VLOGGGGGG (5)

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you my vlog! I know, I know, it's nearly 5 minutes. I just had so much I wanted to share with you! I also cut it down from over 17 minutes, so you're welcome. I am on the cusp of an interview, finally! You can see my frustration in the vlog itself. And now, for your viewing pleasure, the ramblings of yours truly!

The Slowest Week (4)

"I am sick and tired of being sick and tired."

- Fannie Lou Hamer

It's frustrating to want to do something but not have the ability to do it. This past week was entirely consumed by school work and robotics, followed by a weekend of traveling to upstate New York for a cousin's bar mitzvah, and all the while being sick. The sad thing is, I was unable to get anything done in terms of moving forward in the fine tuning of my skills in Cinema 4D. That's right...nothing.

I am not one to merely lie around and stay put like a caged animal. That's not the type of person I am. So while I didn't have the ability or the focus (a.k.a blowing my nose ever 10 seconds) to sit down and diligently work on generating more graphics in C4D, I was able to conduct some more research in between my times of celebration and illness, learning more about MoCap's interesting history.

Real talk for a second. MoCap is freaking amazeballs. I'm talking finding-money-you-didn't-know-you-had, eating-the-last-crumbs-in-the-chip-bag amazeballs. You know what I mean...

That being said, you can't expect something that incredible to have just appeared out of nowhere without having evolved and gone through some complications first.

History lesson! Motion Capture Animation is a relatively new art, only coming around in recent decades. The 1970s was when motion capturing techniques were beginning to be utilized. Rotoscoping was an original technique, which transferred an image from live action film into another film sequence using a rotoscope (shown below). Rebecca Allen, from the New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab, was one to take advantage of this animation tactic. Using a half-silvered mirror, she was able to superimpose clips of real living dancers onto the computer screen to pose a computer generated dancer. Allen's work was PAINSTAKINGLY HAND DRAWN, and later incorporated into Twyla Tharp's The Catherine Wheel.

As time went on, numerous other methods were developed, making Motion Capture Animation more complex yet more efficient, as well as better looking. In the earlier years of the 1980s, potentiometers were being used in biomechanical labs to analyze human motion. Tom Calvert, professor of kinesiology and computer science at Simon Fraser University, acquired these potentiometers and attached them to a human figure (the ratchet setup is shown below), using said human to drive computer animated figures.

Following potentiometers was the use of Graphical Marionettes at MIT in 1982-83, which relied on optical motion capture systems (or Op-Eye) and used sequenced LEDs attached to a wired body suit. Then came Mike the Talking Head, developed in 1988 by deGraf/Wahram using their state-of-the-art software Silicon Graphics, whose face could be controlled and manipulated by a single "puppeteer." Interesting (albeit slightly terrifying) images are included below.

Doesn't this remind you of the dental headset in the most recent Willy Wonka movie??

A quick development in the field led Kleiser-Walczak to produce Dozo, a singing and dancing woman, in 1989. They used a basic style which is still used to this day. Multiple cameras were used to triangulate the images of small pieces of reflective tape placed on a body, resulting in the output of a 3-dimensional trajectory of each reflector in space. Again, the intriguing but kind of freaky video in placed below.

As of right now, that's all I've got for you. There is obviously much more to MoCap in recent years, but we will get to that at another time. Thank you for listening to my history lesson; I tried to make it as brief as possible. Please, feel free to place comments or suggestions in the responses below. Have a great day!

(PS: I am continuously reaching out to Greyscalegorilla, being pointed in all sorts of directions by different people as to which person would be best to take up my interview. I hope to get that to you ASAP!!!!!)

Exhaustion (3)

"Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of the hard work you already did."

- Newt Gingrich

It's been quite the week, guys. On top of the generic school and homework deal, it was the week before districts!

Which reminds me: along with all of that school work, we had final preparations before our first FRC competition of the season (shoutout to Hatboro-Horsham and the 35 other teams who showed up to compete). This is some tiring stuff, I'll tell you that. It's only been one day of competition so far, and it's already been exhilarating enough to keep the team on the edge of their seats...literally. I mean we were screaming our faces off, with chants and cheers, as well as a little more...emphasized shouting, I should say (*cough* *cough* telling the players on the field what they were missing).

Any who, somehow along the way, I was actually able to fit in a little bit of animation this week. I focused on Soft body Dynamics, meaning I created some entities and had them interact with each other. You can see in this video that they sort of molded to fit around one another, hence the "Soft" in Soft Body Dynamics.

They look like bubbly plastic balloons, don't they?

To create this animation, I worked with a few other aspects of C4D. For instance, to get these bubbly blobs to move around in the center, I essentially turned down gravity in the animation and turned up turbulence, allowing them to stay afloat while moving around as if there was a wind-like force pushing them.

I also worked with some other feature of C4D that I've never touched before. To keep these inflated balls contained, I created a box around them, and spent a lot of time generating different sized balls and constraining them inside the box. Then, after setting up my camera angle, I was able to have the balls contained in the frame. This also helped create more interactions, for I made the balls soft-bodies (i.e. able to be manipulated) and I made the box a rigid body (i.e. a non-transforming wall).

As of right now, it is 10:30 at night. I have another full day of competition tomorrow, so I'm going to cut it off right there. Enjoy your weekend everyone, and don't forget to root for Miss Daisy 341!

Please mention in the comments any questions you might have, random comments that come to mind, or simply ideas of what you would like to see on this blog.