Tuesday's project was not one for anyone self conscious as we were presented with the task of animating a photograph of ourselves using Animata. Creating a mesh and bone structure which would allow movement then gave way to a myriad of often humorous movements which often resulted in distortion so it was important to be able to laugh at yourself. What began for me as a simple shrug pose, uncertain yet eager then turned into perhaps a dance movement which would send you edging away from anyone ever performing as such.Extra layers were courtesy of stock photography off DeviantArt with credit as follows:
Genie Bottles - TexelGirl-Stock
Hand - marchetoo
Following on from this, we were given Apple IR Remotes and yet another piece of software to create a patch to operate our animations with. This proved to be a lot trickier. It was my first experience with any kind of software like this and where with something like Animata and the Lego Mindstorms software, it was easy enough to pick up visually and make things work. Using MaxMSP I felt a lot more like I was working blind and clung to the basic structure we were given to get us started for dear life.
Ryan and I spent an hour or two trying to figure out how make the length of the animation 'bone' change in length in only small increments. After a long winded do-it-yourself maths lesson we had someone what figured it out. At which point James came in and showed us how to do the exact same thing in a much simpler way in mere minutes. It was however a good learning curve and by forcing myself to experiement and interact with the software, I got much more out of it in terms of understanding than if he'd shown us from the beginning.
Unfortunately, only about 4 or 5 of my intended keys are working so I might have to go solder a few more wires on depending on what I chose to create for my wearable interface. with which to control my Animata
animation I am feeling very excited about this project and my first few ideas were either using tap shoes and tap dancing or something with chain mail armour. As with the last project, it will be important to think about how all the elements will come together, that is, how it is worn, the movement which will trigger the 'keys' and the animation and how it moves.
Again I feel it is a challenging project in terms of both the concept and then practical creation and programming and then also with the short time span. After leaving the studio today, I quickly followed up on an idea I had me going out to my work in a photolab and pulling apart some disposible cameras for the circuit boards which control the flash. Not sure if they are at all useful for anything but I sure had fun pulling them apart and trying to figure out how to make the flash go off. The hard part is not giving yourself a shock and seeing how long before your coworkers get annoyed with the constant flashes.
Ryan and I spent an hour or two trying to figure out how make the length of the animation 'bone' change in length in only small increments. After a long winded do-it-yourself maths lesson we had someone what figured it out. At which point James came in and showed us how to do the exact same thing in a much simpler way in mere minutes. It was however a good learning curve and by forcing myself to experiement and interact with the software, I got much more out of it in terms of understanding than if he'd shown us from the beginning.
It also gave me something to work with to keep going from and develop and after a bit of a late night and early morning and an unexpected adrenalin rush, I managed to create a fluid motion where the bone extended to a maximum value and returned to the minimum and that was an extreme sense of satisfaction from having worked through my technical problems and figured it out. By the time I finished, I could control the waist, arms and knees from the remote in three different types of movements. Success is as follows!
The really interesting thing is trying to contantly visually make the connection between the patch, the animation and the movement to get them all to work cohesively. Or at all.
The area between AUT tower and the 3D labs today saw the strange sight of 40 odd students wandering along, each carring a keyboard. Once these were torn open, we began the delicate task of tracing back the pathways to the circuit board to then reprogram. At the 3D lab, we undertook the even more delicate process of soldering wires onto the circuit boards. Again, this was something I'd never done 
in my life and though we left about 3 hours later and feeling perhaps a little light headed, my wires were soldered on.
The really interesting thing is trying to contantly visually make the connection between the patch, the animation and the movement to get them all to work cohesively. Or at all.
The area between AUT tower and the 3D labs today saw the strange sight of 40 odd students wandering along, each carring a keyboard. Once these were torn open, we began the delicate task of tracing back the pathways to the circuit board to then reprogram. At the 3D lab, we undertook the even more delicate process of soldering wires onto the circuit boards. Again, this was something I'd never done 
in my life and though we left about 3 hours later and feeling perhaps a little light headed, my wires were soldered on.Unfortunately, only about 4 or 5 of my intended keys are working so I might have to go solder a few more wires on depending on what I chose to create for my wearable interface. with which to control my Animata
animation I am feeling very excited about this project and my first few ideas were either using tap shoes and tap dancing or something with chain mail armour. As with the last project, it will be important to think about how all the elements will come together, that is, how it is worn, the movement which will trigger the 'keys' and the animation and how it moves.
Again I feel it is a challenging project in terms of both the concept and then practical creation and programming and then also with the short time span. After leaving the studio today, I quickly followed up on an idea I had me going out to my work in a photolab and pulling apart some disposible cameras for the circuit boards which control the flash. Not sure if they are at all useful for anything but I sure had fun pulling them apart and trying to figure out how to make the flash go off. The hard part is not giving yourself a shock and seeing how long before your coworkers get annoyed with the constant flashes.
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