What Is The Resolution Of The Eye?

Looks like our eyes are actually not that good (see minute 3:51). It's the processing power which does the trick. Thanks brain.

BJs ToolBox v1.6 - CameraMatch

After a lot of work the last couple of weeks I finally pushed out a new release of my KIT for MODO. All the time I spent for it was a new tool for matching a camera to a still image and so the name is quite obviously CameraMatch.
I had the idea for quite a while now but I wasn't really sure if I had the programming skills to do this. But after I had a look at an article from fxguide (actually two) I was sure I could do it.
At first it seemed pretty easy and it was going well. At least I thought it would. But after the solving of the two vanishing points it was pretty difficult for me. The math I did for the orientation of the camera didn't work or would only work for some images. Especially the yaw rotation made me headaches. Then I found BLAM a plugin for blender and it was based on Using Vanishing Points for Camera Calibration and Coarse 3D Reconstruction from a Single Image. And this was just what I have been looking for. I then spent about one week to get my vector math skills back on track which have been collecting dust since school. Would I had known that I really could use these I would have paid more attention back then.
Thanks to the modo community I could takle down some major bugs and here is the next version of BJs ToolBox.

Besides CameraMatch, BJ's ToolBox has several other features:

Modelling:
Tools:

• Rotate Element: hover over an element and rotate it through its local axis

Thread Tools:
Inspired by the modelling techniques of Peter Stammbach.

• create inner or outer thread
• define diameter, sides and the number of steps
• the thread itself is currently hard coded and best use in the range of millimetres and centimetres

Animation:

• Cameras To Animation: create an animation from a bunch of cameras

Shader Tree:

• Create Materials in Shader Tree: creates material groups for material tags
• Create Material per Element
•  Create Material per Mesh

Her

Last saturday I saw the movie Her with Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson. The short summary of it is: A man falls in love with his OS an artificial intelligence.

This film is already one of my highlights in 2014. The story was thoroughly researched and very well laid out. Besides the story and brilliant playing of Joaquin (and Scarlett who is only present with her voice) the surrounding impressed me the most.

Little details like it is totally normal and actually appreciated that you are first "staking" someones life before dating them, programs and games that interact with you or that everything works flawlessly with voice recognition. Mouse and keyboard are banned input devices.

The art design was in general superb. The wardrobe had a very realistic look and feel and was absolutley plausible. Same goes for the environment. The city (I think in the movie should be future Los Angeles) didn't look highly clean or a total waste dump. It looked real. I never thought about visual effects (and I am sure there very a bunch of them) and was absolutely sucked into the story and their characters.

Her is a very intense and thrilling love story and I highly recommend watching it.