These are the Top Art Submissions for September 2015 from Daz Studio, and they are all quite well done. For those of you who have not been playing with it, it is an excellent and free 3D modeling and animation program which is integrated pretty closely with Poser. Meaning you can not only share a lot of the same resources between the two environments (including everything you create yourself), but also that any skill set you learn in one program is directly applicable to the other. Take a look at this trailer to give you an idea of what is possible, and see if you don’t feel the urge to try to create a little something of your own.
Two movies in different genres but with a link between the protagonists this week; Pan is the latest reiteration of the Peter Pan classic story, giving it a Prequel spin, showing how it got to the beginning of the event sequence we all know and love. Steve Jobs tells the tale of another who refused to grow up and give up his dreams, but instead dragged the entire world with him into the future his imagination created. If I only have time to see one of them this weekend I am going to have to flip a coin, because I really feel the need to see both. Of course, I may just go off the deep end, and opt for Yakuza Apocalypse instead, and enjoy watching a Tokyo Vampire Crime Lord go bats all over the Cityscape.
This weekend is World Maker Faire hosted by NYSCI, the New York Hall of Science. Don’t let the name make you think this is the big one; they call it World Maker Faire to honor the 1964-65 World’s Fair in New York where NYSCI was founded. It is still large, since last year they had 85,000 visitors to the event. These things are a lot of fun, as creative people show off what they have been coming up with and inspire others to make things as well. There are close to a hundred different Maker Faire’s around the world, if you can’t make this one look at the Maker Faire web site and find one near you.
This is the trailer for NYC ACM SIGGRAPH’s annual college computer animation festival, MetroCAF. This year it happens on Friday, September 25, 2015 at 7:00PM at the New York Institute of Technology’s Auditorium On Broadway. It looks like they have quite a few tasty animations to show this time around, so if you are close enough to make the presentation I recommend you do your best to attend.
When it comes to programming a swarm of robots, the question has always been do you program from the top down or the bottom up? According to the Technology Review, you no longer have to decide between programming each robot individually or programming the flock as if it were a single entity. Carlo Pinciroli and a collection of his friends and colleagues at the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal have come up with Buzz, a programming language that allows you to combine both kinds of commands into a single language. It allows you to tweak the two kinds of command structures to any level of detail you feel is required, and it scales easily to control any size of swarm. If that weren’t enough, they have started building and collecting libraries of program modules of common swarming behavior that researchers and hobbyists can drop into their own programming projects. That means for the first time swarm programmers can actually share their work in a common environment, and not have to be constantly reinventing the wheel someone else already solved.
According to the article Pinciroli did at RoboHub the language syntax was inspired by JavaScript and Python, meaning it should be instantly familiar to any programmer, cutting down on the learning curve involved. And the base run time platform itself is so lean it only takes 12KB, so you can do meaningful programming in the smallest of robots. It also interfaces nicely with other types of languages, such as the ROS, or Robot Operating System. The most exciting part? They released it as open-source software under the MIT license. It can be downloaded at The Swarming Buzz, so you can start programming your hoard of Evil Robot Overlords today!
SIGGRAPH is going on right now, from August 9th to the 13th, and many of us are missing it. Here are a few videos explaining a couple of the tracks. While it isn’t as good as being there, a number of these individual programs will hopefully be captured and uploaded to their official SIGGRAPH You Tube Channel soon. While we wait for that, enjoy these teasers.