911 Media Open Lab - April 15

911 Media Arts Center Open Lab - 2007.04.15 on Vimeo

I bought a new laptop somewhat recently, and am currently dual-booting between Vista & Ubuntu. Most of my custom software was only set up to run in Ubuntu, but I forgot to figure out getting the S-Video output to work when I brought it to Open Lab- despite all the other ease-of-use advances of Ubuntu something as simple as configuring an external output is still a pain. So instead I went back into Vista and just messed around with Wings3D, while others manipulated that source video with some hardware video mixers.

The slower bits are edited out, and overall I like the most of the scenes in there- even if they don't match up to the (also live generated) music, I think there's a few underlying ideas that could be developed into more interesting clips:
-Flying over alien landscapes, manipulating them, and a kind of 80s CG flat shading look
-Simple shapes that generate fractals

Wings isn't really meant for live performance. With a little more work I could set up a lot more keyboard shortcuts so the context menus don't show up as much. A more intensive effort would be to make models in Wings, export them to objs or something and a have a custom app running on the external monitor that can be triggered to load the model.

Bones Animation - Re-Acting

Bones - Re-Acting from binarymillenium on Vimeo.

I think I could have done a better job with this video, edited it a little more heavy, but I don't like to get to bogged down with it. I sort of think as these as visual notes to myself, I can refer back to them and recreate the effect I captured in a bigger and more meaningful work.

The main thing making editing more difficult was that I was using image sequences in Premiere- my computer isn't fastest enough to actual play back unrendered image sequences (and I was too lazy to render it), so it was hard to get the edits and feel right.

The source imagery is from a code.google project called 'bones' http://code.google.com/p/binarymillenium/wiki/Bones. It's a very simplistic bones animation implementation, using osg::nodes and with randomly generated hierarchy and animation. Every vertex in the object loaded for a bone has a weight that mixes (using quaternion slerp) the positions of the parent osg::node and the child. The weights are automatically generated based on the distance from the vertex from the root of the object where it joins with the parent.