Category: artists

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Open Source Rendering with Blender, LuxRender, and SmallLuxGPU

There’s some outstanding new open-source add-ons for Blender, one of our favorite open-source 3D rendering/simulation/animation programs.

The first, LuxRender is a physically based Light Modeler. It’s currently limited to CPU-rendering only, but it creates enormously realistic lighting scenarios based on physical equations that describe the behavior of light. An amazing new feature here is that it stores the contribution of each light to each pixel during rendering, so you can modify the rendered image photorealistically and non-destructively without having to re-render the entire scene again.

The second, SmallLuxGPU is even more experimental but it is able to harness the full power of your GPU for unparalleled rendering speed of highly photorealistic visual scenes. Even better, with SLG you can interact with your scene in realtime to get just the view you want.

SmallLuxGPU v1.6 (OpenCL) from David Bucciarelli.

And here’s some examples of renders we’ve done in the past few days. Keep in mind, these are entirely synthetic images. Jump over to flickr to see at higher resolution.

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Join us for Open Art Studio this Weekend!

Chris building a BoomCase
Chris building a BoomCase

Our entire building at 915 Spring Garden is taking part in Open Art Studios this weekend, and we’ll be there too!

Almost 30 studios will be open to the public, including Hive76! There’s a ton of different medias people use, everything from textiles to clays to electronics.

Come join us on Saturday and Sunday, December 4th and 5th, from noon – 5 pm at Hive76. We’ll also be upgrading our MakerBot with a new MK5 Extruder so we’ll be printing in tip-top shape again soon!

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Multithreaded Banjo Dinosaur Knitting Adventure 2D Extreme

Along with being highly neighborly, and slightly insane Travis Goodspeed is also great reverse engineer. He is consistently a bringer-of-weird things to conferences (and the parties that inevitably follow). Many of those cool & weird things are objects designs and/or builds himself.

So It’s not a huge surprise to see him hacking on an amazing collaborative project to make an interactive tapestry creating game. As far as I can tell, as people play the game the winners custom designed image is added to the end of the tapestry. The game appears to be an scroller/shooter game, which is controlled by waving around RFID tags. Geez. And here I was, thinking having #15 high score on Hive’s Spy Hunter machine was cool. One more amazing projects from an awesome Philly resident.

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Hive76 Intro to Microcontrollers — News From The Front

… Soon, I’m gonna have to switch places with some of the students in the class

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It was weird to hit the Wednesday Hive Open House and see a handful of original MSP430 projects.  The video above is an LED chaser effect that Chris Thompson whipped up based on concepts from the first session of the MSP430 class.  As the old saying goes — teach a geek to fish and you’ll soon have LED encrusted fish.

Speaking of LEDs, here’s a Morse Code blinker project that Chris did.  Mostly a cut & paste job, but if nothing else, it makes the point that there are plenty of  MSP430 code samples out there and that it’s relatively easy to use them once you know the tools.

Audience

If you are an artist who wants to create small, cost effective interactive systems or a stone geek who wants to actually make a computer do something physical, this is a must-attend course.  We’ll have labs that will show you how to flash gobs of LEDs with just a few IO pins, run stepper motors, read switches, generate sounds, read analog signals and even have MCUs communicate.   You’ll leave with sample code and enough experience to apply this tech  immediately.
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We’ll be running this class again, for sure.

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Send any questions to: mikehogan62 AT gmail DOT com