Kakapo Cam 2026

It's been fascinating checking in on the Kakapo nest cam from time to time these past few days.  

 

AFAIK, this is the first time I've seem them livestreaming a kakapo's nest during breeding season, marking the first time I (and probably many people) have gotten a really decent look at a kakapo over an extended period!  And so far, that's probably as close to seeing one we're likely to get... 

Things that have surprised me:
* 1)  Getting to see their behaviour a bit more - particularly how, in the nest, they spend a lot of time just sleeping, and also just getting to hear their sounds more.

* 2) It's rather bemusing that that kakapo seems rather oblivious to the changing number of eggs in its nest!  Originally there were 3, then 2, and the 1 when the actual chick was about to hatch!

* 3) Also surprising was that, for a critter that's rather "blind" and living in the dark, it's sense of smell was apparently not keen enough to be even mildly perturbed that "humans" had been fossicking around the nest again, and/or even touching all the eggs! WTF?!

* 4) But what takes the cake, is watching the rangers open up the hatch (while kakapo is there!), proceed to grab one of the eggs (while kakapo watches them, protesting loudly like someone gurgling the last dregs from a straw), and yet somehow manage to swap out the egg (and/or maybe remove some more)... BUT, the kakapo then proceeds to act as if nothing had happened!!!   WTF?!   Between 2 + 3, that's crazy!

Mozart's "Magic Flute" Opera - Papageno - YouTube Rabbithole

For anyone who needs a bit of a cheer-up on this grey rainy day, here's a bunch of clips of a fun duet from a Mozart opera. 😍

1) The clip that started this rabbit hole, featuring (Huw Montague Rendall & Elisabeth Boudreault) 

This was the first time I'd ever heard this piece. I really loved the energy of the performers and the chemistry they had. (Also have to say that Elisabeth's little dance there at the end was quite cute LOL ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP9V7_fevgQ

2) Trying to find out what this song was about / the context for it, I came across this next clip from The Royal Opera (feat. Christina Gansch and Roderick Williams). 

This one had subtitles, and between these + the staging (i.e. all those kids), the meaning of the song suddenly all made sense (besides bringing back memories of the portrayal of Mozart in Amadeus) 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q0ZDZB-AnM

3) From a comment on that one, I learned that the following is apparently a famous performance by Detlef Roth and Gaële Le Roi.

The key highlights of this were seeing the matching costumes along with a bit more of the context leading up to this scene, along with watching the actors' snuggly expressions as they performed the scene. Personally though, I thought the soprano's singing in this one sounded a bit "soft" compared to the others, and didn't really like it that much TBH.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87UE2GC5db0

4) This final one (a "children's version" from 25 Feb 2024 in Vienna apparently, featuring Rolando Villazon and unknown soprano) takes the cake!

I love the staging of this - particularly how it's this really fun + playful setting within a gigantic opera theatre (seriously... look at all the tiers of seating/boxes in this thing) that looks like it was put on specifically to expose kids to classical works in a much more intimate and less intimidating setting. 

Also this one comes with a lot more context, along with the matching costumes, and everything...

All in all - I thought this was just  SO. MUCH. FUN! 😍

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaldPP44oas

Silvereye vs Berry - Slowmo & Regular Speed

Yesterday evening, I caught a plump little silvereye blissfully feasting away on a tasty little yellow berry out the back of the house. Amazingly, I managed to stand there for a few minutes snapping away and recording footage through the gap between the window and the windowframe; it may have helped that the toilet was gurgling away nearby to drown out the clap-clap-clap-clap-clap of the shutter XD (hence why I've replaced the original audio with some more snippets of music from my thesis writing collections).

Here is the footage of the birdie in action. First up is the slowed down version (from 25 fps down to 5 fps):

It's comical watching the birdy chomping, twisting, and tugging away like this.

It's also surprising just how relaxed/serene it all looks when slowed down like this (something I've noticed when stepping through the footage of some earlier clips too) - it's almost like we're finally seeing the world at the speed that the birds actually live/experience it! And to think that I only really noticed this after watching the full-speed clip render out at about this speed and realising just how much more interesting it was to watch when played back this slowly... :D


Now, if you're wondering what it actually looks like at full speed, here's the full-speed version:

It looks a whole lot more frantic eh? (And, just to be clear, I didn't speed up the video... they really do move that quickly in real life!)


As always, these were edited in the Blender Sequencer - I still have the same complaints about ugly quirks in the workflow though :(

(Note to self: I must really get cracking on either adding per-strip blendin/out + better font/text support to the sequencer, OR just bite the bullet and put together my own FFMPEG-based "VIM x Node-Tree" video/audio editor project. If it wasn't for the overhead of setting up a new app structure from scratch and then maintaining it, I get the feeling that the latter would almost invariably end up being a better solution in the long run for my particular needs/workflow)

Epic "Nemo" Tank and Sea Turtles @ Kelly Tarlton's

To kick off 2018, I've just spent a few hours cutting together a bunch of some of the clips I filmed while on vacation up in the North Island earlier this month, pairing the footage with a little taste of the music I recorded last year while in the midst of writing my thesis.



Originally, this was going to be just a video of the clips I'd filmed of an epic "Nemo" tank they had - complete with heaps of Clownfish, Blue Tangs, and Anemones - but to make the clips flow together, and to fit the soundtrack I'd found from my collection, I needed to include a few other clips I'd filmed as well

Hope you enjoy it!  It was fun putting this together with the Blender Sequencer - though it was really sluggish with the HD footage, meaning that I had to rerender it a few dozen times to get the timing of the fades down (though it's perhaps not such a great idea with a laptop on a hot day ;).

Over the coming months, I look forward to gradually releasing more of the 3+ hours of music I recorded/composed last year while writing my thesis (with the backing track here being just the first track of "Album 1" ;)  I'm still working through a plan and the mechanics for doing that, so stay tuned!

[Vote for Me] New Video Describing my PhD Research for #150YOD

Blender community batsignal!   

TL,DR: Please help vote for my #150YOD video (deadline is Thursday/Friday midnight, UTC+12)! Every vote counts!


Like, Share, and Vote (link below)

Vote for my video at the following link:

https://www.thinkable.org/submission_entries/k8Way5qO

Voting Instructions (sorry, that it's a bit of a long-winded process):
1. Go to the competition website
2. Click the "Vote" button
3. Register on the site (Facebook or Email + Name + Password)
4. (If using email, check your email/spam folders, and Activate the account)
5. Back on the competition website, click the "Vote" button again.

Note: You haven't voted until the button says "Remove Vote" and your name appears on the list

Microsoft's Revamped "Paint"

This evening, it came to my attention that Microsoft has been working on an updated version of their classic "Paint" app, but "Windows 10-ified" and with support for basic 3D drawing/sketching...





Woah... this is an interesting move, though not completely unexpected, with the other basic 3D creation tool they bundle by default (IIRC) that's aimed more at people interested in 3D printing simple objects. Having begun my digital art journey with MsPaint in Windows 98 (I like to think I got quite skilled at drawing using a 2 button mouse on a pixel-by-pixel scale, "graduating" on to animate my first characters using MsPaint + MsAgent), it's interesting to see what the next generation of budding artists playing around with a "vanilla" PC will be able to start from.

Grease Pencil - Reproject Strokes tool

Yesterday, inspired by Matias's blog post about storyboarding using Grease Pencil, I hacked together a little tool to fix up your Grease Pencil sketches when you find that you'd accidentally moved the 3D cursor around while drawing, causing all the strokes to be splayed out in weird places in 3D space.

Here's a video showing off how and when to use it (thanks to Matias for letting me use the file from the blog for testing :)



From the video description and commit log:

This operator helps fix up this mess by taking the selected strokes, projecting them to screenspace (i.e. "flattening" the strokes back on to the screen), and then putting them back out into 3D space again. As a result, it should be as if you had directly drawn the whole thing again, from the current viewpoint, but without losing the pressure/strength info.

Unfortunately, if there was originally some depth information present (i.e. you already started reshaping the sketch in 3D), then that will get lost during this process. But so far, my tests indicate that this seems to work well enough.

Siggraph '16 Paper - Fish Swimming Simulation

This video just popped up on my Youtube feed this morning:

It's the video accompanying a paper that was presented at Siggraph 2016 last week (pity I couldn't be there... there were quite a few talks/production sessions I'd have liked to attend), describing a system they build for simulating how different types of fish swim. They also discuss how this method can be used for simulating schools of fish swimming and interacting to various forms of shaping controls (e.g. for art directing the results), including doing so interactively!

Seagulls vs Waves Clip

Keeping with the theme of "fan-art" of sorts, here's a little video I put together from footage I shot while out a Sumner beach on Saturday afternoon...



From the video's description:

A pair of seagulls hunting for food along Sumner Beach, between the receding tides. Filmed yesterday during a relaxing stroll along the shoreline out at Sumner, after a great lunch. The sea yesterday looked as I've never seen it - the water level was really high, and the waves just kept coming in thick and fast.

The scene reminded me a lot of Pixar's amazing short film "Piper" (showing in front of Finding Dory). It's one of my absolute favourite shorts! Great story, wonderful animation, amazing rendering, and OMG cuteness overload!

While this shaky phone-cam (at reduced resolution to save disk space) doesn't hold a candle to that, this clip is still very much in the same spirit!

The soundtrack here is a little track I recorded specially for this footage. It's done using the "Violin Layering" techniques I've been playing around over the past month of so - basically, I recorded the first pass of the music watching the video (via my phone), and then worked on recording extra tracks for it while keeping in mind the general mood I was going for (in addition to the key beats of the clip). It's not quite 100% there yet, but as a first attempt at doing this, I'm overall happy with the results!

Pyne Gould Building Collapse Simulation Video - Blender Bullet Addon Demo

What strange times we live in: I just came across a video for a Blender addon for simulating building collapses using the built in Bullet (rigidbody simulation engine) tools.  What I didn't expect though was to open the video link, and be confronted with was this:

Woah... I know this place...

This is the Pyne Gould Building, that collapsed during the Feb 22 2011 Christchurch Earthquake. It was one of the two worst hit buildings that collapsed that day, killing and trapping people. The other one was the CTV building (also in the CBD), where over 100 people died (including the mum of a classmate from primary school) when it pancaked. In other words: not really something us Cantabrians want to remember/dwell on...

Next Gen Animation Dev - Dev Update 3

As promised, here is a video updating showing off the current state of the Pose Sculpting and Pose Sketching tools, and how they can be used for a more fluid animating experience.

Texture Painted Cube Test - Palettes

Just a short turntable anim of a texture painted cube for fun this evening....



The story behind this:
I was trying to find a way to test the "Palettes" system in Blender (which I'd just only recently heard of). Apparently it's only for the texture/image paint stuff (?), so I went ahead and started texture painting a cube!

Lo and behold, a few random dabs of colour using my tablet later, it turns out to look pretty darned interesting! Hence the turnaround, and a quick BI render of it.

GPencil Anim Test - "Curls"

While testing Antonio's patch for fixing the way that fills for concave shapes get drawn, I got inspired to create a little animation of some of these shapes in motion!



While testing the patch, I kept running into some issues with certain U-shaped filled strokes, where there would randomly be some extra triangles getting created. After drawing heaps of those recently, to figure out whether there were any trends/reasons for this to fail, I realised that they would look pretty awesome in motion.... So, I had a bit of fun + relaxation doing some straight-ahead animation with Grease Pencil :)

Pixar's GTC 2016 Talk - Viewport, Workflow, and Hydra

If you haven't already (and have 45 mins to spare), it's well worth watching Pixar's recent talk at the GPU Tech Conference (GTC) 2016, where they discuss some very juicy and interesting topics.

 http://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2016/video/S6454.html

These include a very detailed look at their in-house animation tool Presto, and all the GPU/OpenGL4 viewport magic, workflow stuff, and the announcement that they're open sourcing their fancy viewport renderer (Hydra) as part of the USD (Universal Scene Description) release later this year. Exciting stuff!

Driver Workflow Improvements - "Property Eyedropper" for Quicker Setup, and Other Features

It's taken a few days of intense hacking and investigation, but late this afternoon I finally succeeded in implementing a new way workflow for setting up drivers that should help streamline the process. Many have been requesting a faster way of doing this for years and it's been on my todo list for a while now until I finally got around to it this Easter.

Here's a little demo of how this now works:

Elephants Dream - 10 Years of Open Movies

What a neat mashup - the Cycles renders look gorgeous!  (I have to say though, that the more you think about the dialog in this little shot and the rest of the scene, the more confusing it gets, and the less it all makes sense... hahaha)

EDIT: On rewatching again a few days later, a new interpretation that somewhat makes sense does come to mind... hmm... 

Happy Chinese New Year!

It's that time of the year again! Today is the first day of the Chinese New Year celebrations. As you may have guessed from the video above, it's the year of the monkey this year (following on from the year of the sheep).  Who knows, this may well be another very awesome year for Blender ;)

For fun, I put together a little short greeting video this afternoon using Grease Pencil. I'm still quite terrible at doing 2D animation - keeping characters on model, drawing them from more than a few "easy" angles, timing, drawing using a tablet, etc. - but I'm quite pleased with how this turned out!

Pose Sculpting - Dev Update 2

To clarify any confusion, the previous post (about "bendy bones") is NOT Pose Sculpting. That said, I absolutely intend to do some experiments with combining the two later down the track :)

What then is Pose Sculpting? This latest update might give you a clue...


In this video, I demonstrate one of the latest sculpt brushes that I've been working on recently. While not quite the elusive "Draw Brush" that I've been seeking, this technique still very useful in its own right. (It's also provided me with a few ideas about how I might pursue the holy grail).

Then of course, there are still many other things which I haven't shown yet! There are quite a few nice new things that are present here that weren't around in the first version, along with a massive list of things I'm still planning on trying (no, I'm not going to post this... IMO, the techniques you've seen so far pale in comparison when some of the things I've dreamed up are functional <evilgrin>)

Christmas Travels 2015 - Highlights from Li River Cruise

Lo and behold, I've been back home now for a week, after being away on a family holiday to China (Guilin + Guangzhou) and Hong Kong over the Christmas break! (Note to Self: It's not fun to wake up feeling sick in a foreign hotel, on day 1 of a multi-week trip. It's equally not fun feeling sick again - despite being fine the night before - at the start of a new year. Gah!)

While going over the photos, I decided to do things a bit differently this time, and instead of putting together long posts of photos + text, I'm going to try turning these into little videos instead. I'll still have a few posts based on the notes I made during this trip (for a change, I did all the note making during the trip, so it'll just be a matter of digitalising them this time), but I'll put those up a bit later on. So, in the meantime, enjoy the first highlights video, from a cruise down the Li River, from Guilin to Yangshou.



The towering karsts (i.e. limestone mountains) look like they came straight out of a traditional Chinese painting. It's quite interesting how they all have such weird and wacky shapes - it's a particular highlight seeing them from the plane... on a relatively flat plain of farmland, there's a cluster of these idiosyncratic pudding-like mountains sitting in the middle of nowhere!

Grease Pencil News - Stroke Sculpting, etc. Now in Master

Breaking news! This evening I merged the work that's been going on in the GPencil_Editing_Stage3 branch to master! Keep an eye out for the test builds coming out from later today or tomorrow to get your hands on these new features.



In other news, as promised, I've uploaded a video demonstrating how the "Additive Drawing" option can be used. I've got a few other demos of this I'd like to record + upload, but there are some other more pressing issues to deal with in the meantime. So I'll get to those when I can.