Time in Motion.

one of the many reasons i started this blog was to act as a production journal on my current short film project. However the last few months have seen very little work on that front as i have been tied up doing up my house, working with mocap and doing SFX/compositing for a WWI film

But the other day I found myself thinking about my project and the work i have done so far. Part of the project I am using a test based paradigm to approach the animation with a continuous intergration process for the models and the rigs

Which is fine so far the models have been rigged very simply with Character studio, but now I have got 12 shots done I am think it would be time to start trying to get this animation onto a render ready rig for preview.

And this has gotten me thinking about repurposing animation made in Character Studio to an FK rig which would have all the cool whistles and bells in place

The system would probably need a set of bones that share the same transform matrices as its donor model in its rest pose and the tool would step through the animation find any keys of the pelvis translations and copy the transform matricies to the new bones. Then step thorugh again copying rotation for each character studio bone keyframe

Just as I was about to go to bed I spotted this story on yahoo:

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/itn/20080909/twl-physicists-ignore-black-hole-theory-41f21e0.html

ITN - Tuesday, September 9 06:12 pm

Leading physicists are set to go ahead with a Big Bang experiment despite warnings it could destroy the universe.
Scientists at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) plan to smash particle beams together at close to the speed of light to create mini-versions of the explosion believed to have triggered the birth of the cosmos.

Cosmologists think an explosion of an object the size of a small coin occurred about 13.7 billion years ago and led to the formation of all matter.

A key aim of the experiment is to find the Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle” that some theorists believe give matter its mass.

But the experiment, which will take place inside a 17-mile tunnel deep underneath the Swiss-French border called a Large Hadron Collider (LHC), could shed light on other mysteries like the existence of supersymmetry, dark matter and dark energy.

News of the controlled explosion has led to warnings of potential disaster.

Some critics say the experiment will create “black holes” of intense gravity that could implode the Earth, or that it will open the way for beings from another universe to invade through a “worm hole” in space-time.

A safety review by scientists at CERN and in the US and Russia rejected the prospect of such outcomes.

Robert Aymar, the French physicist who heads the research centre, said: “The LHC is safe, and any suggestion that it might present a risk is pure fiction.”

Professor Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time, said: “Collisions at these and greater energies occur millions of times a day in the Earth’s atmosphere, and nothing terrible happens.”

The experiment is set to begin soon after 8am on Wednesday
 

My old secondary science teacher spoke about this 15 years ago! C’mon guys! its taken you long enough to get there!

 It would be interesting to see what happens, if they can find the secret of the origins of the universe. No doubt religous types will get all huffy about it when God/Allah/Buddah/Ik Onkar/Aliens/Flying spghetti monsters (ad infinitum) fails to make an appearance. I do like the idea of a health and safety inspecotr turning up at Cern with a clipboard.

“yes?”

“health and safety inspection. I am here to see your Large Hadron Collider”

” Very good, its this 17 mile tunnel”

“ I see, and has this 17 mile tunnel been PAT tested?”

The experiement is due to take place in approximately 8 hours.

So there is an incredibly remote possibility that in 8 hours a black hole could form and impode the earth, which after the weekend of rain we had here in blighty, would come as something of a relief. Just in case I think i will set my alarm for 8:30

nighty night all. in the meantime heres a quote from the hitchhickers guide to the galaxy which I thought was pretty apt

“there is a theory which states thats if ever anyone ever discovers  exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disapear and be replaced by something even more bizarely inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”

finished up a new tool yesterday for adobe Photoshop.

I have a bunch of smart objects in my photoshop layouts that are MASSIVE renders from 3ds max,the smart object has been resized to fit nicely in my layout but there is a problem. I could do with saving out the individual frames of the MASSIVE smart object the same size as the resized graphic.

thats where Smart Animator comes in. It takes a smart object, acceses all the images inside then spits each frame out as the source graphic to a specified location and filename. Took about 10 minutes to output 50 frames of animation but it would have took longer to do it by hand.