Painted mountains close to Landmannalauger (click image to go to flickr)

I put some pictures up from our trip to Iceland. I will write some more about it, but in the mean time I thought I’d show some pictures. Click on the image above to get to the Flickr album!

Anders in one of my favorite photo locations close to Downtown (click image to go to flickr)

Today Anders got here. He is visiting me for about 4 days. We are going to a Megadeth concert in Hollywood and then just hang out for a few days before he keeps going on his trip down to San Diego to be in some kind of advertising award jury.

That gave me a good excuse to throw this picture up on my blog :)
I took it last time Anders was here, in one of my favorite areas just south of downtown Los Angeles. I have noticed that a lot of other (real) photographers like this area too. There are so many pictures in blogs and ads that I have noticed are from the same place. It is basically just a bunch of wearhouses and some streets between them. It is pretty much under the 10 freeway to there are cool cement pillars too that are nice backdrops. It is very close to where I took this picture.

The picture of Anders is pretty straight forward. Sun coming from camera left, behind Anders. I used one flash on a lightstand with no diffusion coming from camera right at about 45 degrees to Anders. That is it. All manual settings on both flash and camera. Fun fun :)
I’m not sure why I like the picture so much. I mean, it is not that great of a composition. Anders is almost dead center but something about it makes it still work for me. I like the shadows at the bottom, the yellow thing on the right and the powerlines…

Now I just wish I had a camera. I sold mine to my younger brother Hannes before the replacement I want to buy was out. So now I am waiting, camera-less, for the new one to be released… doh!

Nice view on the single track :)

Woke up today and just really wanted to take my new bike for a spin. We had the first annual pizza bake-off yesterday and it was so much fun. But, I had so much pizza that I jsut had to do something active today.
So, I loaded the bike into my car and started driving along Pacific Coast Highway (after a breakfast of cereal and coffee). I turned right onto Sunset Blvd and drove up to Will Rodgers State Park. I realized how close I still was to home and decided that I’ll probably ride my bicycle up next time. Anyway, after parking the car and asking the park ranger how I got to the trail I got on the bike and went.
Oh man it was so much fun! The view was amazing. You can basically see all the way from Santa Monica down to Palos Verdes. When I looked to the east I could see all of downtown and the snowy mountains behind downtown. It is a bit weird to see snow when it is like 28 degrees Celcius outside.
The track was a pretty technical single track. A lot of fun. It was a long climb up and then it flattened out a bit. Parts of the trail was covered by trees and parts was open with a nice view. Going back down was really fun and I LOVE the suspension on my bike. So happy I got this one with more suspension. Got down exhausted. Can’t wait to go again. Hopefully Deanne will be home next time I go, so she can come with me :)

This will be a lot of fun

I just came back from Topanga Canyon Bicycles. Went up there to get a mountain bike. After testing and testing and talking to them a lot I decided to go with the Salsa El Kaboing (instead of the BMC fs02). I had almost decided to go with the BMC since it is more of a cross country bike, but evertime I tried the Salsa I had so much fun on it. They guys at the shop finally told me: “you come back with a big smile everytime you are on the Salsa, you should get that one”. And that was true :) I did feel great on the Salsa. It has more suspension than the BMC. The BMC has 100mm and the Salsa has 140mm and on boy you can tell the difference. There is something about the Salsa geometry that just made it feel more playful to ride, so I think I made the right choise.

The bike is used but not much. All XT components and hydraulic disk breaks. I already bought a book about the trails in the Santa Monica mountains (biking distance away from my place). This will be FUN!

So excited to have a bike. Can’t wait to go ride it!

Deanne and I at the VES Awards 2010

Yesterday I went to the VES Awards (Visual Effects Society) with Deanne. I was nominated for an award for the work we did on the movie 2012. We were up agains 3(!) separate Avatar nominations so, yeah, we didn’t win. I kind of knew we wouldn’t. Avatar was very impressive and over 1000 people worked on it for 4 years so they deserve all the awards they get :)
But, the evening wasn’t ruined by not winning. It was really awesome to get to dress up in a tuxedo, see Deanne in a really awesome looking dress and to hang out with a bunch of friends from DD and other companies. They had some awesome speakers and guests there too. I got to hear a talk by Ed Catmull that was very inspiring along with a long talk by James Cameron when he accepted the lifetime achievement award. Other speakers were John Knowles (invented photoshop), Steve Wozniak (one of the founders of apple) and Bill Paxton (Aliens, Titanic and so on..).
It is really inspiring to hear so many awesome speakers who do what we do (and some who don’t). It kind of reminds me how awesome I think my job is. I tend to forget every now and then, but events like these give me a reminder of how lucky I am to work with something I love.
I can’t wait for the next big movie project :)

Took some pictures of Deanne in our design hotel (Clarion Sign) in Stockholm right before we went out to go to the Absolut Ice Bar

The last night in Sweden on our summer trip this summer we decided it would be fun to stay at the design hotel close to the station in Stockholm. We needed to get up to fly home the next day anyway so staying close to the train station made sense. There is a really fun hotel called Clarion Sign. They have designer furniture all through the hotel from Scandinavian designers. The whole hotel is filled with photos from Scandinavian designers too. In the lobby they have about 10 of one of my favorite chairs, the Egg Chair. It is a really nice hotel and we liked it a lot.

We decided to be really touristy and went to the Absolut Ice Bar located in a hotel nearby. You basically put on a coat and walk straight into a freezer where they have a bar made of ice and serve different Absolut Vodka drinks in glasses made out of ice. Cheesy but fun!

Anyway, after Deanne had put makeup on and was ready to head out we decided to take some portraits (since, you know, I am a total camera nerd..). I set up two flashes and bounced one into the bed sheet and a pillow to soften the light, and the other one as a catch/fill light to get some eye sparkle and some fill. I balanced the shutter speed so that the curtains got the right value. I have always wanted to do a portrait in front of this type of curtains, I really like the backlighting they give you. We took pictures for probably half an hour before we headed out for a quick snack and then the Ice bar :)

Click on the picture to go the flickr album.

Bullet impact, using BulletPhysics Libraries integrated into Sidefx Houdini

I finally got some stuff up on Vimeo.com :)
I uploaded two tests I made just for fun. The first one is using Bullet Physics Library (integrated into Sidefx houdini). It is a simulation of 125.000 implicit cubes being impacted by a bullet flying at 2000 m/s. The simulation is running at 15.000 fps and 30 substeps per frame.

This simulation was more of a test just to see how the simulator would handle it. I ran just over 900 frames of it and rendered it in Mantra (Houdini’s renderer).
The color comes from the sum of all impacts on each cube :)

Here I ran a fluid sim with spherical gravity where I stamp in a sphere in the fluid solver every frame. The sphere changes shape a little bit every frame, allowing fluid to “escape” and go into full fluid motion with an initial velocity from a noise function.
SPH particles are birthed from all parts of the fluid surface where there is high curvature.

Fun fun :) I’ll add more little test projects as I make them.

Short pause to rest my legs in the middle of one of the powder runs.

Just came back from a weekend in Mammoth. We had a 3 day weekend here in the states so I figured, why not get some skiing in this weekend. That was exactly what we did.

We got a condo really close to the lift together with Charles, Caroline and Magnus. Charles and Caroline made took Friday off and drove up Thursday night for a four day weekend. Magnus, Deanne and I drove up late in the afternoon on Friday.

We went straight to bed when we got there, after a short stop at the liquor store to get some whisky and beer that is.

Again! Again! One more run!

Saturday was really nice and sunny all day. The skiing was great and we went all over. The snow was pretty nice. Saturday night we were going to go out for sushi, but after hanging out in a french Crepe place too long drinking wine we totally missed that the sushi place closed. We had to settle for pita bread instead.

Sunday wasn’t as sunny as Saturday was and the wind started to pick up more and more during the day which meant that the top closed later in the day. In the end of the day the wind was so strong that we gave up. The top had over 90 mph wind. It also started snowing more and more during Sunday.

Dumping and dumping :)

Monday we woke up to dumping snow. We were worried that the mountain would be closed, but they had just closed the top. Charles and Caroline headed home in the morning because they were worried of not making it out of Mammoth because of the snow. I gave them one pair of the chains to my car and sent them on their way.
We packed the car and headed out to the mountain.

It started REALLY dumping. Visibility got worse and the wind started to pick up, but there was so much fresh powder that we had to ride! We made sure to stay close to or in the trees so we could see better. It dumped like crazy at this point. My tracks from the run before were almost gone by the time I made it up whit the lift for my next run. And best of all, there was no one around. I think people were worried they would get snowed in in Mammoth and had left early because the mountain was empty.

I had one of the better powder days I have had at Mammoth. Everytime I got to the bottom after a long powder run in the forest I had a huge smile on my face :)

Happy campers :)

At about 2.30 we were pretty exhausted and wet. We were starting to worry about getting out of the village with all the snow so we stopped for the day. After filling up the car with all our stuff we tried to clear it from all the snow. We cleared it clean of all the snow and I took my boots off and put my regular shoes on. In the time it took me to do that an inch of snow had covered the car! It was dumping!

We started driving out of Mammoth. You could basically see one and a half car lenght forward and there were cars on both sides of the road that had spun off the road. We drove slow and steady to make sure we didn’t slide off. I had just gotten new tires for my car and I was very happy about that and then four wheel drive! It took us over an hour to get out of the snow storm. Once we were out of the snow storm we went full speed to LA with just a pit stop in Bishop for some sandwiches.

Awesome weekend (2nd in a row, we were there 3 days the weekend before).

It is supposed to snow all week this week and then be sunny on Saturday again. We are totally going next weekend too :)

Me, talking and talking

I got invited to speak at a conference in South Korea called ICON. International Content Creator’s Conference (doesn’t that spell ICCC?? I guess ICON sounds better ;) ).
Anyway, I accepted the invitation and now I am here in South Korea. I have never been here before. I just gave my lecture/speak and it went well. First time I have given a speech with an interpreter. It went well, she was really good and talked to me a lot before my speech to try to understand what I was talking about. I guess it is a bit confusing if you don’t know any computer graphics at all.
I have been here for 3 days now and I have had a blast :) My friend (and former colleague) Young-il lives here so he has been a great guide. The first day we went to an awesome Korean BBQ place. The food here is amazing. In the evening I met some people from his company and we all went out for a beer or five.

The following day was the first day of the conference. I got up early to go through my presentation and add some stuff that I hadn’t had time to put in. (I’m glad I did, because the presentation ran a bit short). At lunch Young-il picked me up and we went on a sightseeing tour instead of going to the conference. The conference is mostly in Korean so I wouldn’t understand much anyway.
We went to Gyongju for lunch. It is an older village an hour outside of Busan, where the conference is. The restaurant was so cool. Basically a really old building with little gardens and court yards and you got your own little room to sit an eat in. The food was SO good. They just kept bringing little plate after little plate with food that was better and better for every plate. I ate so much that I almost exploded.
After the best food so far we went on to our first sightseeing point. The biggest temple in all of Korea. It was so nice and the area around the temple was a beautiful garden. The temple is still in use too which was cool. I loved the ornamental painting they had done on the ceiling of each building. Really beautiful.

After the temple we went to one of the world heritage sites here in Korea. It is a really beautiful stone Buddha inside of a cave. It was on top of this really cool mountain. That was our last stop for the day and we headed back to my hotel where I needed to meet my interpreter to go through the presentation with her.
Last thing we did that day was to go to a Japanese sashimi place for dinner. That was the most fancy sashimi place I have ever been to. The fish was awesome! They served little plate after little plate (seems to be the way to go here) with all sorts of things I have never heard of. And it was AWESOME! The strangest thing we had was a squid, where the middle part of the squid was cut up for us to eat, the back part and the head were on the plate and the head with all the arm was STILL ALIVE!! So crazy! The waitress poured some lemon on it and the arms and head went crazy and almost crawled off the plate! Woha! It tasted really good but it was definitely a strange experience haha!
Today I woke up, had some breakfast, went through my presentation twice and then went to give the presentation. It all went well and I event some questions :)

Now I think we are heading out for more sightseeing before I go to the ICON party tonight in the Busan Aquarium.