The ThoughtScore Project

The first project is my ever-incomplete ThoughtScore animated movie. The highlight of this update is that there has been an animation update with a few extra shots added. You can view the ThoughtScore Blender animation here, or click the screenshot below.

You may view more feedback on its BlenderArtists forum thread (page 4).

The project also got awarded its own domain with some content I pulled together quickly in about an hour. See ThoughtScore.org.

I do have a couple more scenes prepped and awaiting animation & rendering, so more updates will be popping up.

live.WIPUP

WIPUP, a way to share works in progresses, has experienced the yearly dip in content due to the holiday season, but live.WIPUP (the bleeding-edge iteration of WIPUP) has received experimental design changes and slight SEO updates.

live.WIPUP -like the projects it was built to showcase- is also a work-in-progress. It’s incomplete, but as always, hopefully a step in the right direction. Text link to check out live.WIPUP – share your works in progress here.

Real Life

Apart from badminton, taking a break from learning Chinese, globetrotting, and client work, this picture says it all.

Well, that’s it for a brief summary of what I’ve been up to. I hope everybody have also had a great Christmas, New Year, upcoming Chinese New Year, and awesome holiday.

Related posts:

1. Back in business
2. Getting things done.
3. WIPUP.org – aiming small

Anyways, firstly the project that has recently been "finished" (well, technically I’m still waiting for a little bit here and there to fill up the rest of the pages – but the bulk is done anyway), is the grand web-portfolio of Erik Kylen. The web system is using Kohana of course, and behind the scenes there is a very simple administrator panel to CRUD portfolio items.

Also, after so many empty sentences saying I will get back to The ThoughtScore Project, I finally have. A lovely bonus is that this time the update includes both a riveting storyline update as well as pretty pictures (or I think they are pretty anyways).

More awesome in the oven. Temperature set on high. Very high.

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Something else that could be interesting for some is an updated ThoughtScore video I found lying around the other day. You can find the low quality version on WIPUP (I do have a large version but will not host it online). It contains some small changes since the last video and I quite enjoy watching it.

In other news, I got my A Level results today (for those not under the British education system, that’s basically the grades that determine my entrance into university) and I’m exceptionally happy with my results. Any suggestions of stuff to buy to celebrate (recommended food is welcome – and big + useless items that catch my fancy win extra points) are welcome.

Sorry for the lack of blog posts. I am actually doing some stuff which can be seen on WIPUP, and some stuff just aren’t blogworthy enough.

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One of the reasons I developed WIPUP was to be used as a long-term infrastructure for myself – a way to log and see my progress through time. A phrase I like to use here is insight through hindsight. This of course means that since this is the first so-called stable release of WIPUP, I’m going to take a break from developing it (desktop clients, APIs and the such will have to wait) and resume my personal, more creative projects.

I’ve spent the past week porting over the remains of The ThoughtScore Project’s original thread on BlenderArtists to the WIPUP Project. I shall spend my time over the next week to pick up all those Blender save files that have spread across my hard disk and get ready to resume work on ThoughtScore.

I’m also starting a new composition. After every composing session I shall snapshot the score and perhaps a short clip of me playing what I’ve got so far. You can check out the WIPUP project for it.

Also if you need a webdev job, you can ask the folks at the company I’m now working for, OmniStudios.

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Because I fully emphathise that people with a grip of things wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about my life, I decided to show some pictures of the trouble I’ve been having trying to rig Taras, one of the main characters in The ThoughtScore Project. Here are two statically posed shots of Taras:

The left shows him in his unrigged pose. The pose he was modeled in. The right shows him "looking" down, slightly bent forward with his left arm reaching towards you. Disregarding the fact that the lighting is completely faked (what is that suit reflecting, anyway?), we have two other major problems to deal with.

Problem Number One: His arm was not built to be in that pose. Not was any other part of his anatomy. When standing straight his arms are abnormally squashed in order to look natural in that one pose… and when in a dark environment. In any other scenario you’d see two spindly arms sticking out of a hunk of metal. The way it was designed, his shoulder "ball and socket" joint is more of a "plank of wood stuck on a block of wood" joint. It doesn’t fit nicely like a joint should.

Put simply, all of his joints (legs included) will have to be remodelled in order so that you don’t have gaping holes or bits of the suit intersecting when limbs are moved in their extremeties. Not an easy task.

Problem Number Two: The torso. The torso is made up of several different meshes. Each part fits together nicely in one way and one way only. If you look at the picture, you’ll see that when he leans forward, the upper torso covers the middle torso, which largely remains stationary, the groin panel shifts outwards slightly, and the piping all has to move to accomodate this change and not randomly stick out where it shouldn’t. Think of it like the parts of a steam engine.

Long story short, it’s going to be a PITA to rig that guy just to bend over. Heck, I don’t think you can bend over in a suit like that.

Normally I stubbornly plod down the road of "create first, learn later, fix and redo even later", but this time I think I’d better buy some of Blender’s training DVDs before continuing on ThoughtScore.

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You can see the pitiful post I made after scrolling through history on this page:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=88517&page=3

Revive ThoughtScore! I need a plan, a design, something huge! Grab me some pencil and paper, and let’s bring my vision into a reality! I have a holiday coming up, and I hope I can approach this through another angle which should allow me to continue production.

The next post will be in a week’s time because I am going to be stuck in a jungle throughout next week. You will then receive posts in this order: 1) The Trek, 2) New Perspective Magazine Released, and 3) What is becoming of Eadrax.

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The ThoughtScore Project is, of course, completely open source, and this also means that I would like to share the development with you guys, and let you choose what you like, don’t like, and I sincerely welcome all your ideas for changes. Well, enough of the waffling, here are some in-movie frames as a quick preview for the impatient:

Highway scene 4.

Forest chase scene 5.

…and without further ado:

Click to Watch ThoughtScore (WIP Scenes 1-5)

Comments welcome!

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POSE2, what? Where? I thought it died?

Let’s start with POSE2. E2-Productions was the name of my original site, and it still is. E2-Productions serves as the face of my online freelancing events, and it is the name I go under. thinkMoult was started to define the separation between professional services I provide and the fun activities I indulge myself in. POSE2 stands for Project Open Source E2. It originally referred to the similarly named “POSE2 PHP Framework” which was a freely available (hence open-source) MVC framework I made to faciliate future development of E2. However, as POSE2 developed, it stood to become any main website of which I would document the progress of and show people snapshots of development. Therefore, the first POSE2 project that emerged after the POSE2 framework was mature enough for development (about version 1.1) was E2 version 6, which over time split from the main E2 site to become VisionBin. Though VisionBin was actually closed-source (no such thing as an open source website as such!) it represented a huge learning curve, of which I duly shared with others.

Those who were around the release of VisionBin witnessed a sudden surge of popularity…then a sudden drop and eventual death of VisionBin. Right now another project is replacing VisionBin (with some similarities and some differences) and so that is what POSE2 now refers to. I’m making much more of an effort on this one, and hence one of the differences outsiders can notice is that it’s now version controlled/tracked by Git. This way you guys can always check up on my progress via the Twitter feed. I would use Github if it was open-source, but unfortunately not. For those unfamiliar with Git, the Twitter update gives a short summary of what I’ve updated, as well as how many lines of code I’ve inserted/deleted. So over the past week, I think I’ve given a general idea of “hey, I’m making massive progress!” – and pretty soon I will be welcoming alpha testers. Anybody who is interested in testing out the website should contact me and make sure you can stick on the IRC channel #gisklm on irc.freenode.net as it’ll be easiest to discuss/contact there.

Project ThoughtScore, the one that’s taking ages.

Yes. It IS taking ages. That’s the whole point of it. (no, not really) For the uninitiated, ThoughtScore is the name of the movie I am making. This is an animated movie. It is 3D…and it’s probably a thousand times more open-source than POSE2. Firstly because only open-source software will be used in its production (Blender, Linux, FFMPEG, Audacity, GIMP), secondly because I will release all the source files when I’m done, and finally because I am documenting my progress publicly. I haven’t touched Blender in more than half a year, so now I am coming back to continue on this project. I’m actually doing the animation now, and I’ve got a decent amount of material ready to work on the first two minutes of animation. (Which is a long time – actually). Those who lurk in the IRC channel #gisklm would have already seen some of these, but I’ve decided to post them up here just to make this post a bit more picture friendly. Here goes:

That is a picture of the second scene in the movie. It is the transport pod being launched. It is an early render, and there are many modifications to be made and even more work to be done to animate it.

I want to get involved and stay up to date – how’d I do this?

Right, my Twitter feed occasionally gives summaries on what I’m up to, and I also post my Git commits over there. However, there is still a lot of stuff that goes unheard of on Twitter, and most of these are test renders for ThoughtScore, simple questions on “hey, any suggestions for this?” or even general trash on what’s the latest joke that’s going around. To enjoy these, I’ve started up the #gisklm channel on the irc.freenode.net IRC server. For those wanting to check it out, download an IRC client such as XChat or HydraIRC (on windows), Colloquy (for mac), or XChat or irssi (for Linux). To join, first connect to the IRC freenode.net server (it’s different for each client, but find some way to connect to the freenode.net server – the command for it is `/server irc.freenode.net`) then join the #gisklm channel – type the command `/join #gisklm`. To change your nickname, try `/nick my_new_nick`. Note: alpha testers for the new POSE2 are required to be on the IRC, it’s a bit annoying to find you otherwise.

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…and another version with shameless and blatant advertising scrawled all over it:

More cool stuff and updates and small previews and other jazz to come.

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Ok. Here’s the thing. I want to compose something grand and epic for the ThoughtScore. This’ll become the official film music for it. It’ll be orchestral, grand, epic, awesome, *checks thesaurus (of sorts)*, great, fantastic, awe-inspiring, fabulous, superlative, magnificent, incredible, so on and so forth.

Here’s where you come in.

I want you to give me four notes. Four notes that you feel like. Notes like C, D, E, F. You’re allowed to give sharps and flats. And from those four notes, I shall create, little by little, (and update you on it), this film music. I shall record my piano brainstorming session for you to check out.

Leave your notes as a comment to this thread. I will choose one to start off with, then other suggestion I will likely use for other themes.

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