Objectified: The paradigm of construct

I’ve not seen ‘Objectified’ , but from this clip of Jonathan Ive talking about the design and construction of the Macbook Air, it rings very true to what I’m striving for. Essentially its the goal to make ideas, system and methods appear effortlessly, as if by magic to the user.

The hardest part as described in a talk at TED, is with finding a reason for things – the goal of science is to find the best explanation of something that has the littlest variation. This is crucially what spurns innovation, development and understanding. This ‘best explanation’ analogy is basically what designers, engineers, inventors etc strive for too. The goal of their product is to feel it was the only way for it to exist and be used.

Dragon Age: Origins – Out Today!

So the game I’ve been pretty much working on since joining BioWare is out today!

http://dragonage.bioware.com/

http://kotaku.com/5395135/dragon-age-origins-review-tripping-the-blight-fantastic

Check it out!

Implying detail

I try to discuss this as often as i can at work. Implying detail can be far powerful than putting every little thing in. Artist such as Turner, Degas and Rembrandt only needed to mention that there was something there for our brains to fill in the blanks.

In a way to relates to the uncanny valley, rather than hitting every possible detail if we can trick the brain into ‘believing’ theres more detail we may get away with it.

I found matthew cooks work to be just this – implying enough detail for you to fill in the blanks. Amazing paintings of life , during battle and outside of in Afghanistan.

http://www.matthewcookillustrator.co.uk/content/matthewcookwarartist/

Is orthogonality found in nature?

I wonder whether orthogonality is found in nature? We can dictate a direction with an axis and its spin about that axis with a second axis – the third axis is really a product for keeping the second orthogonal to the first.  I wonder whether this is needed in nature or whether it copes quite well with skew? Skew itself seems quite common in nature and the very fact that skin, muscles, etc skew is important for flexibility, movement and kinesis.

I wonder if allowing a transform to skew, without affect its scale has benefits to rigging. Tensegrity and its biological form certainly allow for skew against multiple planes, and the fact that they work under tension allows them to always find a resolution.

Design, Conformity and Abstraction

Here’s a great website on good design and conformity. I find myself very in tune with it, as firstly I’m a very spatial person and secondly I tend to abstract ideas, math etc to  the most efficient model I can get them. This has its good and bad sides as the aesthetic sensibilities can tend to take over sometimes leaving something that is very beautiful but to far abstracted from the original construct – the way I deal with this is essential teach my brain to have guide post I have to stick to.

My brain has always worked spatially even from very young age, as an example my mother would allow me to walk a certain distance from home and her work each day – I’d tend to walk a long stretch then make a right angle. Each day I’d keep making successive right-angles from the last street I went down and slowly map out the city in my brain. I still do the same thing today.

WeeSaw and Blog

Biotensegrity: The geometry of Anatomy

This is something I’m very interested in, its the study of tensional integrity (Buckminster Fuller) in biology. From an aesthetics point of view it would probably fit in the field of  dynamics – but I’m coming from the standpoint of evolutionary kinematic constraints. Essentially that the notion of our evolutionary movement can only conceivably  end up in our current form. Our wrists, shoulders, hips, spine etc can only work they way they work, because its the only way they can.

Now I’m not including ideas such as being double jointed etc, but from a general standpoint I find the ideas found in biotensegrity a sort of bridging of the mathematical  models we create in rigging and real world biology. We both end up with the same results – e.g. the spine in a tensegrity model and a mathematical one have the same limits, rotation spaces and constraints.

It is said that mathematics is a poor man’s representation of nature – but the fact that it can represent it with enough detail as being real its pretty exciting to me. Tensegrity i find is a beautiful connection between nature and maths.

http://www.intensiondesigns.com/geometry_of_anatomy.html

A really, really indispensable PDF on BVH and motion capture formats.

I found this PDF on motion capture formats – funnily enough its called “Motion Capture File Formats Explained” and it is really essential if you’re trying to figure out why everything appears to work but doesn’t.

Motion Capture Formats Explained

Read on from page 16 if you like me, having built a correct matrix from the global data and offset find out that inaccuracies get past done the chain because of discrepancies in this very global matrix (due to the communicative problems of matrices). I will add this to my research page, and possibly keep a copy on my server for backup.

BVH You evil, evil little man!

BVH (Biovision) motion data is evil and I for one hate it! I wish when they had come up with the hierarchy, rotation order and transform methods they have firstly in world space, treated rotations as vectors and treated parenting as loosely as possible.

All you want for an animation format is a position of the joint, its direction and its spin – all in vectors with the position being in world space. This way any additional info like parenting can be bolted on without affecting firstly the initial pose or the animation. (as there keyed and set in world space)

The power of this is that, you could just have a set of positions and animation data without any vector info for direction or spin eg.

pos dir spn
[10,10,10] [0,0,0] [0,0,0]

And use it for raw mocap data such as TRC, or Vicom. But also by giving each joint an additional vector value for direction and spin you can use it as an intermediate format to a character rig. Parenting can still exist.

The power of this is that additionally, joints arent tied to the parents local space, and therefore you could store stretching infomation.

The Blade Runner of my generation

District 9

The title say’s it all – Go see it!

Me, Myself and FACS..

I’ve just begun teaching a couple of tech guy’s and myself the FAC’s manual (Facial Action Coding System) by Paul Ekman and co. It’s a pretty incredible manual as it teaches every facial movement you can do, (around 60 or so) there intensities and there combinations. In terms of a system we could describe it as a non-linear pose system that allows multiple other poses as inputs. The nice thing with this is that it ties directly into the current book I’m reading – ‘Emotions Revealed’.

Also I’ve been studying micro-expressions, which are the subtle emotional triggers (10th of second stuff) that can tell sub-consciously what a person is emoting.