MARTIN SAWTELL

It's been a while, and I've been sitting on this reel for long enough. Time to set it free.

Things have progressed quite a bit from when I was a kid making paper planes and learning MS flight sim! I still remember sitting in a Cessna at Meig's field:

At one point, when I was about 14, I built my own glow engine trainer and enjoyed getting castor oil absolutely everywhere. My fashion sense was... appropriate for the time.

Of course in 2014 when I found out how accessible and cheap quadcopters had become, and with video...

Lately I've been toying with various ways to rebuild a real environment in a virtual space, and after reading about someone's exploration with some open source tools I decided to feed visualSFM some images and see what comes out. SFM, or Structure From Motion is a photogrammetry technique that takes a moving camera; ie two+ pictures of the one thing, and infers where things are in relation to it. Similar to the reason you have...

About a week ago a workmate of mine discovered The Golf Club VR and has been hopelessly addicted since. He's not even a golfer, so clearly this game is onto something good! After giving it a go I started to get into it and saw that holding a vive controller instead of a club was really affecting my swing. Time to fix that.

The local golf store only had grips for sale ($8) so we also found some 12mm shower poles that fit perfect...

UPDATE2: Our team has won the global prize in the category of "Galactic Impact", quite a surprise and achievement as this has so far been the world's largest hackathon, with over 25,000 participants in almost 200 cities! Rock on Radaway! As a result we've been invited to attend a launch at Kennedy Space Center.

UPDATE: We've now placed as a finalist in the global category of "Global Galactic Impact- The solution with the most p...

So Minecraft environments are a bunch of voxels right? What if you took volumetric medical data and put it into Minecraft?

Maritime Port Authority & UP Singapore

Hackathon announcement

I decided it was time to try out a hackathon, something that had always appealed to me. Impressed by the diversity of people there- everyone from data scientists, app developers, designers and shipping industry veterans. The team of 5 that that we formed managed to beat 23 teams and take the runner up prize of $3000, not a bad effort for a first timer!

Hackathon press...

The following is a brief writeup of what started as a simple camera mapping test in Houdini and later turned into a more involved implementation. I ended up creating a system that dynamically maps a texture on to an object depending on when it started moving, where it was in the frame and taking into account changing topology. Applications for this system include examples such as a static shot of a train approaching a camera,...

Whenever I try a new renderer, I always seem to make carpaint. It's fun and it looks good- there's a lot going on with metallic paints to do with the angle of the surface to the camera (facing ratio). So why not give it a go with Renderman?

Here's what I came up with (rendered via Houdini):

Here's some previous attempts in other renderers (In various states of completion)

I had a look around the net for papers on making car shade...

In 2003 I met Brendan Ragan, Adrian Boeing, and Alan Nielson- they were mixing video live at an event with software they had developed themselves running on hardware OpenGL. Thus began my interest in VJing, or "Video Jockeying". Since then I've worked with them as the collective PixelJuice, Vjing on as many as 8 screens, with 3 PCs and an MX50 video mixer at various major events.

Since then I've performed with artists such as A...