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Nov
30

Caffè for Peach!

Posted in Blender Institute by Ton

Prologue

Italy, September 2007coffe1.png

After a lengthy discussion on kino3d.com, the Italian Blender community sends a “suggestion to fix Blender’s arealights” to the Peach Team, thanks to their double agent codenamed “Env”.

Blender Institute, a couple of days later

The Peach Team answers: “and in return the Italian community starts a fund raiser to get us an espresso machine?”

Two months later

The postman rings at the door at the Blender Institute, delivering a giant box. “Great, Sinterklaas is early this year” Ton thinks… but when he opens the box he’s totally surprised seeing the package contents. A genuine original italian design espresso machine! Everyone runs to the kitchen to get Enrico demoing how to make real espresso. “The first 10 cups will taste horrible” Enrico knows. But we’re used to horrible coffee anyway… so there we go… and even though we have to learn when to press the stop button in time, it’s already awesome coffee!

coffe2.png

But… oops! Where is the arealamp feature? No feature, no caffè… and that caffè is tasting damn good! So…lets find where that code is… back later!

-Ton-

(Thanks anfeo, bullx, Chrysophylax, deskplus, e-falcon, fabrixxm, Gillan, hdd, ingoenius, IzE_Design, jazzroy, kino, lozetta, lsscpp, MArco, marioamb, Nono_Nano, pKrime, renderdemon, Rickyx, Stefano, the_nis, Tpor, UncleZeiv, Yota_VGA!)

25 Responses

  1. Anthoni_C Writes:
    November 30th, 2007 at 2:56 pm

    Yum… area light feature… oh and the coffee sounds good too!

  2. Gianmichele Writes:
    November 30th, 2007 at 3:12 pm

    ahahahah…vai Enrico vai, fagli bere un caffè vero!

  3. Martín Eschoyez Writes:
    November 30th, 2007 at 3:29 pm

    The important things first: Let’s do the best caffè!!! ;)

  4. bullx Writes:
    November 30th, 2007 at 3:32 pm

    “Free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech”, not as in “free beer”…or if you prefer as in “free coffe”…hu?

  5. Timothy Baldridge Writes:
    November 30th, 2007 at 3:45 pm

    Thebestthingaboutespressoisthatyoucancodereallyfast reallyafterdrinkingit.

  6. Dion Moult Writes:
    November 30th, 2007 at 4:19 pm

    Coffee > Area light.
    That was a bright decision to make.
    A real spark of genius.
    Do you see the light now?
    Watt’s the problem with coffee anyway?

    I’m sorry – bad jokes.

  7. rogper Writes:
    November 30th, 2007 at 5:08 pm

    Very Cool espresso machine, love the shading and the textures :P

  8. madman Writes:
    November 30th, 2007 at 5:21 pm

    Priceless!!!

  9. Roksvamp Writes:
    November 30th, 2007 at 5:34 pm

    Hahaha, quite nice of the Italian community to give you an early christmas…but wait, it’s too good to be true…the machine must have been modelled in blender…

  10. Bassam Writes:
    November 30th, 2007 at 6:38 pm

    So… what’s the suggestion? speedups? lighting improvement? normalizing the intensity of the light/area so we don’t have to use tiny values for energy?
    and.. more importantly, do you have a grinder?

  11. Eelko Gielis Writes:
    November 30th, 2007 at 6:47 pm

    Well, look on the bright side, at least you can save a bit on coffee expenses now.

    Oh, and when you make coffee, don’t put your hands in your pockets ;)

  12. Fury_jin Writes:
    November 30th, 2007 at 7:32 pm

    That looks(taste) really good.
    This gift will give some energy to the Team! Now they can work also the full night!
    I think a stiker of Blender is already on this machine :)

    But what bug of arealight dis you fix?

    What is this

  13. andy Writes:
    November 30th, 2007 at 8:23 pm

    Bassam: it’s not the energy value that has to be changed when you switch from normal spot / lamp / sun / hemi to area, you only need to make the dist smaller (area lights have a more realistic energy falloff as you might remember)… :)

    .andy

  14. Dilly Writes:
    December 1st, 2007 at 1:47 am

    :D
    I like that.

  15. jazzroy Writes:
    December 1st, 2007 at 2:42 am

    arealights?
    who cares about them!!
    i was pretty sure enrico promised to send here some cute dutch girls!
    come on, we sent the coffee, now give us netherlands favourite flavours :)

  16. Matt Writes:
    December 1st, 2007 at 4:19 am

    bassam: I suspect that that the problem they want fixed is the problem that renderdemon shows here: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?p=909058&highlight=area#post909058 (I also suspect renderdemon is one of the main instigators! :) The way Blender currently calculates area light intensity is incorrect, using some radiosity formula that treats it almost like a point light source. It doesn’t properly account for the way the light is distributed across the area shape, which prevents the smooth wrap-around lighting that you should get with a large area light source and also makes it quite susceptible to blow-out.. The dist value doesn’t have that much to do with the problem, other than being a bit of a workaround to try and minimise blowout (though the dist value is un-physical in itself!)

    There’s some interesting discussion on this sort of thing in Mental Ray here (http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=87&t=531668)

  17. Matt Writes:
    December 1st, 2007 at 4:20 am

    Oh I forgot to mention. Damn that coffee looks awesome! Look at all that crema! I’d weep out out of jealousy if I wasn’t drooling so much already. Time for another cup…

  18. MArco Writes:
    December 1st, 2007 at 10:23 am

    Yep ! Blender now have the power of Italian coffe ;)
    So now.. you can no sleep and make more youtube video :D :D :D
    (I love see your work :D in a video )

  19. kino Writes:
    December 1st, 2007 at 11:21 am

    Happy you like it!!
    dont care about arealights ;)
    take a break… drink a coffee and make a wonderfull peach

  20. Sago Writes:
    December 1st, 2007 at 12:12 pm

    So the Italian community made Ton an offer he can’t refuse….
    Great….. just what I needed….. having Enrico come over to my desk every hour with bulging eyes, a smile from ear to ear and a coffee in his hands while saying “Mmmmm, reeeeaaaal coffeeeeee….”.
    But since I don’t like horse heads in my bed… thanks!!

  21. ton Writes:
    December 1st, 2007 at 2:47 pm

    Matt: the area light issue is not what you suggest it is. Actually the calculation is very correct, but not when the arealight is partially visible (like for curved surfaces).

    The area light “dist” value is just an energy scaling component to make light appear at that distance to be in the standard visible range (0-1), as a regular lamp. That’s all. Using area light (and the code for it) is considered to be very important for realism, and used in GI or Yafray too.

    The blow-out issue is that Blender uses a linearly mapped color space, whilst a logarithmic one could work more realistic. That’s in the world buttons, the exposure. Exposure curves are standard in GI and yafray again…

    Anyhoo, the fix is just to make it work for curved surfaces, by doing area light samples for every area shadow sample. :)

  22. Daniel Writes:
    December 1st, 2007 at 7:10 pm

    You know what? I like this community. :)

  23. Gallardo Writes:
    December 3rd, 2007 at 6:58 pm

    Italy & Blender: two of my most favorite ‘things’. What a wonderful combination :)

  24. JoOngle Writes:
    December 4th, 2007 at 2:49 pm

    LOOOOL!

    Yeah! The community rocks, now THATS what I call Italian PASSION!

  25. Dan Writes:
    December 19th, 2007 at 12:33 am

    What an awsome stunt! I tip my hat to the italian blender community.