Week 8 // July 21 - July 27
On Monday (July 21) I worked some more on my website. I can't seem to get settled on the color scheme...
On a different note, I was really excited to see my last summer's friend, Sophie! She is back in Pittsburgh, being just as awesome I as remember her :-) She and I joined Adam for lunch with a researcher, Raffay Hamid, who was interviewing for a post-doc position at a new Disney Research Lab at CMU. It was really interesting to talk to him about the research he has done and his future plans. We discussed the work I've done last summer with the Wii controllers as well as my current research with Maya. I attended his presentation on Activity Representation for anomalous activity detection. It was very enjoyable to see his talk: I learned a lot and made some notes on what aspects of the presentation I enjoyed the most. To be the best -- learn from the best! :-)
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| Motherly Flower: an example of self-penetration |
I believe there's a bug in Maya 2008, which corrupts the Component Editor. I tried to make it work in many different ways: even tried to make it work on a computer down in the mocap. However, instead of showing the joints and the vertices affected by the joints, it just lists the selected vertices. Also, there is no apparent way of un-doing a smoothing operation, so when I smoothed the stem and got an undesirable effect, I had to redo the whole animation all-over! Additionally, I was looking for ways of applying lattices to lessen their local influence and avoid petal stretching.
As usual we had an interesting paper presented at the graphics meeting: Fun talked about "Wave Particles", a SIGGRAPH paper from last year. He went through some pros and cons of the two most commonly used fluid simulation techniques (i.e. grid-based and particle-based method), and then described the idea of this paper to give a better understanding of the contributions of this work.
The ACM page: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1276501
First Author's page: http://www.cemyuksel.com/research/waveparticles/
The next day I continued working on the flower model, finishing the last of the three available motions. I attended Stuart Anderson's thesis proposal. I see him a lot in the mocap lab working on Sarcos robot, so I was curious to know just what he was working on. I also stopped by the poster session of the fourth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS), which is held July 23-25, 2008 at CMU. This symposium brought together an interdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners in human computer interaction, security, and privacy. The program features technical papers, workshops and tutorials, a poster session, panels and invited talks, and discussion sessions. I was really glad that there I met another DMP student, Julia, with who I had a very nice chat.
On Thursday (July 24) we had a meeting with Jessica. As usual I prepared a handout and put together the movies to present at the meeting. Yesterday I figured out a different way of applying a lattice, which created an interesting curve in the leaves. I thought it added a nice effect to the animation. However, we didn't get to discuss this result much. We got caught up a little in the terminology that we were using (e.g. the final skeleton that I was using was actually an intermediate step in Laurel's animation). Also, Jessica wanted us to get into more technical aspect of the project. Unfortunately, Alla didn't think we could finish it all in the two weeks that I have remaining in 'burgh. I really want to have some tangible outcomes by the end of this internship (perhaps, publish a paper? present a poster?). I'm thinking about asking Jessica if I can start on the technical part even if I don't get a chance to finish the entire part.
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Friday (July 25) started bright and early with several pre-college/incoming students touring the mocap lab. Mo did a very good job running all three sessions, explaining what the mocap is about and what we do in here. The students absolutely loved it! During each session we had a volunteer who we suited up in a mocap suit (with more than 50 markers). As we showed them how the mocap sessions are carried out, Laurel and I got a chance to record some motions of the actors behaving like non-human objects for our project. Hopefully, Justin will be able to clean-up the motions, so that we can try them out next week.
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