Some arm interaction

At the Warehouse

Testing the interaction and deciding that the white color scheme worked better with Dane's arm piece

All done

The dome garden is complete - just the electronic aspects.
We have rigged up a temporary stand for the dome in the warehouse space.
I will post some pictures tomorrow.

It has been great working with Sabrina/Quin- I think papervision should employ her.

Background Video??

so after much debate- maybe we can use video for our background.
As we are running to a tight deadline, i.e has to be ready for curator of Taubmans Museum to see August 7 maybe it is our only option at this stage of the game.
It looks nice at full res.
cheers
s

New Everything

Everything is different tonight. The models are a new reduced poly count version, though the textures have been revamped to compensate for that. Simone has worked wonders with the modeling in spite of neither of us knowing the limitations of the work space when we started.

So, where do that leave us? In a lot better shape then last week, actually. By cutting the polygon count by more then half, we've gained a lot of speed. The Boids weigh in under 500 polys each, which is still pretty massive, but they are flying.

The background needs . . . something. The physical shape of the display leads me to think they are swimming, not flying. So, an aqua tinted fog would be ideal. Using Papervision's Fog Filter has proven more difficult then we had hopped. For some reason, it just 'dies'. No trace output, no readable error message. It just stalls, pegging the CPU at 100% and over 1 gig of ram used. Not good at all. I suspect it's because of the large polygon count, as most of the demos I've seen are pretty simple. Instead, we are going to have the image mirror the display. The next detail to be added is a tunnel that the boids are living in. Hopefully, the background will provide some depth to the display, and give some better visual ques to the viewer. The lighting illusion the textures give should help as well.

After that, all that's left is the motion tracking and the sound track. Thankfully, that code is what I spent last term working on, so there is a lot of copy/paste action to be done.

bots with eyes and skin

A render of a low poly count model (around 400 triangles) but the normals need to be fixed so that it is a bit smoother. Hopefully response time will be faster with this model -
cheers
s

Window into the dome

This is getting closer and closer to finished. On my computer, this is pretty jumpy, the Boids tend to jump from place to place. Right now, I'm working without the use of tweens, so hopefully adding those in will smooth out some of the jitters.

Through Friday, I had tried getting several different inheritance patterns working in Flash. I had intended the Main file to extend PaperBase, and import the Flock, the Camera, and the Sound classes that I was writing separately. While this may for for the Camera and Sound objects, it was not going well for the Flock. Making Flock inherit from Sprite worked fine as long as I was working with 2D sprites for the flock, but it doesn't work when using 3D Collada objects, as I expected. However, making Flock inherit from DisplayObject3D just wouldn't work. My guess is that it should, and if I had more time I might go through and try it again just to find what I screwed up, but for now, I moved EVERYTHING into the Main class. All the work I did Wednesday ~ Friday cleaning up the code made it easier, but I still feel that I wasted time cleaning it up.

Also added a timer that delays the start of the flash movie, currently it only delays it for 1 second, which you won't notice with the load time of both the movie and the objects. Later, though, this will allow the movie to auto calibrate it's camera to the display screen, meaning less chance of randomizing the Boid's goal point should the camera get knocked around. It will also give the piece a bit of time to load and set up the sound.

Next on the list, make the Boids swim further away if the mouse isn't moved. Currently I have their vertical distance bounded, as they have this bad tendency to either swim very far back or up 'through' the camera. While they have wings, I do not think they are that kind of Flying Fish.