3D Terrain Printing
03/09/09 12:03 Filed in: News
3D Terrain Printing
by Albert Kiefer
The summer holidays are coming to a close for most of us. Some will have spent some unforgettable days, or weeks, in a fantastic location like the Swiss or French Alps, the Grand Canyon. Some will even have scaled the Mount Everest (although these might be few and far between...).
Most of you will have taken tons of digital photographs, others take a small bottle of soil or a flask of water but now there’s a new way to grab hold of a piece of your holiday locations. A 3D print!
With the advent of commercially and economically viable rapid prototype printing solutions a number of 3D printing services are quickly becoming available to the public. A very interesting niche is now being presented by Terrainprint in the UK.
UK based Terrainprint.co.uk has a 3D printing service hooked up to a kind of Google Earth type of application that quickly allows you to travel to you location of choice, make a selection and press print. After being presented with a 3D preview of the textured terrain you can order it and presto: your holiday memento extraordinaire will be on its way.
These items which have a very clear pricing structure and there should be no surprises with models that are unexpectedly pricey.
There are several types of overlay graphics that you can color your 3D terrain model with, although at the moment the full range of options is only for the USA area. But still, the continents texturemapping will have a great realistic projection of the terrain for you and should be the general choice for the holiday snap memento.
I can well see applications for terrain printing in the fields of location or prototype planning or scouting for motion picture production (although these companies might already have 3D printers hanging around their own facilities), location and site planning and presentation for architects, a special relational gift for traveling agencies, mementos for tourists that want to document and tell about their journeys, etc.
It will be well worth checking out Terrainprint.co.uk and play with the application a while. Have a test print in the smallest footprint and see how that works out.
by Albert Kiefer
The summer holidays are coming to a close for most of us. Some will have spent some unforgettable days, or weeks, in a fantastic location like the Swiss or French Alps, the Grand Canyon. Some will even have scaled the Mount Everest (although these might be few and far between...).
Most of you will have taken tons of digital photographs, others take a small bottle of soil or a flask of water but now there’s a new way to grab hold of a piece of your holiday locations. A 3D print!
With the advent of commercially and economically viable rapid prototype printing solutions a number of 3D printing services are quickly becoming available to the public. A very interesting niche is now being presented by Terrainprint in the UK.
UK based Terrainprint.co.uk has a 3D printing service hooked up to a kind of Google Earth type of application that quickly allows you to travel to you location of choice, make a selection and press print. After being presented with a 3D preview of the textured terrain you can order it and presto: your holiday memento extraordinaire will be on its way.
There are several types of overlay graphics that you can color your 3D terrain model with, although at the moment the full range of options is only for the USA area. But still, the continents texturemapping will have a great realistic projection of the terrain for you and should be the general choice for the holiday snap memento.
I can well see applications for terrain printing in the fields of location or prototype planning or scouting for motion picture production (although these companies might already have 3D printers hanging around their own facilities), location and site planning and presentation for architects, a special relational gift for traveling agencies, mementos for tourists that want to document and tell about their journeys, etc.
It will be well worth checking out Terrainprint.co.uk and play with the application a while. Have a test print in the smallest footprint and see how that works out.
Cinema 4D R11.5 Released
02/09/09 23:13 Filed in: News
Maxon Releases Cinema 4D Release 11.5
by Albert Kiefer
Maxon has just released Cinema 4D R11.5 to the general public.
by Albert Kiefer
Maxon has just released Cinema 4D R11.5 to the general public.
Key Highlights of CINEMA 4D Release 11.5
- Superior Rendering Performance Including New Bucket Rendering
- Enhanced Picture Viewer
- Improved Interoperability and Integration
- Numerous improvements have been made to CINEMA 4D's highly praised connectivity to Adobe® After Effects®, including support for additional object types.
- Support for Apple® Motion now includes the export of 3D data.
- Support for Autodesk® FBX® 2010.0 allows for quick and easy interchange between a variety of 3D applications.
Powerful New Motion Graphics Capabilities
Release 11.5 promises a tighter integration with Apple’s recent Final Cut Studio upgrade, more specifically with Apple Motion3 from that package with its strengthened 3D capabilities.Support For the New Generation of Operating Systems
- Apple - R11.5 is fully compatible with Mac OS X Snow Leopard, including access to up to 64GB of virtual memory. This is a great relief since it’s always a wait-and-see if a new OS is supported by current products.
- Microsoft - R11.5 is fully compatible with Windows 7, including enhanced file dialog.
Filter Forge Review
30/06/09 14:02
an indispensible tool for the graphic and 3D artist
by Albert Kiefer
Recently I received a message via one of my feeds that Filter Forge was finally released for Mac OS X.
Previously only availbe for windows systems I have long eyed the special application with envy. The sheer possibilities of this seemingly small application are endless. As a visual designer this enables me a lot of freedom building up images.
Stand Alone and Photoshop Plug-In
Filter Forge is a procedural texture generator and Image manipulator in one app (or Plug-In) that has a tremendous flexibility. The advantage of the Plug-In is that you can apply filter effects directly to any image you are currently working on in Photoshop without having to resort to pointing Filter Forge to an image explicitly. The other advantage is that you can apply the effects to a selected area.
The advantages of the stand alone version are that you are not bogged down by Photoshop and several windows and that you can start to create your own filters from scratch.
Image Correction and Manipulation
Filter Forge can either do basic to advanced color correction or abstraction on any of your images (just create a workflow and save it with several presets) or it can combine the image information with very complex procedural calculations that turn images into fantastic pieces of abstracted, grunged up or plain funny works of art.
Incredibly powerful texture engine
For me however the most incredible power lies in Filter Forge’s ability to create stunning and versatile seamless textures that are very, very handy to apply as texturemaps in 3D software. The thing is that produral textures are a common sight in any 3D software nowadays but they sometimes generate such complex textures that rendering an animation slows down to a crawl due to time and time again calculating these complex procedurals every frame.
With Filter Forge you can create the same, if not much more complex and convincing textures and, once they are rendered to a tileable image file, you have a file that renders like lightning and even will behave better with anti-aliasing than some procedural noises ‚in app’ tend to do.
But Filter Forge does not simply spit out an image file. It even presents you with the options of generating normal maps, bump maps and specular maps and alpha channels of that same file. This way you have a complete package of images to put to use in you texturing project.
All of the above images are procedural without any additional image input.
Library Magic
When you get Filter Forge and open it up for the first time you cannot even start to comprehend how powerful this app actually is. So first thing I would advise is to rus over to their very extensive on-line libraries and grab presets from several categories. You can spend hours and hours just marveling at the incredible images and textures that are being generated by a very active user community and wich are free to download (you can even do that directly into you running Filter Forge app!)
Multi-core enabled
The node based system that Filter Forge uses to create its magic can bring down a modern computer if things get really complicated (but remember: it’s only once to render the image and then the resulting image renders blindingly fast in your 3D package of choice). So the developers have enabled multi-core rendering. If you happen to have more than one processor driving your machine you can put that extra power to great use here.
The node based system lays out steps in clear iconic building blocks.
Variations to go
Filter Forge comes in several flavors tailored to your specific preference or budget.
- Filter Forge Starter-1 Edition Mac ($ 9.-)
- Filter Forge Starter-1 Edition WIN ($ 9.-)
- Filter Forge Starter-3 Edition Mac ($ 19.-)
- Filter Forge Starter-3 Edition WIN($ 19.-)
- Filter Forge Starter-7 Edition Mac ($ 29.-)
- Filter Forge Starter-7 Edition WIN ($ 29.-)
- Filter Forge Basic Edition Mac ($ 99.-)
- Filter Forge Basic Edition WIN ($ 99.-)
- Filter Forge Standard Mac ($ 199.-)
- Filter Forge Standard WIN ($ 199.-)
- Filter Forge Professional Mac ($ 299.-)
- Filter Forge Professional WIN ($ 299.-)
