Crytek GmbH

Snapshot with my friends, the developers of Crysis.

Left to right: Martin Mittring (Lead Graphics Engineer), Carsten Wenzel (Senior R&D Engineer), Me, Michael Endres (Art Manager), and Chris Evans (Technical Art Lead).

SIGGRAPH 07

Keynote

Eve on the "big screen" during Glenn's great Keynote.

SIGGRAPH 07, Final Asset

San Diego

Eve and I made it to San Diego. In the final hours, we finished off her clothing and gave her an animation pose. Using my networked-camera plugin, we created camera paths in Maya - and just played them back on the 360. This output was recorded (720p) and cut into the final video. The video is one (of several) that Glenn Entis will be showing during his Keynote today at 1:30.

Brought to You by the Number 4

Server Upgrade

I upgraded (one) of my servers yesterday to the Intel quad core. The CPU combines two Conroe dual-core chips, known collectively as Clovertown (so, technically, it's a "dual-dual-core"). It's a nice compliment to my quad core G5 - which serves the streaming music, and a few other ports. Anyway, each cpu on the quad is a 2.40 GHz part, sharing 8mb of L2 (2x4MB), and a front side bus at 1066MHz. I caught day 1 of the massive price cut.

It also includes a digital thermal sensor, which continuously monitors the temperature of each core - and enables the system fans to only spin as fast as needed to cool things down. (This requires variable speed fans of course).

Also, my total drive space is now 3.5 terabytes. Muhahahaha

The Progression of Eve

Xbox 360

Two more grabs of Eve off my dev box. (These images are about 2 hours old). Lots of work today on the skin tone (sub-surface scatter, blood transmission, etc). Her eye-lashes went in today, and it was painless. They looked good on the first try, which is always nice. I got the hat and hair assets late in the day, and I have not started on the shading work there (so kindly ignore those for now). I'm not sure how noticeable it is, but I made some changes to the eye-shader, and I'm happy with the results. Lesson of the day: the self-shadow of the eyelid onto the eyeball is critical for escaping the zombie-eyes.

Diffusion in the image domain is used to approximate skin-light-scattering -- as my friend and neighbor George describes in his paper:
http://www.virtualcinematography.org/publications/acrobat/Face-s2003.pdf

Real-Time Character Rendering

Xbox 360

This is a screen shot of "Eve".

Eve is a mesh that we have been using to explore high quality human rendering, without the use of any measured data (no scan data, no BRDF, etc). The nice artwork was created by James Lau and crew, and I wrote the hardware shaders. The image here was taken directly off my Xbox 360 dev kit. At a technical level, there's a lot going on - but the performance profile is within budgets that would normally be expected on a shipping game. That is to say, the accomplishment here isn't just about quality - it's about speed (which cannot be demonstrated in a screen grab. You just need to trust me on this one).

Also, clearly, Eve is a work-in-progress. The "hair" layer isn't in (lashes, brows, etc). I'll try to post updated shots as she moves forward.

If you look closely, you might see Eve at SIGGRAPH this year.

Nordpol+Hamburg

My first real media-job was as an offline video editor for an advertising agency (GSD&M). This was back in the glory-days of advertising and I followed the production house "Propaganda Films" like a religion. At that time, Propaganda included commercial directors: David Fincher, Michael Bay, Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Mark Romanek, Alex Proyas and others. Obviously, those names have moved to feature films - and Propaganda Films was gone before I was old enough to submit an application (I was 16 at the time).

Nostalgia aside, I still follow the industry - the directors, the agencies, and the spots. In my searching, I found this, and would like to share it. I don't want to give anything away (revealing the title would ruin it), so this is the only introduction I'll give: On June 29th, this spot created by Nordpol+Hamburg (regarded as one of the most creative agencies worldwide) won the Golden Lion at the International Advertising Festival in Cannes. It's as beautiful as it is brilliant. Play

Afternoon Armageddon

Rain, or An Apocalyptic Catastrophe?

I caught this awesome sky last week. This combination of the sky and sun was visible for about 15 minutes, so I had time to grab my camera. Click the here for the HD version. The image looks edited, but it isn't. (Ok, I warmed up the sun color a tiny bit, fixed some lens distortion, and some sharpening - but that's it). The image is cool because it ACTUALLY LOOKED LIKE THAT. (Extra reflections killed in-camera with a circular polarizer).

The sixth angel poured his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up in order to prepare the way for the kings from the east. And I saw three foul spirits like frogs coming from the mouth of the dragon, from the mouth of the beast, and from the mouth of the false prophet. These are demonic spirits, performing signs, who go abroad to the kings of the whole world, to assemble them for battle on the great day of God the Almighty. And they assembled them at the place that in Hebrew is called Harmagedon.
Revelation 16:12-16

Live From Yaletown

Yes, yes... I started a live webcam. This is a live image over the harbor of False Creek. Unlike the picture above (which I took with my Canon 5D), this is a 1.3 Megapixel image - generated with a standard webcam by Creative. It updates every minute. Go have a look: Live

If you would like to link directly to the page, the URL is:

http://www.hejl.com/media/live

Who Are You?

So, I started recording traffic on this site using Google Analytics. It's a cool, free service.

Anyway, here is a map of visitors over the past month (the dot size is proportional to the number of visitors). And here is a (partial) list of connecting domains. Total page views over this period was 2,958 - or about 100 per day.

I recognized an interesting correlation between my distribution of visitors, and the population density over the same area. This image is a comparison between a satellite image of the US at night, and my dots.

"The dots awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible."

Flickr Fotographien

London in Sixty