I love seeing personal passion projects like this on HN - great inspiration for the day.
I’m curious as to what the build cost was for the whole rig, and on how long that project took. Seems like he milled a bunch of the aluminum jigs himself, which is pretty cool. Certainly a lot of effort and the results are quite neat. It would be interesting to see what more art pieces can be done now that the basic rig is setup - it would be really cool to “render” several-minute-long light painted videos now that it can be fully automated.
> It would be interesting to see what more art pieces can be done now that the basic rig is setup
At the end of the video he tears everything down and packages some stuff back up - I'm guessing he borrowed a lot of gear from the University.
According to the documentation[0]:
"Depending on who you are, building the machine and the control box is either the most or the least intimidating part of this. Since the hardware isn't too dissimilar to other CNC machines like 3D printers, I'm not going to go into too much detail. If you want to follow my design, consult the pictures."
> it would be really cool to “render” several-minute-long light painted videos now that it can be fully automated.
According to his comments in the YouTube video:
"Each of the animations I made took between 4 and 12 hours to shoot, one frame at a time. Each frame is 1-3 long exposure photographs of the machine performing the light painting."
Extrapolating from that, a several-minute-long video would take days or possibly even weeks!
How would someone without access to a milling machine go about making custom aluminum parts like these?
I've had a couple projects that would benefit from aluminum milled parts, but I haven't been able to figure out how to go about making 1 or 2 parts without spending hundreds on setup or tooling costs.
Incredible technical work mechanically, electronically, photographically. Amazing artistic talent and personal drive.
3:19 and 4:22 remind me a lot of a tumblr page with animations like these. It's exciting how trippy they are. His direction and animation is beautiful, knowing that it's real light is something else.
This is freaking crazy! I bet this guy could take his pick of video production shops to work for by sending them all this video alone. Huge props for doing it all open source!
Isn't this comment like watching someone hand-build a supercar and saying "gasoline really is an exceptional source of energy"? I mean, sure, but it's not even 1% of the final product.
Blender is extremely capable in a wide range of areas. It’s much more than simply fuel in your analogy, it’s much more like the car builder’s toolbox or even his workshop.
Blender can do complex 3D modelling, physics based rendering (now including real-time EEVEE). 3D animation including rigging and physics interactions, Video editing, 3D motion tracking, plane tracking, image compositing and spatial audio.
Its grease pencil tool is execptional and allows for powerful 2D animation. The freestyle NPR renderer can export animation outlines to SVG.
It has a wide range of plugins for architecture, 3D printing and CAD.
Everything can be scripted via python and almost everything in the UI can be keyframed.
It is an exceptional project and a credit to the open source community.
Blender is an amazing product being used by a ton of professionals, but a lot of people in the CGI industry don't admit to using it because it is free.
Because of this weird echo chamber of "Blender Shame" you have people who actively promote how cool Blender is, which is not always a conscientious reaction, but still stems I think from this reputation fight that Blender is in.
I think the whole PC MASTER RACE joke was a similar response to Apple snobbery.
Actually, "PC MASTER RACE" came from a comedy review of the Witcher. In context, the original quote:
> What quickly becomes obvious is that Witcher is very much a PC exclusive game, which are typically designed to be as complex and unintuitive as possible so that those dirty console-playing peasants don't ruin it for the Glorious PC Master Race.
It was not originally intended to be a positive term.
The PC Master Race thing grew out of a Zero Punctuation video. It’s more about comparing PC games to consoles.
Those I’ve spoken to in the industry have all praised Blender but say they use various commercial tools because it part of their pipeline and they pay for support.
It is nice to see that it is finally getting some traction and recognition in the professional space. For example, the VFX artists on the Amazon TV series "Man in the High Castle" use it for many shots.
The Python integration is truly fantastic. I bought a Perception Neuron motion capture suit a year or two back for use with Unreal Engine, and in just a couple of days I was able to write a Python addon for Blender to take the output generated by the capture suit software and retarget it to the default UE4 skeleton. And I'm no Python guru.
At the same time I feel like the GPL license is a big limitation for Blender. There are a lot of niche tools in the industry and if blender was open source under MIT/Apache or something like that I'm sure you would see a lot of commercial plugins and spinnoffs. They would still have the incentive to contribute back to core to have their stuff merged with trunk and keep compatibility with latest but could also build commercial tools on too of the code base.
Right now it's basically begging governments and donations for dev money and the level of polish is rarely at the level of commercial software.
Great project! Reminds me of pre-CG special effects that were also achieved with motion control and long exposures, like the 1980 HBO opening animation:
This is a fantastic hack. Does anyone know what that weird box in his rack is? (The one he packaged back up again at the end). It looks like it's something off-the-shelf to avoid writing code to turn the objects into GCode, but I guess this could have done more easily with a blender-to-gcode converter.
It is bit weird how there seems to be this Arduino motion control stuff, and then also this dragonframe motion control and they are somehow integrated together. It seems to work fine for him, no doubt about that, but I feel like more integrated approach would be logical next step.
Oh that's interesting, thanks. I'm not familiar with DragonFrame the software, but I imagine it's something that does 3D motion control for animators? I find it interesting that there doesn't exist (or that the author didn't use) an open source alternative for this box.
Hey, I made this! There are Arduino solutions for motion control with Dragonframe, but I opted to invest in a used DMC16 because it can handle in/out triggers (which I tapped into with my custom control box), it has DMX out for lighting control, and it does motion control signals faster than Arduino can, and it's all in a nice package that I can rack together with the rest of the gear. It might be a little overkill and I'm sure a custom solution could work, but I'm usually more interested in results than process, so I tend to take prebuilt approaches when practical.
Hey, I made this! There are Arduino solutions for motion control with dragonframe, but I opted to invest in the DMC16 because it can handle in/out triggers (which I tapped into with the custom control box), it has DMX out lighting control, and it does motion control signals (faster than Arduino can), all in one nice package that I can rack together with the rest of the gear. Might be a little overkill and I'm sure a custom solution could work, but I'm more interested in results than process, so I tend to take the prebuilt approaches when possible.
I'm curious what you felt made it dismal? I found it rather delightful and was much better than my expectations as I've not seen this style of artwork before using a physical camera. I was particularly impressed with the glass sphere animation.
I find the resulting videos to be no more interesting than animated renders, but the mechanics, engineering, and software skills to set everything up, connect it, and get it reliable/precise enough to produce anything at all I find utterly astounding.
He just built the machine from scratch. I don't think the very first bit of video rendered from after effects was something that made it on the criterion collection either, but you learn to use a new tool to do things of increasing sophistication as you go.
I do think he could probably use a bit more rigidity on the long thing that holds the end of the light tube since it appears to have a bit of wobble, but I'm sure that somebody with this level of competence is already on that issue for the next revision.
For the proper application, you could do stuff with this which would absolutely make a raytracing renderer vomit its bytes in anguish. All my motion design buddies are very excited about this video.
I’m curious as to what the build cost was for the whole rig, and on how long that project took. Seems like he milled a bunch of the aluminum jigs himself, which is pretty cool. Certainly a lot of effort and the results are quite neat. It would be interesting to see what more art pieces can be done now that the basic rig is setup - it would be really cool to “render” several-minute-long light painted videos now that it can be fully automated.