Not much going on at the minute, I'm back in the world of work doing IT contracting on some cool stuff over at a company in Manchester.
At some point I'm hoping to continue with the bristol blenheim model and maybe move onto a spitfire (with help from the haynes spitfire manual) :)

Si

new 3D work...

Got a distinction for my Masters degree - woohoo!
I'm busy DIY'ing the house at the minute but get time every now and again to work on a technical high resolution model of a bristol blenheim bomber from World War 2.
Its going quite well with a few areas more to model (it takes ages to complete each area as virtually all my reference information is gleaned from photos found on the internet).
Click the little image to the right to view a screengrab of the cockpit and engine area. Once modelled it will be textured and probably used in some animation ideas I have.

Course finished :o)

Woohoo, I've finally finished my Masters Degree!
Its been a fun if extremely busy time working on the degree but definitely worth it. Time for a little relaxation before getting together a showreel and looking for a job.

In the meantime here are the tutorial videos I've created to demo my bTraffic tool. I'm toying with the idea of modifying bFlocking, my other animation tool, to simulate pedestrians and then add that together with bTraffic. Following on from that is another idea that I'm looking into which would encompass both bTraffic and bFlocking. More on that as it develops.

more bTraffic...

Here is another update on the bTraffic tool, showing how easy it is to set up a road with a few different vehicle types.



and another one showing 2 roads that have been generated by bTraffic, a 6 lane motorway on the left and a 3 lane road at the front right (just uploaded so will show soon).

more traffic...

Well I'm coming towards the end of the Uni course at Leeds Met and am putting some final touches to my bTraffic animation tool. Below are two highres samples of traffic flow. The first simply shows a fairly heavily used road with numerous highres vehicles moving along.


The second shows an earlier version using a primitive movement between lanes. That has recently changed and an ease in/ease out movement is now moving vehicles nice and smoothly. An updated video showing the effect will be posted up soon.

traffic congestion...

Here is an update to the congestion element of the tool. You can drag one or many locators onto the road and position them on lanes to restrict traffic flow. For this example I added a couple of boxes as a simulated accident that the traffic tries to get around.

bTraffic opposing roads...

Here's a bTraffic update on a few bits I added just before xmas and just after new year.
This version now has opposing road generation so you can set up a motorway/freeway quickly and easily. You can now also change the lane widths and specify a separation value between the roads. It's using the same particle emitter to fuel each road but it will later let you set the weighting of how busy each is.

bTraffic - multiple vehicle type selector...

I've finally got back to working on bTraffic, my traffic animation tool. The latest update includes the addition of vehicle types. What this means is that you can easily add multiple vehicles to the animation, such as models of trucks, cars, bikes etc just with a simple click of a button. Next up is to allow a weighting to the traffic so that you can have some simulations heavily laden with trucks whereas other simulations might be sparsely populated with traffic and only consist of cars.
Plenty more to do...

Here's an example of the generation of a road and the assignment of 3 different vehicles to the simulation:

virtually free virtual reality...

I've recently got back into some games I played a few years ago - Live for Speed 'LFS' for short (racing game) and IL2 Sturmovik (WW2 Flying). Each are great games and LFS even lets you play the demo online where there are hundreds of other demo players all wanting to race.
Anyways while getting back into IL2 I found that the hat view method of looking around the screen while flying was a bit restrictive and started searching for other methods. Two that I found were TrackIR and Freetrack. Both use the same idea of using infra-red or leds attached to your head (e.g, on a cap) and tracking the positions using standard webcam technology. From the captured information algorithms are run to determine whereabouts your head position is in 3D space and then this is transferred to the game that you are playing (if it supports it).
TrackIR is a commercial product including everything you need to start out of the box - an infra-red webcam, software and head markers but will set you back a fair amount of money. Seeing as I didnt want to fork out too much money I decided to have a go at Freetrack - the free one.
Freetrack is the actual software that takes your webcam information and figures out your current head position.
If going with Freetrack you will need the software, a webcam, a cap, some leds, some resistors, a bit of wire, a battery pack and some batteries and an old metal coathanger to make the framework that the leds sit on. It's probably advisable to get a switch as well so you dont have to keep taking the batteries out when you're not using it. So for the cost of a webcam (£20) and the other bits (a few pounds) I have a virtual reality type system :o)

Here's an in game example of someone using Freetrack in IL2:


and here's an example of using it in LFS

research paper...

Thought I'd post up a recent research paper I wrote for my Masters course. It's entitled 'Group Behavioural Animation Tools' and looks into using existing and modifications of existing theories to create tools specifically for computer animators.
Have a read and let me know what you think ;)
Group Behavioural Animation Tools - Simon Mann