I am currently senior software engineer for a new venture, the See3D Visualisation Centre. This means that I co-ordinate both software development and animation projects. Previously I have worked as a software engineer on a variety of projects, developed websites and obtained a PhD in artificial intelligence by creating a fuzzy asynchronous qualitative simulator and proving it worked.
See3D is a new spin-off set up by the University of Wales Aberystwyth, UK. We have a new purpose built facility and dedicated team creating animations, visualisation applications and supplying virtual reality equipment to commerce and academia.
We would like to introduce See3D and its work to the community.
Initially we would introduce our new purpose built building and facilities (two high definition stereo theatres, a hemispherium, SGI Prism, motion capture studio, blender render farm).
At See3D we use open source tools on Linux wherever possible, which means using Blender as our core modeling and sequencing tool (in fact almost exclusively). We have written a neat render farm daemon for Linux and a Python plug-in for Blender which allows monitoring and control via IRC which we would like to offer to the community.
We have worked on a diverse range of projects since we began last year. We would like to demonstrate how we have used Blender to create stereographic animations, assist with windfarm planning applications and recreate historical sites in animation and how it has been better for us than using commercially licensed software.
Additionally we have been developing a software tool to enable visualisation and simple alteration of plans created using CAD tools by non-technical users. This software is based upon CrystalSpace with content created using Blender. This tool in addition to being able to output real-time stereo graphics has a networking component to allow collaboration over the internet.
Finally we would like to end with a short (3-5mins) demo of highlights from our animation work.