The power is in the polygons.

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In 1991, Jean Henri Gaston Giraud (aka Moebius) and a team of animators created this gorgeous short pilot for a film called Starwatcher. According to this Wired feature that Mark wrote in 1994, "Starwatcher was slated to be the first feature-length animated movie to be made with 3-D computer graphics. But the film's producer died in a car accident, and shortly thereafter it was discovered that the French production company bankrolling the film was FF85 million (US$15 million) in debt. (Many suspected the car accident was no accident.)"

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SIGGRAPH is coming, when all the amazeballs graphics research drops, and the previews are terrifying and astonishing by turns (sometimes both!). Read the rest

Etienne Bouteille made a twitter bot that "renders hairy balls" every three hours. They're not naughty, unless you benefit from extraordinarily versatile perversions, but they are all very hairy and very balls.

Check out Etienne's guide to creating similar bots with Blender and a Raspberry Pi.

In total the system is composed of four different parts :

A Blender file — It contains your beautiful composition, material, lighting, etc. • A script to run in Blender — This is were you will add procedural elements for your bot, that will be different in every picture • A script to post your images on twitter — No point in rendering images if you don’t post them! This script will do that for you. • The “crontab” — This is a little file on your Pi that will run your script at regular intervals

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A better way to simulate viscous liquids is present in this paper: Variational Stokes: A Unified Pressure-Viscosity Solver for Accurate Viscous Liquids Read the rest

A poster talk at last year's European Conference on Computer Vision introduced "Deep Warp," a machine-learning based technique for "photorealistic image resynthesis for gaze manipulation" -- that is, you hand the algorithm an image of a face, and tell it where you want the person in the face to look, and it moves the gaze realistically to have the person look in your desired location. Read the rest

Redditor enzyme69 used Blender to generate a picture of Mario "drawn" in crayon; this should be a thing. [via r/GenerativeArt] Read the rest

From a 1984 episode of the fantastic USA Network series Night Flight, an interview with pioneering digital video artists John Sanborn and Dean Winkler about their latest pieces, "Act III," with music by Philip Glass, and their music video for Adrian Belew's "Big Electric Cat." Watch them both below.

(r/ObscureMedia, thanks, UPSO!)

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Joseph Pollack creates digital artwork—or, rather, he codes software that does. Animated, too! Check out his github for a peek at the code. [via r/proceduralgeneration]

...these were made by a program I've been writing in C++ and OpenGL. ... If you've never done ANYTHING with 3D, I'd recommend starting with a basic 3D modeling program like blender, maya, or 3D max. Get familiar with digital modeling in general. You eventually realize there are really 3 main components to 3D Graphics: geometry, lights, and to a lesser extent, the camera. Try to understand why each of these are so important, and more importantly, how you can mess with each to accomplish a certain look or quality.

Once you get more comfortable with the concept of digital modeling (or if you already are), you get into more spooky territory. If you only care about making something interesting, you can get away with a pre-made game engine like unity or unreal. If you want to get your hands dirty and go the low-end, rewarding-but-frustrating route, you'll look at something like OpenGL or DirectX. Working with OpenGL is essentially programming on the CPU and the GPU, so it can be a real pain in the ass. For someone like me that started using it without a lot of programming experience to begin with, the learning curve can be brutal. Not sure I'd recommend it for someone that just wants to mess around with graphics. All of my code is on github, but since this is a one-man project, it's a hot mess, haha.

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r/BadCGI is my new favorite subreddit, whose inhabitants share examples of grotesque, inept, or amusingly dated computer graphic animation. Embedded here for your enjoyment is the full movie of Joshua and the Promised Land.

P.S. Has anyone noticed that the cripplingly addictive game in Star Trek: The Next Generation is basically Pokemon Go, but with only one Pokemon? Right down to the quality of the graphics!

Speaking of Pokemon, here's a genuinely terrifying PC version from 2000:

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Archilogic, an online architecture viewer/editor designed to be easier for laypersons to use and share from than Sketchup, is spectacular stuff... at least on a fast computer. You can upload plans and convert them to 3D, move and replace furniture, mess around with the layout, push the results to friends or real estate agents, and so on. Some of the demos posted to the company's blog are fascinating: exploring Don Draper's apartment in the first-person is eerily voyeuristic. An unbuilt Frank Lloyd Wright design is more majestic and less, well, sleazy.

Now do the Overlook Hotel! Read the rest

Tantalum is a 2D ray tracer that runs in the browser. Just click anywhere in the scene and watch those rays go a-scatterin' through the simulated optics.

You can reconfigure the contents of the scene, the light emission spectrum, and much else besides. The Secret Life of Photons, by creator Benedikt Bitterli, explains everything.

r/internetisbeautiful has some neat examples. Read the rest

Teruyuki and Yuki Ishikawa are a husband-and-wife team of freelance 3D computer graphics artists from Tokyo. Their latest creation is Saya, and she is going to be the star in the movie they are self-producing. Read the rest

"There's something mesmerizing about watching little dragons made of semi-viscous cookie batter falling helplessly into heaps and melting into each other."

The short film "Hunger" by Peter Foldès was made over 40 years ago using computers. The design is fresh. It looks like it could have been made today.

Animated film satire of self-indulgence in a hungry world. Rapidly dissolving, reshaping images, made with the aid of a computer, create a stark contrast between abundance and want. A man eats, at first sparingly, but his appetite grows to gluttony, greed, and gratification of every desire. The nightmare that finally haunts him is the one that hangs over our disparate world.

I love the soundtrack, too.

Hunger, from the National Film Board of Canada (Via Dangerous Minds) Read the rest