I’ve been a bit quite lately, and am now happy to present one of the reasons. brainpets GbR has been awarded 2nd place in the Berlin ProjektZukunft competition for our work on a dedicated non-photorealistic rendering environment.

Above: 1st place winners exozet (Frank Zahn, Nhat Quang Tran & Robert Anderson) my partner Tatjana Maas and special prize winner Nico Palme.

One of the main goals behind aQtree (an NPR platform we’re developing) is the hope that it will act as a bridge between researchers and artists. It occurred to me that there are many realms in visualization where these interests overlap… like medical illustration and paleoart. Fastforward to me watching yet another dinosaur documentary and being specifically annoyed at the poorly executed 3D presenting creatures that even I – a paleoamateur – knows to be false. Instead of switching away, I went and modeled procompsognathus. A quick pose later and I could throw him in aQtree v0.0. Here’s the result. Need some solid, fine line treatment but overall a promising experiment. Whatcha think?

P.S. did procompsognathus have an overbite? I modeled in a morph target in case he does.

I’ve updated the gallery with some hard work by myself, Thomas and Maryna. The hard work by Volker, Stefan and Nils will first become visible in a month or so, but then in a mad way – the frapper is looking crazy, and it will make aQtree insane.

Go check out some eye-candy.

Its official. We’ll be presenting at fmx/09 in May. If you’re coming, make sure to catch the talk: Friday, May 8th at 12:00. We’ll also be present in the expo itself, so – look us up. “We” are the AI research group: Volker, Nils, Simon, Stefan, Thomas and I. Next to the straight-forward aQtree rendering application, I hope to bring a NPR virtual agent alive. Cross your fingers, press your thumbs!

Antje wants to be a real drawing. Here’s an attempt to make her happy. Lots of work still… partucularly in the quality of the strokes. Despite the shortcomings, I’m happy with the potential shown here. Rendering is realtime at least in the terms of tweaking feedbacks. I’ll be adding more eye candy in the wiki gallery.