.

I’ll drop a new on-topic post tomorrow!

Woohoo, going to the Roskilde Festival

Great music, great friends and several cases of beer is to be expected during the next couple of days. Despite that the weather seems to be awful, it will be outweighed by those factors.

Over and out, see you next week!

And it’s been pretty lousy sitting at home staring at the same resolution of 1920×1200 at my laptop 17″ screen. So now when Dell had a good deal at their new 2407wfp screen I jumped on the train and ordered one which arrived yesterday.

I’m already in love. It’s so pleasant to work in front of. Now my upgrading frenzy will have to rest for a while so I actually get some time over to get some work done in the evenings.

The refurbished workspace in my apartment with the new baby

Luckily I got the rev A03 of the screen, which all of the problems that I’ve read about with earlier revisions of vertical banding and such are nowhere to be seen, the image quality is as close to perfect as it can be, according to me and my preferences.

Oh well, back to doing some artwork now… until next time…

It has served me well, but I have been drooling to get a Core Duo processor since it’s release. And now when the Core 2 Duos where available I decided it was time for an upgrade.

Anyway, I got my new Dell Inspiron 9400 the other day with a Core 2 Duo processor and some other goodies, and have spent the last days configuring it. It does take some time to set up all my software from scratch on a new machine, but finally everything is perfect, just the way I like it.

The creative corner in my apartment

The new Core 2 Duo processor really is a dream come true. It renders about three times faster than my old PM 2.0. I haven’t had this huge leap in rendering performance since the middle 90′s in the Lightwave 4.0 era, when I made the jump from my trusty old Amiga 4000T with a 060 processor to my first Windows based workstation, a Pentium 133MHz machine which were running circles around my Amiga when using Lightwave.

Now more than ten years later, that feeling has emerged again. It’s a joy to press the F9 button to render and have blazingly fast results pumped out to the screen.
Some quick numbers I did to compare the Pentium M 2.0 and Core 2 Duo 2.0 when rendering the same scene in a couple of 3D applications on both the PM and the C2D, both machines are equipped with 2GB RAM.

• LightWave 9; PM: 39 minutes – C2D: 15 minutes.
• Modo 202; PM: 4 minutes – C2D: 1 minute 32 seconds.
• Vue 5 Infinite; PM: 7 minutes 42 seconds – C2D: 3 minutes 13 seconds.

Wonderful difference, and will make a big impact on my workflow. I couldn’t be happier with this upgrade. Also the GeForce 7900 GS card in the machine makes the OpenGL viewports a joy to throw real heavy meshes at.
Just drooling over a 24″ screen to go with this setup on my desk sometime in the future.

Setting up music: Anna Ternheim – To Be Gone (EP)

It’s about my software development projects. I wanted to clearly separate it from the artistic part of the site, and have made a different design for the software projects.

The StormDev Website

It will contain web applications, Lightwave Plugins and Windows Utilities.
Storm|Stats will be the first software available there, which is one of the most advanced and sophisticated web analytics tools available. It’s currently in it’s last beta phase with me making sure it’s rock solid and sorting out the last things with some Flash presentations inside the app. It will be released the same day as the software development site opens.

While doing that I started to get quite happy with the techniques I’m using, so I made a still image of some other environment. Here is the backplate I’ve come up with.

Backplate for a coming image

The complete image with the foreground elements are rendering as I’m typing this, so I’ll hopefully have it posted to the portfolio tomorrow or the day after.

On another note, I added a software section to the website. I’ve been coding on a stats apps for some time, and it’s getting quite advanced and finished as well. So I’m tuning it for it’s release. So be sure to soon see the birth and appearance of Storm|Stats and it will be followed by some other apps I have in the pipeline when time permitting.

According to the very sad post about my dear friend Brent I posted yesterday, I’ve been talking with some of the other executives at IMA this night, and we won’t let Brent’s dreams and visions die with him, but we’ll make everything we can to make sure they will live on and let the show be a dedication to Brent’s memory.

He passed away this morning from an abdominal aneurysm rupture and massive heart attack in Los Angeles, where he was temporary working for our show.

Brent was the creative mind behind the complete concept, and other than that he had become a very dear and close friend of mine. I’ll miss him deeply.

And my deepest sympathies goes to Brad and Gloria.