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.

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/

Nuke Classes

Rising Sun Pictures

I don't often talk about my work on this blog. Here is a nice little article on the company I work for, Rising Sun Pictures (RSP). The truth is I love what I do and feel like one of the lucky ones...

Here's a link to the article. Yes I am in this picture. Can you spot me?

100th post!

A very cool Article on how to hack a servo adding 10-bit incremental / absolute encoder feedback to your hobby servo.



Looking forward to "Hack your servo V3.0" with PID control!

Where's My Blog's Menus!?

Apologies,

My blog's Drop-down menus are playing up. Unfortunately I am away from my computer for the next couple of weeks. So this blog will look pretty lamo in the menu department until I can get back to my machine and re-upload my files to the server. Sorry for the inconvinience.

Dan.

Edit: All fixed now, Just realised that if I don't log in to my free file hoster every 90 days it deletes the files I use for my Menus! :( ... I might have to switch to Dropbox.

Ezi Servo (motor envy)

Sigh.. If only I had money... :)

APAC Panorama Event = Success!

In the last post I mentioned that I was going on a working holiday to Hong Kong. I was asked by Autodesk to join 3 other industry professionals to be apart of the APAC Panorama event.

My duties were:
- Critique and Mentor the Students to help them polish their films
- Give a 45min talk about Character Development and Animation for Visual Effects
- Be on the panel of judges to select the winners of the competition.

It was a surreal experience. Not only was it a complete culture shock. But the format of the event attracted lots of media. So there was a camera on me pretty much the whole time I was there!

The whole event was also covered be a TV crew from Animax an Asian anime channel. They are planning to do a series of short silhouettes on the event. The First one goes to air on Christmas Day! Unfortunately we do not get the Animax channel in Australia, but if clips end up online I will be sure to post them.

Here is a link to the winning team's film. It's called Tancho and I was lucky enough to be their Mentor as they polished it off in the last remaining days of the event.

You can follow all if the student's adventures throughout the event as they were all given flip cameras for a vBlog competition (Australia Team one this one).

I'll post more photos from the trip when I get time. But all in all it was an experience I'll never forget!

Asia Pacific Animation Challenge

The PANORAMA - Asia Pacific Animation Challenge 2009 ("Contest") is a creativity and skill-based contest allowing eligible entrants to compete for the opportunity to have their design selected as the following winners of the Autodesk Education PANORAMA - Asia Pacific Animation Challenge 2009 in one of the (4) categories and profiled on the Autodesk Website.Entrants will submit their original designs for judging according to the criteria for each of the specific Categories.

Congratulations to all the finalists in the APAC. This year I have the honor of speaking at the event which will be held at Cyberport in Hong Kong. Looks like it's shaping up to be an awesome event!

EasyDriver V4.2 is out!

Great News!

Brian Schmalz has released a new Easy Driver Board!

It has some great new features. The most notable one for me is the ability to access the chip's logic that can switch to micro, half and full step methods. It also now has pretty lights and a more usable trim pot.

I've just ordered three of these from sparkfun cause good things come in threes! Check out Brian's Easy Driver Site for all the details.

Thanks Brian for this brilliant piece of hardware!

Update! Check out my EasyDriver v4.2 Tutorial post.

Servo Tools For Maya Release v1.0.1

I have finally taken the plunge and released Servo Tools For Maya to the world!


Servo Tools For Maya is a Python Plugin that sends rotational values over USB the the Arduino Micro Controller. These values are then converted in to Pulse Width Modulation which is used to control multiple Hobby RC Servo Motors.

Applications for the plugin are only limited to your imagination. Some popular examples could be to drive complex animatronic puppetry or kinetic sculpture art installations.

Current Features Include:
- Control up to 4 Servos simultaneously. (see tutorials on how to add support for more)
- High Level GUI for building servoWrite node network.
- Ability to calibrate you servo's range and limits directly from Maya.
- Serial Connection over USB cable to hardware

Hardware Requirements:
- USB Cable
- Arduino Micro Controller
- At least 1 RC hobby servo

Software Requirements:
- The Scripts and Plugin available from this page
- Python (separate from the one that comes with Maya 8.5+)
- PySerial Python Module for Serial Communication
- Maya 8.5 or Higher (32-bit only)
- Latest Arduino Software

PLEASE NOTE:
I'm still prepping the Documentation in Video Form. So unless you are familiar with all of the above concepts, I would wait for the videos before you dive in. They should be ready in a week or two when I get back from holiday.

Rick Baker (Monster Maker) Modcast Interview.

If you haven't heard of him. Check out his filmography! He is the master of Makeup FX.
Well worth the listen! Thanks to Brad Peebler from Luxology for setting up this very inspiring interview.

Check it out interview here!

Social Media

LAMP (Laboratory for Advanced Media) recently ran a Seminar and Workshop called the Social Media Campaign about Connecting and Conversing with your Community through Social Media. This is a really interesting topic to me.

I don't pretend to know too much about the big picture. But I found that this video reasonated with what I do here on my blog and elsewhere in other online communities. The video goes for about 50 mins so you might want to get comfortable :)
Check it out:



For more info check out the LAMP web page.

New Menus

Greetings,

In an effort to make my blog more user friendly I have added some snazzy new menus at the top of the page. They are designed to help you find common topics without having to sift though all the tags on the side of the page to find what you are looking for.

These menu's don't give you access to every topic or tag, just the ones that are important to me and apparently interesting to you.

Enjoy!

DIY Moco Update

So it's been several weeks since I posted any real progress on the DIY Moco front. So here is a bit of an update.

MOCO TOOLS FOR MAYA

I was almost ready to release the software, but as I was going over the code I came across a few fatal flaws in my design :( The most obvious was that my position engine could only support one stepper motor! I thought it would be easy to make it support more. But due to the dynamic nature of the engine, I would have to resort to some serious multi threaded type coding and interrupts to get it to work the way I want. If you are not familiar with the Moco Tools For Maya project, here's an example clip. This is just one piece of a much larger idea :)

REVELATIONS

I discovered a new micro controller platform which is slowly louring me into it's multi-core ways. It's called Propeller and it's made by Parallax. I'm interested in it because it can run up to 8 parallel loops due to it's multi-core design. So in my case I would use one for serial communication, one for file reading and buffering and the other 6 would each have their own position control engine. Each Proc is called a "Cog" and while they function independently, they can all talk to each other as well!

If I was just reading the move data from a file, all of this would be much easier. But I am really interested in the interactive position control for all six stepper motors at the same time. This is why I'm seriously considering the propeller for this for this project.

STUDY

On the weekend I attended an Arduino Physical Computing class. It was run by a couple of guys for the Adelaide Dorkbot chapter. Check out this post for more info. Fun was had by all!

At my real place of work I have be learning pftrack. It's a piece of software used for extracting a moving 3D camera from 2D footage. It's not the funnest job I've had to do, but iteresting none the less.

I've also been learning Perl and Processing. Why Perl you ask? The current interface for the openMoco timelapse engine is written in Perl. So if I am to speak to it, I need to know it's language (well, a little :) Why Processing? It's visual! and it plays nice with Arduino and I am in the early stages of writing a generic animation editor. Like the ones you see in most animation packages, only much simpler.

TALKS

A few weeks back I did a talk about my motion control adventures for our local chapter of Dorkbot. It was well received.

Tomorrow night I am doing a talk for the Australian Video Producers Association. I'm tag teaming it with a friend of mine who is a professional timelapse photographer. Check out his work! I think it's beautiful.

This is Me!

Apparently this is me! :)

I-Sobot

I so want one!

Thankyou

Last Month's Blog Stats

Just wanted to say thanks to everyone who stopped by my blog last month. It showed me that people are actually interested in my video tutorials. Most of you who visited came via the sparkfun website. They kindly posted a link to my blog on their news page.

As a result, I have decided that it is worth the time it takes to put together one of these tutorials. So as I learn more stuff I will do my best to present my findings in the form of a short, easy to understand video tutorial.

I've got a few on the way already. Feel free to post feedback on here about them. I don't want to be posting crap. This would be a waste of everyone's time. That said, this is my personal blog so the statement at the top of the page still applies :)

Anyways. Thanks for all your interest so far.

Dan.

Maya + Python + Arduino + Servo (Part 2)

An update on the previous video. This time I have written a Python Plugin for maya. This makes it now possible for real time (viewport to servo) communication, without the need for dynamic playback. So now it is possible to literally keyframe your servo's position in time and playback it's animation!

A big thank you to John Park for blogging about these Ideas on the Make Blog. Check out what people have to say about it here

Edit: I have made some progress on this technique click here for more info

It's Here!

Just thought I'd post some pics of my first Spark Fun Electronics order which arrived in the mail the other day. I'm looking forward to testing out these little beauties over the next couple of weeks. The stepper driver board is a microstepper board. That means that it is capable of producing up to 1/8th of a standard step. Now that's precision! Probably too much precision for my application but hey, at $15 USD why not give it a try!

Stepper Motor Rob-08420

EasyDriver v3.1