Guest of November 2001 : Anthony D'Agostino by the Linuxgraphic.org team
I n t e r v i e w

Linuxgraphic.org:
First of all, Anthony, thank you for having agreed to be our guest this month. Could you tell us in a few words who you are, what are your interests and how you came through Blender ?

Anthony D'Agostino :
I'm 29 years old, a graduate of Villanova University, and I work at a small hotel here in the USA.  My interests include mountain biking, body surfing, and computer graphics. I found out about Blender through a mailing list,
and once I tried it, I was hooked.

Anthony D'Agostino :
In school, I always excelled in math -- it was my favorite subject.  This is probably why I am fascinated with geometrical objects and patterns. When I see one of these objects, I am drawn to my computer and try to create it with Blender.

Anthony D'Agostino :
I usually get ideas very early in the morning, just before I get out of bed. Sometimes, I'm not even fully awake yet -- it's as if I am thinking about this stuff on a sub-conscious level.  When I finally have a working script, I wonder how I pulled it off.  Blender and Python is a wonderful combination that makes my ideas come to life.

Anthony D'Agostino :
Learning Python, by Mark Lutz & David Ascher, is a great introductory book that explains python in general. The Blender Book, by Carsten Wartmann, has a chapter that explains how python can be used with Blender.  Finally, Jean-Michel Soler (http://jmsoler.free.fr) has the best web site that is very useful for beginners and more experienced users.

Anthony D'Agostino :
This image (entitled "A PhotoRealistic Radiosity Rendering") is my first experiment with radiosity. Basically, I took the two small boxes out of the
cornell box (a famous scene used to test radiosity engines) and replaced them with more interesting objects.

Those objects are exact models of 'Spalding Top-Flite PLUS' golf balls. They were modeled and rendered entirely with Blender 1.80a (each ball has 492 dimples, and consists of approximately 61,000 vertices and 83,000 faces). The model is a direct result of my deep interest in geometric forms, Blender's incredibly outstanding mesh editing tools, and my own ingenious technique...

Anthony D'Agostino :
There are two things that I would like to point out.  First, the subtle shading on the dimples that are indirectly illuminated, the soft shadows, and the color bleeding. These features are a direct result of Blender's radiosity solver. Second, the specular highlights on the ball. This was done by setting the 'Ref' value to zero (so as not to disturb the radiosity solution) and increasing the 'Spec' and 'Hard' values (to provide a phong highlight). Usually radiosity renderings result in everything looking like it's made of chalk, but my procedure added highlights that accurately depict the hard plastic shell of a golf ball.

Modeling a high-rez golf ball is somewhat complicated and took me a long time to get the dimples just right. The radiosity solution took 25 minutes (I let the calculation run until it was finished) and rendering took 17 seconds on my PII 450MHz.

Anthony D'Agostino :
I'm working on a soccer ball at the moment.  And more radiosity scenes involving golf balls (with different dimple patterns) and other small plastic objects.

Anthony D'Agostino :
My Nendo Import And Conversion Suite (now at version 0.6) enables Blender to import NDO files and can also be used as a standalone NDO to Wavefront OBJ converter. The Suite is distributed as a compiled python module (nendo.pyc) and requires Blender/Python 2.0.  It isn't finished yet, and future plans for it include importing Wings files.

(Nendo is a very useful modeler, but there is a free clone called Wings that has many more features).