Programming

I am a programmer by training, so it would be strange not to share some of the work I've done in the business of making some ones and zeros move other ones and zeros around.  Here you'll find some technical demos of rigging tools I have designed, several of the tools I've written as part of The VIS project at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center, samples of work I've done at Cornell, and even some small games I've written on my own time.

Animation Studio - Spring 2006

Trigger UI Tool and Rigging Demo

In my search for new rigging techniques, I found the Generi rig which came with a tool to create "trigger" objects - objects that, when clicked, trigger a sequence of other events to take place, such as select a different object, hide scene elements, etc. I dissected the code and rewrote it, customizing it for the rig we were designing for an in-house animation project and making it much simpler for beginning MEL scripters to understand and modify. I also created a new interface for animators to create custom triggers. The rig demo which follows is a collaboration between me, Javier Burgos, Shaun Budhram, and Maggie Caswell-Mackey and features custom rig features such as stretchable IK.

  • Download MEL script and UI (coming soon)
  • Download tutorial (coming soon)
  • View UI and rig demo (.wmv, 4.53 MB)
    A very sped-up demo that illustrates the basic concepts behind the trigger tool as well as various rig features. The demo is meant to come with a narration, which will be added shortly.

The Vis tools - Fall 2005

Automatic Rigging Tool

One of my projects at the VIS team was to write a MEL script to facilitate rigging real-time models for the Building Virtual Worlds class. This script creates half a skeleton, allowing the animator to position it inside their model, then mirrors it and offers to create IK and helper geometry with driven keys controlling attributes such as finger motion and spine rotation.

Crowd Simulation Tool

As an independent research project, I wrote a simple crowd simulation script in MEL.  The script asks for the number of agents (model instances), a model or skeleton rig, a set of trax clip animations to play for each agent, and some advanced parameters such as a goal to follow, animation offset, and flocking variables.  It then creates a crowd of duplicated models and uses some simple AI to have them run around.

Personal Projects and Games
Kitanul's Tetris

Some time ago I discovered the Wild Tangent game engine, and this was my exercise in mastering its Java interface. You're going to have to install the WildTangent Web Driver to play. Supports standard Tetris or a two-player competitive mode.
Flowing Pipes Puzzle

A quick JavaScript game where you arrange for the primary colors to flow through the correct pipes in order to mix the desired color.

  • Play (best viewed in IE)
Scramble Solver

If you ever need help cheating on your scramble puzzles, here's the tool to do it! Take a puzzle, recreate it using the Scramble Solver (there's no fancy vision algorithm here - you have to enter the puzzle by hand), and type the word you want to find. Works in all directions, including diagonals.

  • Play (best viewed in IE)
Music Synthesizer

For an independent research project under the guidance of Prof. Graeme Bailey, my friend Aaron and I began developing an engine which composes music based on stochastic probability arrays. While not amazing, the resulting algorithmic compositions are surprisingly not bad.