On Programming and Art.

It's been ages and ages since I touched this blog, but I thought I'd come back and document some of the changes in the direction I have been heading towards in my career.

So what's changed? Well, I have been headed towards a much more technical direction. Not just in CG, but in general. Mostly it started because I wanted to make my job a little easier and cutting and pasting Mel commands from script editors into shelf buttons....which led to learning how to program....which led to looking into things like Arduino, then building my own hexapod and now I would write tools to help productions in my Studio.

At the moment I'm learning to write shaders, as well as diving into the maths behind CG. I took a course on Robotics on Coursera. Didn't understand half of it, but a lot of the maths, like calculating matrices, vectors and rotation is exactly the same, and wonder of wonders, a lot of the shader code started making sense as well!

Anyhow, I'm going to use this post as an index to some of the code + technical research stuff I've worked on or doing. I do have a github page as well, but this will provide more of a explanation behind what I was doing.

Onwards!


Production Related:

01 -- ) Object Planter:
 -My first full-on production related tool, for the anime movie One Piece Gold. The object planter helped immensely with the crazy amounts of light bulbs needed in the movie. But as always, the real challenge in computing isn't always what it seems to humans. Getting the lights into a form that can be animated like in Vegas was the real challenge.


02 -- ) Face_Hugster:
-Taking inspiration from the object planter, I turned it into a much more general toolset. But although this was immensely fun to work on, as a tool, I think it has a long way to go yet.


03 -- ) Chain Maker:
-Making chains in 3D is annoying. Even more so when there is no design, and no scale nor instructions on how large the chain links are. The original task was to come up with something visual to show the director, and he will decide if the scale/design/link size works......I'm really sorry guys, but I have urgent matters to attend to today, like watching paint dry. So...here, use this!


04 -- ) Shader Writing in Unity:
-On-going self-learning on shader writing in Unity. In time, I hope to take this much further!


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Non Production related:


01 --) Stop Watch:
 -A simple exercise, but I included it because here is where my thinking on solving computing problems using maths took a turn. I could have written this with a long if/elif conditional to format the time, but instead, using Euclidean division yielded a much simpler coding structure.


02 -- ) Windows Batch Rename:
-My first real os related script! This is where I really learnt how seemingly simple tasks for humans can be so difficult for computers...because natural sorting!


03 -- ) "Hello World!"....in Moorse Code!
-Exploring Arduino and writing in C for the first time. But I cheated and used python instead to write a converter script that will turn the english sentence you type into C so that Arduino can run the blinky lights.