Sometimes LJ friends pages can be amusing. Witness the synergy between two posts by different friends today:
Archive for April, 2008
LJ answers its own questions…
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008More Blending
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008Another motion capture movie for you. This time it is for a presentation so is a little less interesting but it is longer :).
How I am feeling
Friday, April 25th, 2008More fun Blender-ing. This time it was using the new approximate ambient occlusion stuff in Blender SVN to try doing some image-based lighting. This image is lit entirely from a single HDR panorama of a glacier at sunset.
Pretty nice and sums up my mood at the moment. Generally dark and puzzled. I’m not, unlike the chappie in this image, puzzled over someone called Suzanne though :). Not that I should make a habit of expressing my mood though mancandy.
Using Blender to Visualise Motion Capture Data
Thursday, April 24th, 2008In the lab today, someone posited that Blender might be a cool tool to use to visualise motion capture data. We have a small mo-cap rig here in the lab and I pulled up an old capture file to test. After writing some magic python import scripts the result can be seen below and in a small video.
Lots of prettiness! I modeled the human character myself don’t-cha-know :). What we are seeing is the output from our auto-magic ‘centre of rotation’ finder. The idea is simple, given a load of points moving around in space, try to fit a skeleton to them. The coloured balls are the observed marker locations (actually attached to a researcher’s daughter who was dancing) and the small white balls are the reconstructed skeleton joint locations. The human model is then animated directly from this raw data (glitches and all!).
I’m really loving teh Blender for all my academic visualisation needs. Now I can work on that video describing one of our experimental setups…
The World Comes to an End
Thursday, April 24th, 2008Oh noes! I’m goling to have to do some work!
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More 3d rubbish
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008The resulting video from last night’s blending shows a strange cube-like UFO flying over a panoramic photo of Lecce in Italy. New things wot I learned in this video: motion blur via post-processing composite nodes and glossy reflections.
This is the news from the BBC.
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008The ever-wonderful BBC has posted a montage of the intros to the BBC news throughout the ages. Which is the first you remember seeing? Personally, it was the blue eighties six o’clock news one. Just hearing the ‘duh-duh-duh-de-de-daaaah duh-duh-duh-de-de-de-de-de-da-da’ brought me straight back to sitting having tea at home after school and watching the news.
Funnily enough, even then I noticed the nasty moiré pattern on the intro…
I wish they kept the Voice of the BBC doing the ‘this is the news from the BBC’ bit though.
Camera mapping
Monday, April 21st, 2008Last night I stumbled upon a cool technique called ‘camera mapping’ which lets you ’step inside’ a photograph without too much effort. I couldn’t resist having a go so after a brief search on flickr, a static photo is transformed into a video. Not very convincing perhaps but it was no more than an hour’s work beginning to end :)
Update: I made a slightly better version which uses a better model for the midground mountain, is in HD and adds a little specular to the water to make it look a little more ‘alive’.
Photography competition
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008I got an email today reminding me of the department photography competition. I decided to have a bash at entering one of the fractals I was generating a while ago. 10 minutes in inkscape resulted in this:
For the curious, this is a composite of two fractals, both of them Julia sets. The foreground is a 3d ’slice’ through a 4d hypercomplex Julia set and the background is a Julia set embedded within the non-Euclidean, hyperbolic geometry of the Poincaré disc. Yum!
Dear lazyweb… website design
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008Dear lazyweb… What sort of things should I put on my academic homepage?