
Light painting animations directly from Blender - pmarin
https://hackaday.com/2018/07/30/light-painting-animations-directly-from-blender
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nneonneo
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.

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arriu
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.

~~~
jlg23
If you are lucky, there is a maker space within reach. Even if they don't have
the tools, maybe some member has.

Or the old-fashioned way: Talk with local shops who use the tools you need and
get some quotes.

Edit: or look for alternatives to parts you cannot make yourself (material or
design or both).

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lakechfoma
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.

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Sir_Cmpwn
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!

~~~
jsheldon
Thank you!! One can hope, maybe someday I'll get hired. But on the other hand,
it might be funner to stay indie and build a personal audience.

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knolan
Blender really is an exceptional piece of software.

~~~
StavrosK
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.

~~~
knolan
I guess I should elaborate.

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.

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
I want to add onto this....

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.

~~~
MrEldritch
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.

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jcl
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:

[https://youtu.be/wqzihgR_-SI?t=400](https://youtu.be/wqzihgR_-SI?t=400)

Or the slit scan technique used for the stargate sequence in 2001: A Space
Odyssey:

[https://youtu.be/KhRo2WbWnKU?t=346](https://youtu.be/KhRo2WbWnKU?t=346)

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kingbirdy
Skip to 3:20 or 4:25 in the video if you want to see an example of the results

~~~
invalidusernam3
For the lazy:

[https://youtu.be/O1bY66X1JKA?t=199](https://youtu.be/O1bY66X1JKA?t=199)

[https://youtu.be/O1bY66X1JKA?t=263](https://youtu.be/O1bY66X1JKA?t=263)

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StavrosK
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.

~~~
zokier
You mean the DragonFrame controller box?

[https://www.dragonframe.com/product/dmc-16/](https://www.dragonframe.com/product/dmc-16/)

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.

~~~
jpindar
As I understood it, the Dragonframe controls the camera and the Arduino box
controls the rig that moves the LED. (He describes this at around 8:08).

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cpdt
Previous discussion (on the video):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17637834](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17637834)

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xmichael999
Seems like a ton of work for pretty dismal results. Cool work though, just
kinda disappointing what was captured.

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avian
Dismal? I find the resulting videos very pretty and I find it amazing that
they were done mechanically, not using ray tracing.

~~~
mrguyorama
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.

Truly a cool project

