Friday, June 8, 2007 

     Two new students arrived this week, Katie and Christine. Both of them are from different universities in Hawaii. Katie is working on a project dealing with Wii remotes, and motion capturing hands. Christine has yet to decide on her topic of focus. They both work up stairs in the Graphics Lab so I do not see them that much.
     This week I have worked on a prototype of a simple table cloth for Jim, to ensure that Maya8.5 nCloth could be used in Maya8.0. It took a while for me to be able to construct a table cloth that maintained enough friction with the table that it would not be pulled off by gravity. After I accomplished this, by alterations in the constraints, I sent it to Jim. However, he was having trouble loading it into Maya8.0 so I looked at it again and rebaked it and altered the script file some, so that it could work in Maya8.0.
     I was also given the opportunity to attend two talks about research and progress that has occurred in the computer science and graphics field. One was during the graphics lab meeting on Tuesday night. A student from Japan discussed his thesis work about robotic motion and dancing. The team focused on key points in the dance, along with music recognition to animated the robot to replicate the traditional Japanese dance. The other talk was by a MIT professor about computer animation and the designer to make simplistic animation easier then simple key framing. He discussed different techniques where there at a set of positions that the character can move in and then the computer calculates how exactly the character would move. As well he discussed the improvements between his model and the SSL model