I’ve just finished coding my first plugin for Wordpress. I’m calling it Vimeo for Wordpress (original huh?).
The plugin is simple to set up, it uses your Vimeo user name to grab your videos and your friends videos but there’s still an option to enter the URL of the video (the plugin takes the http://www.vimeo.com/ part out of it).
Anyways you should go try it out!
This is a test
I’m hoping at some point to upload a video of my installation but for now I’ll just talk about what I did.
For my double project I created an installation that used ARToolKit to control the parameters of effects in Logic Pro. In my last post I put up a screenshot of the quartz file I was using and nothing has changed, it basically goes Video input->Single Marker Detector->Matrix to Params-X & Y co-ords->OSC Sender. Using OSCulator I then send MIDI data to Logic as a control surface which I can then use to make effect parameters change. The music was provided by my friend Oliver who’s band Adventure Elephant are awesome
I’ve got a short (poorly shot) video on how it all works, and I’m currently working on another better video for Mark to show him how it works. At the degree show it was great to see an outsiders perspective on my work. My girlfriend’s stepdad said it was like magic the way that it worked. I had a good talk with Ian Grant from TVU about it all and Mark seemed to think I held my ground which is good for me. My dad as usual made a snide comment about how I’d spent all my time in my room making it. And I talked to a few more people about it all before buggering off to go talk to my mates.
Now just sit back and watch my video on how to set up my uni project and how it works
Using ARToolKit as a control surface in Logic Pro via Quartz Composer and OSC from Colin Wren on Vimeo.
It’s the end of uni and I have a chance to update everything on here now. The first thing I want to put up here is my SFX project.
In the SFX project I was the 3D artist who was responsible for making the 3D eye we used in the movie. To make the eye I used a sphere for the eye ball (whoda thunk it?) and 2 semi spheres as the eye lids, I then created the textures for the eye from an image of Joe’s face. This made the eye look kinda awesome. I’ve already talked about how I set up the shot where the eyes fall from the packet to the hands so I won’t repeat myself. For the shot where the eye is put into the socket I rendered out footage of the eye moving around and then hand tracked it going into the eye. This shot really shows off the textures though the end eyeball is a little too dark. The hand was then rotoscoped so it could be placed on top of the eyeball so the eye looked like it was being held.
We then combined all the shots and edited them together to create the movie and tada it was done
Here be my textures
Texture of Joes Eyeball
Joe's skin for the eye lids
Here be the Video
Face Redux from Jamie Morris on Vimeo.
Today I set up my double project properly for the first time. It all worked perfectly though I think I may have accidently connected the wrong X to the wrong OSC fader because some of the patterns were controlling the wrong things, though this is due to me rushing it.
I spoke to Mark and he says I can use one of the new iMacs and mount it into a wall, then use my firewave for surround sound. So next week I’ll be setting the machine up with my softwares and getting it all up and running.
I still need to decide how I’m going to get people interacting with the piece though, I want to have objects in the scene which will be able to be pushed around, such as trash cans and statues etc but I don’t know if this will the best solution. Another option is maybe to have a magnetic board, on which magnets with the markers stuck to them can then be placed. These can then of course be moved around, but doing so restricts the freedom of the audience to do what they want.
I’ll have to come up with 5 ideas and get Mark to help me weight up the pros and cons of each
I’ve put a few tests up of attempts to composite my shot for the SFX project up.
Face: Redux eyes into hand test 1 from Colin Wren on Vimeo.
Face: Redux Eyes in Hand Test 2 from Colin Wren on Vimeo.
The first test had a few problem in it, like I had made the eyelashes blonde (wtf was I thinking?), the object I used to cast the shadow wasn’t casting the shadow where I wanted it and the animation was a bit loose. Jamie said the eyes needed to be a bit bigger.
For the second video I corrected these mistakes though an early rendered with the eyes made bigger by 50% made me and Joe laugh as the eyes looked like big hairy balls 
I’ll put up a few screencaptures of my scene and the composite set up
After Effects Set-Up
Cinema 4D set up
Yesterday, 3 guys went into a travelodge in Morden, and only 3 guys came out.
Yes, yesterday was the day of the shooting of our epic short Face:Redux. We’ll be submitting part of it for our SFX project but we all agreed to shoot some extra footage so could make it into a short film to include on the DVD we’ll be putting together. We are also going to be putting out-takes on it, most involve fuck ups but there were some truly magical moments like the one below.
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Face: Redux Out-take 1 from Colin Wren on Vimeo.
I hope to edit and upload part one of the making of very soon
It’s been a while since I’ve updated my blog on the progress of my double project. I’ve been beavering away on getting all the functions working together and so far I’ve got them all working separately but I’m having a slight issue with getting ARToolKit to work when I’m using OSC though this probably me just being silly and forgetting to set something to a certain value and will be quickly over come, I’ll have a video up once I’ve got that in the bag.
Here’s a screenshot of my composition
Using the ARToolKit Marker's coords as OSC values
Hopefully I’ll get it working later today, so I can put up a video of it working with both Quartz Composer and touchOSC on my iPhone (which if they both work at the same time means I can control it and reset it remotely).
Ok the reason it’s called part 0 is because this post is more of a ‘ I intend to research this subject to find out if I can use it as part of my exhibition piece’.
I use Cbasicore64 to make chiptune music from time to time and it has a set selection of memory banks for each instrument (there are only 4 instruments) and I was thinking that I could exploit the way the programs laid out and use a midi patch in Quartz Composer to send out a signal to Cbasicore64 to change the memory bank it’s currently playing. This would result in the music changing rapidly when the user moves the objects around the scene.
There are downsides to this idea. One is that I’ve asked my friend Oli to create an awesome soundscape for me, and to suddenly change to a 8-bit style would be a bit of an insult, plus 8-bit isn’t fitting with how I wanted the piece to go. Secondly it would mean loads of coding ( I imagine, knowing my luck) to get it work, and I only have a month to pull this thing out of my arse.
I could try to use Garageband as the music playback device and have Oli export the song in 4 channels, that way I can use his score. I just need to hit the web and look at midi in Quartz Composer
Just got an email saying someone’s registered to my blog, so a big thanks goes out to Blind Squirrel.
It’s nice to see something in my inbox once in a while that means people are actually finding me on the internet. On another good note I’ve finished the bulk of the Grow Your Own Human art and animation, meaning that I just got the coding and any more (minor) art to do for the site 
That also means I can start on my Double Project and break out Cinema 4D and Quartz Composer and dive back into the loop again. Now where did I put those speedos
So I was look at Compositing today as that’s my part of the presentation and decided I should actually look into it. I’ve never really looked at the multi-pass render setting in Cinema 4D mainly because I’ve never had to but also because I hardly look at the render settings anyways.
I eventually worked out how to turn multi-pass on and how to add channels to it. and managed to come up with this.
I ended up cloning in the second eye because the original that was there was too bright n seemed weird and out of place. I turned down the ambient Occlusion a bit and after that it looked perfect. Even Jamie liked it