The next step was to connect these new bones to the Biped system so that they would behave in the way I wanted, rotating based on the underlying rig. Biped is a relativley closed system, so to query the rotation of Biped bones you need to expose the internal values using expose transform helpers. I set these up via script, so that as well as always having the same name I can position them on screen and even set their colour for easy identification.

Wiring rollbones in max uses the paramwire.connect command, and this takes three variables: the driving or controller bone (in the case of Biped I use the aforementioned Expose Transform Helper as the driver), the bone you want to affect, and a control expression which controls the amount of twisting.

With twist bones like the forearm twist you will most likely want to affect them on the X axis only so that as the hand rotates the rollbone will twist around the forearm bone. Bones like a neck roll however will roll in all three axis. Also in the case of the twist bones like the upper arm twist bone which is parented to the clavicle then you require it to follow the driver bone (in this case the upper arm) 100% in the Y and Z axis.

What I was finding was that I was calling the paramwire command several dozen times to link up an entire skeleton, sometimes calling it 3 times in a row with the same rollbones just to specify a different axis each time.

To makes thing easier for myself, I ended up writing a function to wire rollbones where I could simplify this to a single call:

-- Wire up a Local rotation rollbone given a bone to roll, a controller object and a roll amount per axis.
-- If any of x, y or z are 0, skip the wiring for that axis (inherits parent rotation)
fn wireRoll theRollbone theDriver xr yr zr = (
if xr != 0 then
(
controlExp = "Local_Euler_X*" + (xr as string)
paramWire.connect theDriver.baseObject[#Local_Euler_X] theRollBone.rotation.controller[#X_Rotation] controlexp
)
if yr != 0 then
(
controlExp = “Local_Euler_Y*” + (yr as string)
paramWire.connect theDriver.baseObject[#Local_Euler_Y] theRollBone.rotation.controller[#Y_Rotation] controlexp
)
if zr != 0 then
(
controlExp = “Local_Euler_Z*” + (zr as string)
paramWire.connect theDriver.baseObject[#Local_Euler_Z] theRollBone.rotation.controller[#Z_Rotation] controlexp
)
)

So with a calf roll that is parented to the calf bone, I want it to make it rotate 50% in the X axis as the foot rotates in the X axis:

wireRoll $'L Calf Roll' $eTM_LFoot 0.5 0 0

Uncanny Valley Youtube Link

The phenomenon can be explained by the notion that, if an entity is sufficiently non-humanlike, then the humanlike characteristics will tend to stand out and be noticed easily, generating empathy. On the other hand, if the entity is “almost human”, then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of “strangeness” in the human viewer.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley

Surprise Attack! (focus)

Originally uploaded by Rick Stirling.

I built a lightbox today. I don’t have proper lights, but I spent ages playing with mirrors, bouncing my flash with foil, diffusing the flash with tissue paper and generally mucking about. A great learning experience.

Tramlines

Originally uploaded by Rick Stirling.

Tramlines next to the Charles Bridge/Karlov Most, Prague, Czech Republic.

However by revisiting this in light of Brian Nathanson’s article and after looking at his portfolio I thought there were some others things worth mentioning. Brian didn’t seem to have a portfolio - he had a collection of images, some of which were based on his coursework at college. The truth is that a university education isn’t there to build a portfolio for you, it’s there to teach you how to use the software via a series of assignments. You get an understanding of how everything works, but the finished works are not relevant to a portfolio. In much the same way I learned French at school (with a passing grade), but I wouldn’t use my French homework on my CV to get myself a job as a translator.

As Adam Bromell said, you have to throw away everything you have done on your course and create your own portfolio using the TECHNIQUES you have learned. That’s the real reason you went to the class.

It’s an exceptional little machine. It’s tiny, dinky even - which is both it’s greatest strength and weakness. The keyboard is very small, but more on that later. It’s so light that I hardly notice it in my bag, whereas my old Toshiba was like carrying round a couple of bricks.

Although the screen is small (800 x 480), it’s fine for most purposes (I’d bought it purely as a thin client/dumb terminal to connect to the internet. Of course this pub has no wifi). By most purposes, I mean using the internet, and that means Firefox. By running Firefox in full screen it’s perfectly usable.

If I wanted a serious laptop, I’d have bought a serious laptop, however I made the conscious decision to buy the EEE PC because it wasn’t an expensive, powerful computer. Although I’m a computer artist, if I wanted to do any art I’d not want to work on ANY laptop, especially since I have a 24 inch monitor on my powerful iMac. Over the last year I’ve moved most of my computing software to Google - email, RSS reading, document editing, calendar et al., so all a I wanted was Firefox, a screen and a keyboard.

Since there is no wifi here, I’ve switched off the Wifi mode (Function key+F2), which seems to make a huge difference to the battery life - indeed the battery life is my second biggest issue after the keyboard size. I get about 2.5 hours withWiFi enabled, and just over 3 hours with it disabled.

The keyboard is what takes the most getting used to. It’s not ultra tiny, and it’s certainly much more usable than the soft keyboard on my iPod touch. It’s comparable in size to the iGo Stowaway Bluetooth keyboard, and to be perfectly honest, after 2 to 3 minutes of typing each time I use it my hands adjust. It’s similar to the switch I had to make when I switched to playing guitar after playing bass for a few hours. The biggest bugbear is actually the arrow keys, which are placed so close to the right shift that I continually hit the up arrow when I try to use shift. Again, after a few minutes this becomes less of an issue.

I’m writing this is Google Docs - but as I mentioned I have no Wi-Fi here. Thankfully Google have brought their Google Gears technology to Docs, which means I can create new documents and edit existing ones offline. When I get home (or find any network signal), the documents will sync again. Google Reader also works fantastically well with no network thanks to Gears. I’d been away for a few days, so I’d built up 600-700 unread feed items. Google Gears downloaded all these and I was then able to read them offline.

If only Google mail had an offline mode…

Leith B&W Series-4

Originally uploaded by Rick Stirling.

Whilst off, I took the camera to Leith docks again, even though I felt that I had totally exhausted that area. I used a neutral density filter to add some darkness into the scene and shot in black and white all afternoon.

I wish that Adobe Lightroom had a good facility to add film grain to images, at the moment I have to export them to Photoshop to add that.

My biggest issue seems to be getting Wordpress commands to run inside Posts - this was working prior to upgrading Wordpress a few weeks ago, and means that at the minute my custom links and content pages are pretty much useless. Hopefully I’ll get this sorted fairly quickly.

Edit: All the content seems to now be working, and I’ve uploaded .gif versions of some images to hopefully sort out the IE6 issues.