Macro spring photography

Today I decided to try my hand at macro photography. About half a year has passed since my previous attempt. Spring is definitely a good time of year for shooting macro as colours are vivid, many plants and animals get back to life after winter.

This time I almost haven't post-processed the images. The only adjustment was using "auto" for some of the photos. I even haven't used unsharp mask this time!

Click link below or "read more" to see slide-show:

Changes

Yesterday was my last day at One2Tribe company. Through last 6 months I've been working as a Java programmer and although I still don't like it (there are some niceties when compared to C++, but from modern languages I prefer C# and C++/CLI) it was pretty funny and useful experience. Now I'm taking a few days off from any work (nGENE doesn't count - I've got a lot of work here and a lot is to come in the following weeks), after that I'll make decisions on the next steps.

So to the One2Tribe guys reading this entry - thanks! I really enjoyed my stay there!

Spring photos

Today it was a beautiful spring day (finally it was sunny and warm!). I decided to take this opportunity to take some photos (I was just fed up with shooting snow :) ). Here are the results:

If you want to view slide show, click "read more".

Some changes to the blog

As you probably noticed today I've completely changed the appearance of my blog (note orange & teal - it works ;) ). The reason for that is simple. I was pretty much fed up with the previous one, which I chose at the very beginning of my blogging (three years back I guess, including Polish version of this blog which was first). The changes are... well radical... I will tweak a lot of things in the following days to make it more readable and eye-pleasing :)

I also fixed some problems with performance on Firefox.

As for the nGENE everything is a bit delayed (I mean SDK RC2 ;) and the new video of soft particles). Hope to do some of it this week but I have pretty much work with the engine, you know.

Soft particles - video

Recently I posted a note about soft particles. Here is how they currently look in nGENE (after removing edge aliasing thanks to Sebh suggestion; heat & haze effect doesn't look very good in this video due to compression but softness of particles should be obvious):

Orange & Teal - colour grading

If you have read the article about orange & teal abyss in the Hollywood movies you may wonder how such an effect can be accomplished in games. It is very simple and I will cover it in this entry.

Soft particles - what are they?

Particle systems are a simple way to model complicated volumetric medias like smoke or fire (and also special effects like magic spells, fireworks and so on) by approximating them by a small set of objects known as particles. Of course, if we were to make it fully realistic we would have to use billions of tiny particles but instead we use hundreds or thousands of large ones at most.

Traditional real time (I mean used in games) particle systems are created by rendering multiple small camera-faced 2D quads (or point sprites) all over the medium volume with some sort of blending enabled (which is often additive blending to avoid need of depth sorting). The quads have textures assigned to them which convey information about colour and transparency of the particle. Particles are animated (i.e. change position in 3D, colour, transparency, linear and angular velocity, radius etc.) according to the specified equations and faded out as their lifetime ends. For some uses Perlin noise will do, for other different approaches have to be used.