Tic Tacs

My Attempt at the 3D pixellated effect

This one was quite a bit of a learning experience for me. I wanted to test the shatter simulation plugin in Cinema 4D called Xbreaker 1.7 made by nitroman of Pariah Studios, but soon it became a little test of multipass rendering. The depth of field and motion blur was added in post using depth pass and motion vector passes (respectively) out of cinema 4D and into After Effects. And also managed to setup Cinema 4D plugin in After Effects so that it could read AE projects generated by Cinema 4D. This is awesome because it can export full 3D information of the lights and cameras. Saves a lot of hassle. And I added the sound effects from a little collection that I have using Garageband, just because I am very familiar with it and know my way around quite well.

Just testing out the clothildle cloth simulations in Cinema 4D. In context this could be some pieces of cloth/paper flying around randomly in the scene (in a barren deserted city for example).

Some more results from my Cinema 4D journey. Learnt a lot of things from this one. I followed Rob Redman’s C4D Basics: Reflections and Global Illumination tutorial to do this.

The way I like to follow tutorials is that I like to follow the classroom approach. I watch a tutorial to it’s completion, while taking quick notes on things I find interesting or things that are new to me. Then I try to do it later by myself. If I have a problem or run into a wall, I go back to the specific point in the tutorial and find out the particular information and quickly get back. I find this method way better than following the tutorials step by step.

I’ve been trying out Cinema 4D these days and finding  out that it’s a very powerful software. Especially for it’s dynamics/awesome instancing feature called MoGraph. Here’s something I came up with after following the tutorial on Maxon’s Youtube Channel.

My new Apple iMac I ordered from the Apple Online Store arrived exactly in one month. After finishing Billy Blue, I needed to buy a new capable computer for my work and experiments in motion design and was deliberating on buying a powerful PC workstation. The new Intel quad core processor the Core i7 have just been released I knew that was the processor I would be going for. I didn’t want to buy another laptop because they can only be so much powerful and if I was buying a new computer I would pack all the power possible into it. The other option was a Mac Pro with a quad core 2.6 GHz Intel Xeon “Nehalem” processor which is an awesome piece of machine but just too expensive at over A$4000 for the base configuration. So the only option I could see was a custom PC, probably with the Core i7 920. Atleast I could then play all the games that are not available on the Mac like Grand Theft Auto 4. But in the back of my mind I wasn’t looking forward to switching back to Windows operating system having been so used to Mac OS X for such a long time.

That was exactly when Apple released their amazing refresh on the aluminium iMacs. There were five models:

• 21.5″ 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo
• 21.5″ 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo with ATI Radeon 4670
• 27″ 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo with ATI Radeon 4670 (with an option for ATI Radeon 4850)
• 27″ 2.66 GHz Core i5 with ATI Radeon 4850
• 27″ 2.8 GHz Core i7 with ATI Radeon 4850

I was particularly excited with the the highend model with the Core i7. Together with the model with Core i5, it was the first quad core iMac and it was a beauty, especially for the price of A$2,881 (with 4 GB of RAM). It was arguably a workstation Apple computer priced very competitively with PC workstations.

Here are the things I like about it:

Processor: Intel 2.8 GHz Core i7-860 “Lynnfield”

The new line of Intel Core i7 processors are just legendary. Built on the new 42 nm Nehalem micro-architecture, they have several new features than the older Core 2 Duo/Quads or the older Xeons (the newer  Xeons are also built on the Nehalem micro-architecture).

• Multi Threading
  Each of the the four cores enables two threads which act like virtual cores, making the processor have 8 cores in total.
• Turboboost
  Multiple cores are really useful for most things I do, such as rendering comps in After Effects or rendering out a scene in Maya but when I things like browse the internet or watch movies, there is little use for the multiple cores. In cases like these, the processor dynamically shuts down the unused cores and overclocks one or two remaining core to 3.6 GHz  (Infact the Lynnfields boost five multiplier steps, higher than two additional steps of Bloomfield).
• Direct Media Interface
  Replacing the Front Side Bus technology, Intel Direct Media Interface establishes much faster, higher bandwidth communication between the processor and the memory and the motherboard or logicboard in Apple lingo (although it lacks the Intel QPI and triple-channel memory in its big brother Bloomfield).

27″ Monitor

The 27″ monitor is really one of its kind. First of all, it’s just huge, almost comically. It’s bigger than anything I’ve ever worked on. Not that it’s just physically big, it can display at 2560×1440 resolution, the same horizontal resolution as the 30″ Apple Cinema Display. It uses IPS technology and LED backlighting which results in perfect representation of colors, just what I needed.

Magic Mouse

Magic mouse is, for those not familiar, world first multitouch mouse. The whole top part of the mouse is a multitouch sensor and it  only comes wireless. Apart from looking awesomely sleek, it’s also lot of fun to use. Especially for browsing the internet or reading documents.Whenever you need to scroll a lot (thanks to it’s momentum scrolling). The only drawback of the mouse is that unlike the Mighty Mouse (which was quite annoying to use), it does not feature a middle-mouse button. This isn’t really a big drawback for most people, but I happen to use Autodesk Maya where the middle mouse button is pretty much essential. But being a multitouch mouse this problem isn’t very difficult to fix, a firmware update could add a middle mouse button to equation but it something like that hasn’t been released by Apple yet. I guess I’ll just use my Microsoft Standard mouse (which is quite good for the price) whenever I use Maya until someone fixes the problem.

Anyway, I am loving Here are some more pictures of it: