Hey all! It’s been a super busy couple of months. I’ve been a bit pre-occupied at work among other things.

Among those other things though have been helping Jenn with her shop and getting some of her ‘branding’ elements in place. New business cards are on their way along with some new website assets (when the cards get here). We’ll be getting some fabric labels for her handmade goods soon. Oh and we had rubber stamps made for addressing her shipments.
I’ve also been learning a bit of PHP (well, how to copy and paste it from tutorial sites and modify it) and so I have a new email system for the site. Click the contact me link in the right sidebar and drop me a line. I might even reply!
I did a bit of freelance work recently and grabbed myself a license of zBrush as a result. I plan to have fun with it at some point – although for those who aren’t up to speed on the whole zBrush thing – the user community has been waiting for an updated Mac version for quite some time now and it should be here at any moment. For now, I’ll install it on my Boot Camp partition, which just means I won’t use it much until the Mac version ships.
Speaking of shipping new software… Alias 2009 is right around the bend. Yup. Any day now.
As soon as we get our copies at work, I’ll put up a mini review. Maybe they’ll even have fixed the ‘tab key’ behavior that has become one of those little niggling under-my-skin things. It’s the first thing I check with every release of Alias, and then immediately file a bug report and then feature request. I’ve done so since version, um, 9? We’re coming-up on version 15 (a.k.a 2009) now; but whose counting?

Yay! A post for 2008! Happy New Year (and a few days… or more). 
Sometimes Often times I struggle to come up with neat tricks for this blog. Then I stumble on something and someone points out that it would be good blog fodder. Here’s one case and point..Anyone who knows me, knows that my current design tool fascination is real-time rendering. I just think it’s the most time saving thing for us product designers. It just eliminates so many steps of the ‘process’ and accelerates us toward our visions faster than ever.   

Alias Studio (my design tool of choice) has some pretty nice real-time visualization features, but since the features are fairly new to the tool, there are always additional features I wish for whilst using them. One such is to have a bit more control over the Image Based Lighting (IBL) set-up. There are some nice tone-mapping features, but no features that control the placement of the IBL image itself.

In this example, I have a product design from my archive that has had shaders assigned, ambient occlusion calculated and an image loaded into the IBL slot of my environment. The image is from HDRI-Studio and is a panoramic image of a professional photo-studio set-up. It’s a nice quick way of getting a real photographic look without much configuration or knowhow.   

But by definition, the image based lighting set-up uses a static image to generate both the lights and reflections you see on your display. Without the ability to move the IBL, you can’t really move the lights. They are one and the same.   
Inevitably, there are things about the light set-up that don’t suit the image. I’ve outlined a few things in this image that didn’t suit me. Aside from the details highlighted – one of the main features of this particular IBL image is the warm/cool lighting. From this vantage point, the face of the product is getting the full brunt of the blue-tinted light.
My workaround is pretty simple – I group the model geometry to the 3D view’s camera.

Now when I select the top level of the group, I can rotate about the z-axis and the model and the camera spin in tandem. The visual effect though is the opposite – it looks like the IBL image is spinning and now I can find my perfect lighting set-up. Below is the mouse shortcuts from the Alias manual. I use the right most mouse button to constrain my object rotation to just the z-axis. (You can rotate about other axes, but if you are using the reflection plane in your shaded view, you’ll get undesirable results because the plane itself is locked to the world coordinates – much like the IBL – and not the camera and/or the object.)   
This movie should illustrate the effect. Keep in mind, it’s the model and the camera moving, not the lights…  
Click to See Movie

After finding an angle that best shows off the form and materials, I can tweak my tone-mapping controls, make any last minute shader adjustments and I have a final image.

 

Another nice thing about this set-up is that the camera “eye” is still free to move within the 3D viewport. So I can navigate to the back of the product, then select the top level group again and adjust the lighting and I have an instant other view.   

This whole image (not including the documentation) took less than an hour to set-up and output.

One of my long time dreams has been to have Alias Studio running on my Mac. I’ve been using Alias since ’96. Life wasn’t so bad when it primarily ran on SGI hardware. SGI’s were fun and esoteric enough to maintain my interest. I didn’t ever really wish to run the Class A modeling software on anything else until Alias (now Autodesk, but I’ll still call them Alias) ported Studio over to the NT platform and my SGI’s were replaced with hardware that cost a tenth as much. Not that cost had anything to do with it, but anyone who weathered the transition knows how rocky it was – especially if you were quitting SGI’s cold turkey and suddenly had half the features you were used to and a buggy GUI among other things.

I had been using Mac’s since ’85 and Alias’s migration away from IRIX (a flavor UNIX) coincided with Apple’s migration toward Mac OS X (also a flavor of UNIX). It seemed logical that eventually Alias would port their preeminent industrial design software over to hardware that won the most design awards. Well that’s the way it worked in my world.

It never happed. Or, at least it hasn’t happened yet.

Until now. Well, sort of.

My wife and I purchased a new MacBook Pro to replace an aging iBook. Within the first week of having it, I couldn’t resist loading on a copy of XP via Boot Camp just to see how it ran Alias.

I have been really impressed with the results. Considering that it uses an unsupported ATI GPU, I have been very pleased. I have completed a couple projects for Teague from the comfort of my couch and returned to a few projects for myself that I’d started over the years. It’s been a total joy.

At work, I’m currently running a Dual Woodcrest PC with two SLI Quadro FX4500 graphics cards. The little MBP doesn’t support much of the real-time visualization that I can achieve with the nVidia’s, but for most modeling needs, it really rocks! Definitely a mobile CAD solution if there ever was one.

I’ve been pleased with it’s ability to tumble large assemblies, even in shaded mode and with real-time reflections turned on. This makes modeling smooth curvature continuous surfaces very effective and efficient – one of Studio’s strong points.

I’ll continue to post my experiences as I live with the MBP and Alias solution. My preference would still be to have the software as a native Mac OS X application, but for now, Boot Camp and XP works well.

PS: Yes, I tried CrossOver first, but Boot Camp worked the best. I could never get CrossOver to launch past the splash screen.