Monday, August 8, 2016

Hey Everyone!

Just a head's up that as you can probably tell that this blog is pretty much inactive these days (apart from the comments). But I leave it up because I can. Thanks for encouragement and your comments. I encourage you to help one another out in the comments of all the old posts. But the truth is I have barely touched an Arduino (or code for that matter) in the last 5 years, These days I'm mostly focusing on my career as a Lead Lighting Artist in Visual FX along with playing guitar and just trying to being a Good Husband and Father.

Good Luck everyone and God bless :)

p.s. Who knows!? Maybe when my kids are all grown up I can start posting again. haha

Sunday, March 23, 2014

Shameless Plug

Check out my friend's entry to the Sony Production Awards 2014. It's the result of years of collected footage. It took him weeks to put this together. I love the narration too. It really is beautiful. If you like it please take a moment to click on the button to vote for it. He deserves to win!

Sunday, February 2, 2014

A friend of mine has closed the loop between maya and his system for doing IK track compensation moves. Ideal for multi-scale moves. Having looked into this myself years ago I know that this is non-trivial. Impressive work Gerald Thompson!


Demo showing creation of animated camera in Maya with export to Mantis Motion Control from Gerald Thompson on Vimeo.

Friday, January 3, 2014

New Youtube Music Playlist

So I've been learning a few songs lately on my guitar. I decided to make a playlist on my YouTube channel for songs I've been learning.I'm recording the video on my GH1. The Audio in recorded on a Zoom H4n stereo recorder. And all synced up in Reaper.

Saturday, December 28, 2013

Where have I been this year???

Well...

Life just seems to get busier and busier. I've spent the year doing music mostly. Tapping into my love for guitar. I've been learning online at the following sites.

http://www.riffninja.com
http://www.guitarjamz.com
http://guitarzoom.com

Here's a couple of tracks I've put down over the last few weeks. Just demo quality. Learning about home studio recording while I'm at it ;)

Monday, August 26, 2013

Aussie Rules Football



ADELAIDE CROWS FAREWELL FOOTBALL PARK from Dan Thompson on Vimeo.
I'm not much of a fan of the sport, but I made this video of the Game on the weekend. It was a fun day out for the whole family and a good subject matter for me to test some slowmotion on my hacked GH1.




Sunday, February 24, 2013

A Piece of the Pi

The following paragraph has been lifted from http://fxrant.blogspot.com.au/
 
A protest at this year's Academy Awards is taking place today to draw attention to the current state of the visual effects industry. While visual effects films are making billions of dollars at the box office, visual effects facilities are declaring bankruptcy and going out of business. The situation has never been more bizarre and ironic than the recent bankruptcy announcement of Rhythm & Hues, the visual effects shop that created the creatures of "Life of Pi", a film that has earned $580M worldwide, and, which many believe is the frontrunner to win the Oscar for visual effects at today's awards show.
"Piece of the Pi" Protest at the Academy Awards https://www.facebook.com/events/102072926647311/

Saturday, January 26, 2013

USB MIDI Drum Kit with EZDrummer

I bought this rubber drumpad of ebay. Then downloaded two bits of software:

USB2Midi - Remaps MIDI signals from the drumpad
http://usb2midi.info/pages/usb2midi_history

Loopbe1 - Creates a virtual midi output from USB2Midi for use in other MIDI software such as Reaper.
http://www.nerds.de/en/loopbe1.html

Monday, November 12, 2012

The VFX Pipeline


Here's my visual interpretation of what a VFX pipeline might look like. This is definately an oversimplification, but it gives you an idea of what goes into one. Click to enlarge.

Sunday, September 30, 2012

Gett'n my music back on.

I've been getting back into my old days of Rock n Roll. Some of you might know that I used to play in a band called Thinktank in the late 90's early 00's. I'm working on getting all the recordings up on spotify as a memento for all the old punters. I've recently been jaming with a friend from church and have set up a little recording suite with a laptop, Reaper, Mbox2 Mini, Guitar Rig and EZ drummer. It's been soooo long since I've play music. Having a lot of fun at the moment. Below is an homage to One of Thanktank's early infuences, Fugazi
 

Monday, July 16, 2012

Flying Robot WIP

Another Update to my Robot Model. I did a rough Zbrush Sculpt this time. Mostly Damien Standard Brush with Lazy Mouse and the HPolish Brush.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

PT785-S Pan and Tilt System + Arduino

I bought one of these a little while ago and finally got around to testing it with an arduino. This system isn't accurate enough for real-time repeatable motion control photography IMO. I'm planning on using it for capuring sphereical longitude/latitude HDRI's.

You can find the product here:
servocity.com/html/pt785-s_pan___tilt_system.html

Monday, July 2, 2012

New Model WIP

I'm working on a little project for an up and coming lighting class I'm teaching. The goal is to create a simple example scene for people to light and comp into a live action plate.



Monday, May 7, 2012

Nuke Classes


Wednesday, March 21, 2012

mia_materal_x maya linear workflow

So I have been doing a bit of research on Maya's "off the shelf" colour management tools. Things have come a long way in the last two versions of maya in this area.

One nice find is that there is now the ability to load display luts in maya's render view window. This makes mental ray fit nicely into our colour pipeline at RSP pretty much out of the box! Of course we are manly a 3delight/Mantra house. But occasionally Mental Ray can be of use too.

Here is a render of a Moom character using the mia_passes_x material. This image is in sRGB colour space to look right in the browser, but maya can output the raw linear image as well for use in composoting packages such as nuke. This image has two Area Lights (Quadratic Falloff) and FG switched on for some secondary bounce lighting.


Wednesday, March 14, 2012

GH1 hacked.. Finally!



Finally got around to hacking my GH1. After a quick search this was the best one stop shop I could find to do it.

I'm heading up to Leigh Creek with the Fam tomorrow to test it out in the Rugged Australian Outback. Yay!

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Sub-Surface Scattering

Some renders of a dragon head I did for a lighting class I taught recently. I was thinking about doing a 3D print of this head, not sure if I would need to make it into seperate parts to maximise the resolution of the print?

Monday, January 23, 2012

2012 Show Reel


I'm mostly a lighter these days but I have been know take on
the role of a generalist from time to time :)

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Arduino Push Button ON/OFF Example


Someone posted a request for this in the comments. After a quick search I couldn't find a simple example on how to do this so here's one I made based on the Debounce example sketch in the Arduino IDE.

arduino codeDebouncePushButtonOnOff

/* 
 Debounce
 
 Each time the input pin goes from LOW to HIGH (e.g. because of a push-button
 press), the output pin is toggled from LOW to HIGH or HIGH to LOW.  There's
 a minimum delay between toggles to debounce the circuit (i.e. to ignore
 noise).  
 
 The circuit:
 * LED attached from pin 13 to ground
 * pushbutton attached from pin 2 to +5V
 * 10K resistor attached from pin 2 to ground
 
 * Note: On most Arduino boards, there is already an LED on the board
 connected to pin 13, so you don't need any extra components for this example.
 
 
 created 21 November 2006
 by David A. Mellis
 modified 3 Jul 2009
 by Limor Fried
 
This example code is in the public domain.
 
 http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/Debounce
 */

// constants won't change. They're used here to 
// set pin numbers:
const int buttonPin = 2;     // the number of the pushbutton pin
const int ledPin =  13;      // the number of the LED pin

// Variables will change:
int ledState = HIGH;         // the current state of the output pin
int buttonState;             // the current reading from the input pin
int lastButtonState = LOW;   // the previous reading from the input pin

// the following variables are long's because the time, measured in miliseconds,
// will quickly become a bigger number than can be stored in an int.
long lastDebounceTime = 0;  // the last time the output pin was toggled
long debounceDelay = 50;    // the debounce time; increase if the output flickers

void setup() {
  pinMode(buttonPin, INPUT);
  pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);
    Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop() {
  // read the state of the switch into a local variable:
  int reading = digitalRead(buttonPin);

 

  // check to see if you just pressed the button 
  // (i.e. the input went from LOW to HIGH),  and you've waited 
  // long enough since the last press to ignore any noise:  

  // If the switch changed, due to noise or pressing:
  if (reading != lastButtonState) {
    // reset the debouncing timer
    lastDebounceTime = millis();
    
   // this is all that's new to the code 
   // toggles the ledState variable each time the button is pressed 
      if (buttonState == HIGH) {
      ledState = !ledState;
      Serial.println(ledState);
    } 
  } 
  
  if ((millis() - lastDebounceTime) > debounceDelay) {
    // whatever the reading is at, it's been there for longer
    // than the debounce delay, so take it as the actual current state:
    buttonState = reading;
  }
  

  
  // set the LED using the state of the button:
  digitalWrite(ledPin, ledState);

  // save the reading.  Next time through the loop,
  // it'll be the lastButtonState:
  lastButtonState = reading;
}

Thursday, August 18, 2011

My First Animation Editor (With Bezier Curves)

I've been working on this on and off for a while now. Ever since I got Maya talking with the Arduino. I thought to myself, "wouldn't it be nice if there was a free app that wasn't bloated and designed just for animating parameters?" Well, I just hit my first milestone for this goal. Eventually I would like to add multi-segment Bezier Curves. Then I would like to have multiple channels of animation. It's all written in Processing so serial communication with the Arduino should be simple. The trickiest thing to get working was the lookup of the Y value on the curve based on where the Time Slider is. Many thanks to Ben Paschke for finding the function I needed in the Blender Source Code and helping me port it to Processing.

There is another Processing Tool out there called Timeline but it's heading in a different direction than I am and I wasn't a fan of it's mixed languages and non-realtime Y lookup function. Plus, I thought this would be a good challenge to set for myself considering the industry I am working in :)

Hotkeys:
Spacebar = Play/Pause
J = Play Forward
K = Play Backward
L = Pause
Left Arrow = Step Backward 1 Frame
Right Arrow = Step Forward 1 Frame 

Click and Drag to Position the Handles or Timeslider