Collaborate Disseminate
Robots of the entertainment industry are given life by character animation, where the goal is to emotionally connect with the audience to tell a story. In comparison, real-world robot movement design focus more on managing physical limitations like sensor accuracy and power management. Tools for robot control are thus more …read more
Continue reading Use Movie Tools To Make Your Robot Move Like Movie Robots
Light painting is the process of moving a light while taking a long-exposure photograph, which creates a sort of drawing from the path of the light source. It’s been done in one way or another since at least the early-to-mid 1900s, but modern hardware and methods have allowed for all …read more
Continue reading Utterly Precise Light Painting, Thanks to CNC and Stop Motion
Join us Wednesday at noon Pacific time for the All Things Enigma Hack Chat!
This week’s Hack Chat is a bit of a departure for us because our host, Simon Jansen, has tackled so many interesting projects that it’s hard to settle on one topic. Simon is a multidisciplinary hacker …read more
From the banks of levers and steam gauges of 1927’s Metropolis to the multicolored jewels that the crew would knowingly tap on in the original Star Trek, the entertainment industry has always struggled with producing imagery of advanced technology. Whether constrained by budget or imagination, portrayals usually go in one of two directions: they either rely too heavily on contemporary technology, or else they go so far in the opposite direction that it borders on comical.
But it doesn’t always have to be that way. In fact, when technology is shown properly in film it often serves as inspiration …read more
Continue reading Seth Molson is Designing the Future, One Show at a Time
When we were in school, every description of how transistors work was pretty dry and had a lot of math involved. We suppose you might have had a great instructor who was able to explain things more intuitively, but that was luck of the draw and statistically unlikely. These days, there are so many great videos on the Internet that explain things that even if you know the subject matter, it is fun to watch and see some of the great animations. For example [Sabin] has this beautifully animated explanation of how MOSFETs work that you can see below.
It …read more
3D printers have long since made it easy for anyone to make 3-dimensional zoetropes but did you know you can take advantage of a 4th dimension by stretching time? Previously the duration of a zoetrope animation would be however long it took for the platform to rotate once. To make it more interesting to watch for longer, you filled out the scene by creating concentric rings of animations. [Kevin Holmes], [Charlie Round-Turner], and [Johnathan Scoon] have instead come up with a way to make their animations last for multiple rotations, longer than three in one example. If you’re not at …read more
Continue reading Time-Stretching Zoetrope Animation Runs Longer Than It Should
By Carolina
He is now diagnosed with a condition called Pedophilic Disorder. An Ottawa-based animator has received 28 months in prison for possessing child pornography content. The 55-year old Tom Wysom is an artist by profession, who is known for his … Continue reading My Little Pony animator jailed for possessing 60k child abuse images
Light painting: there’s something that never gets old about waving lights around in a long exposure photo. Whilst most light paintings are single shots, some artists painstakingly create frame-by-frame animations. This is pretty hard to do when moving a light around by hand: it’s mostly guesswork, as it’s difficult to see the results of your efforts until after the photo has been taken. But what if you could make the patterns really precise? What if you could model them in 3D?
[Josh Sheldon] has done just that, by creating a process which allows animations formed in Blender to be traced …read more
Continue reading Light Painting Animations Directly From Blender
Lip syncing for computer animated characters has long been simplified. You draw a set of lip shapes for vowels and other sounds your character makes and let the computer interpolate how to go from one shape to the next. But with physical, real world puppets, all those movements have to be done manually, frame-by-frame. Or do they?
Stop motion animator and maker/hacker [James Wilkinson] is working on a project involving a real-world furry cat character called Billy Whiskers and decided that Billy’s lips would be moved one frame at a time using servo motors under computer control while [James] moves …read more
Continue reading Animatronic Puppet Takes Cues From Animation Software
When it comes to YouTube subscriber counters, there’s not much wiggle room for creativity. Sure, you can go with Nixies or even more exotic displays, but in the end a counter is just a bunch of numbers.
But [Brian Lough] found a way to jazz things up with this Tetris-playing YouTube sub counter. For those of you not familiar with [Brian]’s channel, it’s really worth a watch. He tends toward long live-stream videos where he works on one project for a marathon session, and there’s a lot to learn from peeking over his virtual shoulder. This project stems from an …read more
Continue reading A YouTube Subscriber Counter With A Tetris Twist