Below is a very early digital 3D rendered film (possibly the first one, ever). It was created in 1972 by Ed Catmull (the founder of Pixar) and Fred Parke with a little help from Robert B. Ingebretsen.

The best part of this film is not even the 3D rendering itself, but the outtakes and “making of” footage that has been interwoven throughout, including footage of a plaster replica of Ed’s hand onto which he is meticulously mapping the polygon vertices that make up the three dimensional model (around 1:30). That’s really remarkable. The math that we take for granted for rendering 3D was being invented, real time, to create this video. (Ed’s credited for having working out that math to handle things like texture mapping, 3D anti-aliasing and z-buffering.)

Read more about this in detail on nerdplusart.com

(via kottke)

Created by Katarzyna Kijek and Przemysław Adamski, ”In statu nascendi” captures the ”under construction” process, in this case, of global illumination pass in rendering. Where one would normally be interested in the final results, the team finds beauty in these half rendered images and their temporal qualities.

To highlight a peculiar inability to reflect reality by the film, we focus on the “struggle” of generating an image. We capture the process of rendering “in statu nascendi” (“under construction”). Therefore we try to intercept this moment of the creative process, which is the most ephemeral – a temporary, piecemeal render phases (mostly global illumination pass). In the course of animation every next frame is more accurately rendered but still far from the target appearance. By analogy to chemical processes, the term “in statu nascendi” refers to the intermediate products of chemical reactions, which can not be isolated from the environment of this reaction. They are therefore just “under construction”, and then disappear.

Sound designed by Adam Witkowski is a direct transcription of the image made with a software dedicated for blind people.
Work commissioned by The Baltic Cultural Centre as a part of exhibition “Art is generally suspicious”.

Created using Cinema 4D.

More at kijekadamski.blogspot.com

/via triangulationblog

For this year’s Creative Review Annual cover, together with Nexus Interactive Arts, Minivegas created a custom application to draw a letter ‘A’ using content from the CR’s website and Twitter feed over the past year.

We decided to make an “A” from CR’s prolific online output. We felt that its form should be implied, discernable by its physical influence on elements from CR’s blog and twitter content. Some of our early efforts were a little abstract, but we settled for wrapping thousands of strips of tape in the loose shape of the “A”. The strips would contain words and pictures from the blog. Using recent blog activity doesn’t cut it for an annual, so with “a little wget magic”, we slurped every article and image from the last year. We got 10,000 unique proper names and places, hashtags and usernames, and about another 5,000 pictures. That’s a lot, even for six images, so the number of comments on a blog post became a metric for how “big” a story and its content ended up in the final image (like a “tag cloud”). To add some dynamics, we ran the scene as a cloth simulation to blow our strips around a bit. Exploding the letter is fun, though in the end the shapes looked a bit messy so we toned that down a bit. Final snapshots of strips in motion were exported for a high-quality render.

You can download the app and have a go yourselves. The app allows various aspects of the image to be adjusted before a final render is downloaded. These include animation properties such as turbulence, vortex, attraction, damping nd stiffness. In addition, the app also includes .OBJ exports allowing the team to import into Maya together with textures and render out with better lighting and shadow effects. The twitter text version was then used for the front cover whereas the images from the site were used for the back cover.

The app was created using MiniVegas’ own proprietary C++/OpenGL framework code-named Atlantis.  The tool itself is a set of user interface components suitable for the rapid assembly of artist tools, which together with a persistent data and parameter system allows artist and programmer to work together on shaping the project’s look without needing to hard-code everything. It is developed and maintained as cross-platform, running on OS X and Linux. In the future they plan to port portions of it to mobile platforms such as iOS and Android.

Read more about the Annual project on Creative Review’s website or Minivegas’ Project Page. For more information on the Atlantis frameworks see here.

Credits
Production: MINIVEGAS / Nexus Interactive Arts
Producer: Beccy McCray
Coding: Dan Lewis / MINIVEGAS
Creative direction: Luc Schurgers / MINIVEGAS
Art direction for CR: Paul Pensom

Qubicle is a standalone Windows software for creating 3D pixel-art. It combines standard 2D image editing tools with a powerfull function-set for editing 3D cube-matrices. We first wrote about it in October last year and have just received an email from the creator, Tim Wesoly, notifying us that Qubicle is now available for download (Public Beta v 9.502)!

What’s included:
Standard Image Editing Tools
The tools used in the Qubicle Constructor are familiar to users of common image editing tools like Adobe Photoshop. The pencil, the eraser, the paintbucket and other well known tools are used to “draw” the model on a 2D canvas or to sculpt it in 3D. It’s easier to learn and use than conventional 3d modelers based on polygonal meshes. And the models you create have a very original look and that retro touch we all love.

Powerfull Function-Sets for Matrix-Editing
In addition to the familiar tools, Qubicle Constructor owns many helpful functions like interpolated scaling, mirroring and texturing.

File exchange with other 3D Applications
Qubicle Constructor can export models as OBJ. OBJ can be imported by most third party 3d applications on the market. It also reads and writes the exchange Format QEF for a seamless transfer of cube models between the Qubicle Constructor and the Qubicle Maya Plugin.

More info + download at minddesk.com

Previously: Qubicle [Windows]

The Strata project by Quayola consist of a series of films, prints and installations investigating improbable relationships between contemporary digital aesthetics and icons of classical art and architecture. A combination of 3d render/processing application, the film includes Processing delaunay triangulation conversion applied to photographic stills with 3D mesh output which was then fed into 3D software application and rendered separately (video below).

The term Strata defines a geological formation made of multiple layers of rock. Each one of these layers has its own individual characteristics and history, which combined produce beautiful and unique formations…

Commissioned by Evento and Lumin for the Bordeaux Art & Architecture Biennale.

Credits
Concept: Quayola
Sound: Plaid
Photography: James Medcraft
3D Animation: Robin Lawrie
Custom Software: Mauritius Seeger
Assistants: Kieran Gee-Finch, Colin Johnson

See also:
Strata #2 – Paris
Strata #1 – Rome

Attempting to visualize the earthquakes, Quakescapes is the latest project by Christopher Warnow using the datasource from 2007 until the beginning of 2010 from the Potsdam GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences. What is shown in the images/movies below is a worldmap of earthquake amounts with Potsdam/Germany being the white block. The project was created with Java using Toxiclibs Physics and rendered with Sunflow.

Christopher Warnow
vimeo
flickr

Music: In the sky on the ground – Nils Frahm (myspace.com/nilsfrahm)

Also part of the project is a projection test for the upcoming data sculpture about earthquakes. The hills show the amount of earthquakes over the last three years all over the world. The real world version was modelled by hand using a silicon like material called FormaForm. Each frame in the video is a photograph, a stop motion data sculpture film.

Christopher is a 27-year old interface design student in Potsdam/Germany, living in Berlin and a member of the We Are Chopchop Collective.

Sound: Love Cry – Four Tet

See also Phénomène [Java]

Created by Christopher Warnow, Phénomène is a promotional film for a collection by fashion designer Laura Reuss. 3D scenes are programmed in Java using Toxiclibs Physics developed by Karsten “toxi” Schmidt and rendered using the Sunflow Library.

More renders are available on Christopher’s flickr.

Styling: Laura Reuss
Photographer: Andreas Chudowski
Models: Katja Dreyhaupt and Lina Eulitz
Make-Up: Susann Marleen Kuster and Aylin Wiener
3D and Motiondesign: Christopher Warnow
Music: Like Spinning Plates – Radiohead

Christopher is a 27-year old interface design student in Potsdam/Germany, living in Berlin and a member of the We Are Chopchop Collective.

For more renders created using Sunflow, check out this flickr group. If you’d like to get your processing 3d sketches to render using Sunflow, see tutorial here.

(via @kimasendorf aka kimasendorf.com)

For the 26th edition of the Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, FIELD designed an identity based on the festival’s film submission database. Set in a thick and obscure forest like the wooded surroundings of Kassel, the colourful spheres form a sculptural representation of the programme – each of them represents a film, video, or installation work shown at the festival.

A unique structure emerges from the forest when hundreds of these individual objects come together – like the festival brings together artists and visitors from all over the world, regional talent and established filmmakers, professionals and interested locals.

Each film is represented by a sphere, with the size showing the length of the work. When two films coincide in all 3 parameters, meaning their spheres would sit in the same position, they cluster around this position like grapes on a vine. A generative colour palette assigns a unique shade to each represented work, which it keeps throughout all diagrams.

The forest in the images was rendered using luxrender and took about 8 hours on a large amazon ec2 instance. Geometry was generated in a custom Processing application and then imported into Blender.

See images below + make sure you visit field.io for more wonderful work by the London based studio.

For more great Processing projects on CAN, see here.

ASCIImeo (asciimeo.com) is a project by Peter Nitsch that renders Vimeo videos in three different textmodes.

Here are some of Peter’s favorite videos in ASCII:
Metamorphosis by Glenn Marshall
MOTOR / AMBIENT REEL by KU-SCHNEIDER
Magnetic Ink by flight404
Still Run by DANTE NOU
Look At Me by Patrick Lawler

Read more incl technical info on Peter’s blog. Video below is of Glenn Marshall’s generative app also available for the iPhone.

(via today and tomorrow incl images = ASCIImeo version of Scintillation)

Qubicle is a standalone Windows software for creating 3D pixel-art. It combines standard 2D image editing tools with a powerfull function-set for editing 3D cube-matrices.

The tools used in the Qubicle Constructor are familiar to users of common image editing tools like Adobe Photoshop. The pencil, the eraser, the paintbucket and other well known tools are used to “draw” the model on a 2D canvas as well as in 3D. In addition to the familiar tools, Qubicle Constructors owns many helpful functions like interpolated scaling, mirroring, texturing etc. for matrix manipulation.

The Qubicle Constructor can import Bitmaps from files or directly from clipboard. Bitmaps can be interpreted as heightmaps to create organic models or imported as sequence to build a model slices by slice. Qubicle Constructor can export models as OBJ. In addition, thanks to the plugin for Maya, It also reads and writes the exchange Format QEF for a seamless transfer of 3d Pixel-art between Constructor and Maya.

You can find our more info, download the application and see more awesome examples and tutorials for Qubicle on minddesk.com