Getting ready for London

I am preparing for the London studio visits by making new business cards and a new website, at www.sarahjcgillespie.com.

Dynamic Fishing…

Sounds like the best extreme sport ever, but sadly in real life only involves Maya, more particularly MEL.  This is a shoal simulation of fish that I will be using as a base for my simulations in the Going Live project.  I instanced Sean’s swim cycle and have used MEL to:

– Randomise the start point of the swim cycle.

– Randomise the scale of individual fish.

– Connect the speed of the swim cycle to the velocity of the fish, so that the cycle speeds up if the fish are travelling faster.

A Long Expected Blog Post

So it’s been a while since my last blog post. The reasons for this are twofold – literally, two other modules, both of which have elements that I’m not allowed to talk about on here for various reasons, which include (but are not limited to) the potential violation of ethics agreeements and – at worst – a lawsuit.

So after a few weeks of feeling a bit like an MI6 agent, except armed with Powerpoint, Maya and a dictaphone, I have finally amassed enough stuff that I’m actually allowed to talk about to form a new blog post.

1. I have been leading the Going Live project, a simulation of a real-world project in conjunction with The Mill.  In addition to the chairing of various meetings, I have been (partly) modelling and sculpting our central character, a Right Whale.  Here he (she?) is:

My next steps will involve the dynamic simulation of some fish.

2. I also presented in a Mock Symposium for the Reflection on Practice module, for which I focused specifically on cross-disciplinary collaboration.  Here’s a selection of slides from that:

 

We also had to submit a complementary essay last week, hence the lack of physical output of late.

3. As for my personal project, I am happy to report that Angus was happy with the new animatic, aside from two minor scientific mistakes:

– What I referred to as “p19” in the animatic is actually “p14,” p19 being the mouse equivalent of the protein.

– The protein actually folds as it is being produced, rather than afterwards as I have shown it.

So I have now begun the modelling process. I am currently working on the nuclear envelope and pores, which look like this at the moment:

I am also looking into ways to re-topologise the mMaya meshes, as they are proving prohibitively heavy and triangulated.

Think that’s all for now.