Ram Parallels

Just thinking, with 64bit computing, we get over the 4gb ram limit (or is it 3gb).

Back in the day was the same wasn't it? 640k conventional, 384k extended. Don't know what came earlier, as my first machine was an 8086 already.

Then came dos extenders, DOS4G/W, and away we went.

Don't think I'll see more barriers broken in my lifetime, but hey who knows, 10 years from now, we'll see implanted mobile communication devices with 1 terabyte of data storage on carbon nano cubes or something.

Need a modeling package for Unity?

As mentioned in an earlier post, Unity3D released their IOS/Android modules for free this month, so after picking them up and playing with Unity, thought I'd get a modeling package to go along with it. As googling would have it, Daz3D is having an unbelievable offer, Bryce 3D, Daz 4 Pro (supposedly a Poser type package) and Hexagon 2.5 (Woo!) for free.... unbelievable.

Only installed Hexagon 2.5 since I really want a modeling package, and out of the box, the interface was very intuitive. To be fair, all I required were tools to extrude faces, move points and do subdivisions. Not explored to UV toolset yet, but for free software I can't complain.

In other news, I spent to entire afternoon (and morning) going through the official unity tutorials. The main coding language seems to be a choice of Javascript, C# or Boo (uh.....)

Wee! Whilst I can understand what the code is doing, the syntax side of things leaves me pondering if I really want to pick up (or re-pick up) another programming language.

Oh well, time for more tea and some music.

Midi controller: Phase 1

This little project has been on the sidelines for awhile, and I'm slowly picking it up. Idea is to build a Wind MIDI controller to play/record sampled flutes, trumpets etc. First up, is to actually get the midi working between the physical buttons and the synth.

For a midi interface, I bought one of those uber cheap midi in/out usb cables off ebay, £5 I think. Sweet little class compliant device that provides midi input and output via DIN5 connectors.

On the arduino's hardware side, I got a female DIN5 connector, and wired it up per the website. The test code worked right off, and I continued work on getting input with buttons - which was uber straight forward. Active high switches were simply wired in to 3 digital inputs, easily accessed via digitalRead()

Software wise, there is a nifty MIDI Library for the arduino that sets up all the serial comms necessary, and abstracts much of the note sending functionality required.

Code wise, after the initial "sending several thousand note-on commands to the synth" and getting some nice machine gun piano sounds, I figured out that the input data had to be sent once while the key is pressed down, and then a note off sent when it is released.

#include 

int val=0; // used to store state of switches.  
int isNoteOn[3] = {0,0,0}; // Used to keep track of whether notes are currently being pressed down.

void setup() {
  // put your setup code here, to run once:
  
  pinMode(8,INPUT); 
  pinMode(9,INPUT); 
  pinMode(10,INPUT); 
  pinMode(13,OUTPUT);


  MIDI.begin();
}

void loop() {
  // Step one, sample all the inputs
  
  
  // Step two, check to see switch is active and not playing, then switch them on.
  
  for (int i=0; i<3; i++)
  {
    val = digitalRead(i+8);    

    if (val==1 && isNoteOn[i] ==0)
    {
        MIDI.sendNoteOn(i+60,63,1);
        isNoteOn[i] = 1;
    }
    
    if (val == 0 && isNoteOn[i] == 1)
    {
        MIDI.sendNoteOff(i+60,0,1) ;
        isNoteOn[i] = 0;
    }
  }
  
  
}

The next stage is to include the pressure sensor (MPXM2010GS) data to control the note on/off events, as well as to use the pressure detected as the velocity for the note - at the moment the buttons all send a value of 63, which is a fixed midway velocity.

Sadly, this will actually take a little bit more effort on my part - the sensor actually delivers data at 25mV at full scale - the arduino's ADC is 10bit over 5 volts, which gives 4.9mV resolution steps. I really need to read the data sheets more carefully. Hence, I need an amplifier with a gain of roughly 200 to bring Vfss from 25mv to 5v.

The sensor also requires Vcc 10-16v, so... a small step up voltage regulator will probably be required to power it.

Also, the output from the pressure sensor is a V+/V- output, so I'll need a differential amplifier. Probably something like a TLC272 op-amp, which supposedly works well with single rail supplies - I could take it directly off the Arduino's board. I do not want to mess about with dual rail power supplies!

There are also the physical aspects of getting silicone tubing, hose clips, Y connectors etc. Hopefully another week or two and I'll get a prototype wind controller working.

Unity3D - IOS/Android packages available free till 8th April

Totally awesome, and I've signed up for this. Last I checked, the IOS/Android packages were like USD$400. Apiece. Having this is just simply awesome. Further checking of the specs indicate that I actually don't need to have an Ipad or Android Tablet to do dev work on, just a mac. So... looks like my music laptop will be doing double duty :3

Now, it has long been my dream* to create an epic adventure of dragons and druids, warlocks and warriors fighting for the supreme rulership of the USS enterprise. Pick either the aircraft carrier or the NCC1701D/E.


*No, not really.

I've tried stuff like PyGame, works very well, just that I'm not a game developer, and my interests don't really lie there. What I'm keen to try is actually getting houdini stuff into Unity, like houdini's particles and RBDs.

Will be a rainy day project though, as a certain wolf has got his hands on air pressure sensors and embarking on yet another tangent ;-)

GW

Shmups - training you for the future?

I'm a big fan of shoot 'em ups. The feeling when you dodge a whole screen of bullets without using a bomb is just :3

Observing shmups that are aimed towards the bullet hell gamers (ok maybe I count as one of those) seem to indicate a pattern, a need to a certain place to avoid dying, or in another words, to actually figure out all the various paths all the various bullets will take, and be at the places where they do not converge.

You can't just see a bullet and dodge, but look into the future, and see the patterns evolving, and make sure the jaws of death do not close in on your pixels >.>

Crucial UK, two thumbs up!

Upgraded the ram on both my boxes this week, and Crucial UK's service is simply impeccable. Ordered on wednesday morning, and I had it on my doorstep Thursday evening! Similarly for my linux box, I ordered a set on Thursday evening, and when I got back from work today, there it was, two delicious pieces of 4gb so-dimms :3

I still have two slots empty on my main machine, maybe next month I'll get another 16gbs to top it up. I do enjoy my dell m6400 :3

Compressors and Power Functions

Currently working through a video tutorial on Compression - no no, we're not talking about audio data compression technologies like mp3, but rather compression as a way to control the dynamic range of a signal.

In the audio world, compressors work by decreasing the input signal by a certain gain (multiplication factor) above a certain audio limit. So for say, we set our compressor to work at -10 db, sounds below -10db are not affected, but louder sounds like say -6db, are affected by the compressors. How much it is affected, is by a ratio control, e.g. 3:1.

In vfx and photography, one function I do use at times is a power function - basically it keeps the brightest and darkest or 0 to 1 values at where they are, but selectively gradually brighten or darken the values in between them.

A compressor type function would be an interesting kind of filter to apply to data of all sorts. If I do apply it out of work, I'll be sure to post again...

Saxophone Log: February 2012

"Children now play video games instead of Mozart"

I can't resist the title. Happened on this post this good day. Originally, I was going to put it on my music blog but heck this is blog is better for a rant.

And yet rant I can't. Just reading the article brings a mild discomfort to my heart. Gonna stop here.

British Wildlife Center | February 2012

After a long wildlife photography hiatus, I'm back! Well maybe. I'm running out of my own photos to sketch from, so maybe it's time to go back to get more references from the wildlife parks.

I wasn't aware that Surrey was having a boatload of snow, thankfully I wore my full bad weather setup - with a minor hickup of not wearing double layered socks, so my toes are still feeling quite tender even as I type.

The critters we managed to get photographs today were the Red Squirrels, Wildcats, Otters, Deer, Harvest Mice and Owl. Foxes and Badgers were no go, the first being uber skittish, and the latter refusing to wake up.

Brought my usual wildlife kit out - D300, 300/4, 70-200. For the most part, the 70-200 was in use, though when the harvest mice were abound, I switched over to the 300/4, occasionally with the 1.4x TC.

Bit rusty shooting with long lenses, and messed up alot of the shots by incorrectly selecting where to focus. To give an idea of how thin the DOF is on a 300mm:

The AF - thankfully - is still spot on, and I was using a single point AF for most of the day, alternating between 11 and 51 AF points depending on the speed of the critter. I only had to switch to multi point Af when tracking fast moving critters or low contrast subjects.

What can I say. I just love the D300's AF.

Towards the end of the day, a pair of owls were brought out for us to shoot, a Tawny Owl and a Barn Owl. I'm not a big fan of owls standing around, so tried to get uber close details.

The above is un-cropped, using the 300/4 with the 1.4xTC. Bit saddened there were no foxes available, would have been frakkin' awesome to catch them in the snow.

Perhaps next year.

Two new things were also introduced into my photography today, first off is my flash being powered by Sanyo Eneloop batteries. After years of pining for them, I finally have a set! Only because I blew up my last set of batteries and their charger. I don't know why, don't ask. But it's not bad, since I've used them for about 2 years, across countless photography trips over many countries.

The eneloops are.... well they work like the sanyos they replaced. Supposedly they rock as they don't have any charge leakage, so you don't need to "top them off" before going on a photoshoot.

In addition, the bundle I picked come with a really awesome microprocessor controlled battery charger than charges 4 cells together, *individually* shutting of the charge when each cell is done. On top of that, if only two cells were charged at a time, a quick charge mode activates, decreasing the charge time in half. And 3 times the speed, if only 1 cell was charged. I can't see myself using this feature, but it's still nice to know this little tidbid :)

Secondly, I've moved over to Corel Aftershot Pro... no sense in hanging on to old software. Still getting to grips with the package. One thing I'm not a fan of is the contrast slider, it tends to give some really hot highlights, whereas adjusting the contrast via a curve seems to do much better. Color wise, I'm a bit too pooped to copy/redesign my old color curves for Aftershot Pro, need to get that done soon.

Two Wolves

Came across this searching for stuff wolves to practice my sketching.

http://www.community4me.com/two_wolves.html

Ack it's February!

January's over! Aieee!!!! 1/12th of the year is gone, can't believe time is flying by so fast.

Have I Told You Lately

Music music music.

The saxophone logs will now be shifted towards the end of each month, as I will take the first few weeks to familiarize myself with each new ballad the forum members decide. And those few weeks will be needed to create my backing track as well. Seems like my theory lessons are slowly paying off :)

I've been asked several times if I intend to take this as a new career, and the answer is no.... The lifestyle of a gigging musician is definitely not what I'm interested in.

What I want to do though, is join jam sessions.

Ever since the last two times I've played in an ensemble, it's just magic. Creating music on the fly in real time with people. Hence: Jam Sessions.

Lots around London. Appear, pick a tune, improvise. Oh yeah. The jams I've been to so far are just waaay beyond my level. To do that, I need to learn the language of music, then I can speak it.

How time flies

Checking out some piano sample libraries at Imperfect Samples, it seems like the downloads are in the range of gigabytes. Like..... more than a single layer dvd! (Ok, so I'm outdated but whatever)

It just brings me back to the old days with my 28.8k modem, when a game *patch* for like mechwarrior 2 or some microprose game, which was like perhaps a megabyte plus took about a quarter hour to download. A megabyte won't take more than a few seconds with today's dsl speeds.

Similarly - RAM. I remember the day I earned enough moola to afford the 8MB ram upgrade so that I could actually play mechwarrior 2 - I'd purchased the game only to realize 4mb of ram was insufficient >.> And look at us now. I have 4gbs on my laptop at home, and at work we get to use machines with insane (to me) ram limits.

How time flies, and technological progression marches on. Now if only we can develop not only technologically, but *socially*, as a species.

Wacom Bamboo, 3rd Generation

Time really flies - has it been almost 2 years since I began my journey into learning more about sketching? Even though I only spend about a quarter of an hour a day - as well as a weekly trip for life drawing sessions (this has stopped due to time constraints) - I've seen well warranted improvements over the hundreds of hours spent.

On a whim about two weeks ago, I decided I want to dip a little into digital painting. A tablet makes sense here, and a Wacom tablet is in order then, but the prices of intuos was a major turn off - £250 for the M sized tablets I see littered around the desks of artists at work?

Ouch inducing for a newb! The alternative choice is Wacom's entry level tablets, the Bamboo series, that clocks in at £49. The Bamboo Pen Tablet (CTL-470) is the cheapest of the bunch, and features just a pressure sensitive surface with no frills. It does come with a license for ArtRage 2.6 though.

In use, I can't say it's better than an Intuos or not since I've never really used an Intuos, but it compares well, or maybe better to the Graphire I used to use. One thing I've noticed, is that after learning how to sketch on a pencil, I had a far easier time with the Bamboo, versus back in the day when I could *not* draw - the graphire was a pain to use.

In practice, the Bamboo is well built, and while the feel is far from that of the Intuos (£49 vs £150 for the similar sized Intuos S) and lacks buttons, for the hobbyist it is great. One minor gripe I have is that it uses one of the odd micro usb connectors, different from the types we connect mp3 players and portable drives with - another cable to keep track of.

On OSX, it plugs in and works out of the box. The installation CD leads to a web download of some apps as well as the Bamboo driver. So far, I'm still figuring out how to paint, with ArtRage and Pixelmator. The later, is to me, a pseudo photoshop for twenty quid. Imports .abr brushes, and the menus, panels and layers just work for me.

The issue I found here was the response of the pen did not work for me out of the box - and caused me quite a bit of frustration as I messed about with the pressure settings in Pixelmator to get it to work. It ended up to be a setting in the OSX's Bamboo Control Panel for the pen's stiffness - a stiffer setting worked far better for me.

Tried it on my Ubuntu box, but gave up after a quarter of an hour fiddling with drivers and all. I have much better things to do than figure out software - like harmony and all that jazz. If only OSX didn't have such a crappy interface - I really, really dislike the Finder in Snow Leopard, and the way resizing windows works etc just plain sucks. It's too bad, since I really enjoy how applications and stuff just works. Much prefer to spend my time doing/learning stuff than compiling drivers, seriously. That's me getting old and whiny.

So, to wrap this up, I think for the price the Bamboo is a great buy, and perhaps down the road in a few years, I may upgrade to an Intuos.

Corel AfterShot Pro.... what?!

Last week, Bibble Labs announced that they have been bought over my Corel. I think I snorted out some of the tea I was drinking. Like... what. the. hell?!


Apart from OS upgrades and reinstalls, RAW converter changes annoy me. Alot. Between bibble 4 and 5, they'd made a change to their rendering engine, and whilst it was for the better, I need to re-learn all the tools again.

So what about AfterShot? For the moment, I've got the trial version -  and us Bibble 5 users get to purchase the full version for £14, so it's quite a good deal. Well it had better be a good deal since Bibble is now sold to Corel for goodness sake.

Initial tests went well. Loaded it up, set my icc profile, reset, and tested on some D300 and LX5 files.

Out of the box, AfterShot IS bibble, all the familiar commands are there, and on my Linux box, it actually seems to run smoother, and the UI seems to work better. Props to the team there. Noise Ninja seems to be the full version, but it could also be a system thing since I'd purchased the full version years ago.

In general, the controls I use mainly in B5 have moved over seamlessly to AfterShot. There are some custom curves I have developed over time that I will probably need to port over, but it's not difficult to come up with new "looks".

The D300 raws ran as expected, though I feel that the click white tool *may* work better previously, but it's hard to say. LX5 wise, the click white tool still does not work as expected, and the color balance profiles just don't work. Thankfully, the LX5 has much better white balance detection compared to the D300, and the "As Shot" profile usually gives very good results. Usually. I've had one or two LX5 raw files come in... green.... and it was a picture of a piece of paper.....

This is the thing with digital photography, raws are good and all, but I wonder, I wonder, when will my D300 raws be no longer viewable?

On the flip side, fact: My photographs aren't exactly pro-level "omg awesome" level good, so even losing them won't mean much. Plus, all the keepers are already exported to full sized jpegs, so at least there's that.

Bottom line, the new piece of software works, and time spent agonizing over the D300's raw format is a waste of time. Time better spent say, oh, doing houdini or figuring out chord voicings.

Wolf, out.

RBD Chain Sim

Found an interesting problem on the forums, and had to investigate. Chains, a fully simulated chain. The issue the OP had was with the links penetrating, and testing showed that increasing substeps helped.... but was that it?

Further stress testing showed that the links will still inter-penetrate given certain motion types (like that shown in the example, an animated link lifting the rest of the simulated chain).

Solution was to increase the Collision Passes parameter, *together* with the maximum substeps.

Weekend project - procedural active state sim

Inspired by this video, I did the above sim. It's more or less setup for the particle emission as well - feeling under the weather atm (fever, cold, etc), no mood to do more.

Ikuze, 2012!

The first week of 2012 is over! Dang that was fast. Started on a new shot today, looking forward to Monday to try some stuff I thought up on the way home. If not, it's full steam ahead. 2012, let's make you a great year!!!

We're all beginners... at some stage

Let's start the new year with an inspirational quote!

What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me . . . is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not.

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story.

It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

Ira Glass

From: writerunderground

Whilst Mr Glass refers to writing, this is obviously applicable in any creative field. Keep on plugging away, chase the dream, make it reality.