This new wearable motion capture system is so compact, it can even be used to capture movement in otherwise impossible environments like behind the wheel of a car!
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0yT8mwg9nc 350 292]
The most interesting part? The authors claim to have built their prototype from off-the-shelf components for only around $3K. Read the paper here.
This plug-in collection adds a series of tools to AC3D that allow you to manage object pivots more effectively. With this plug-in set, you can: Set an object pivot to the highlighted vertex, zero the object pivot, rotate around the pivot instead of the centroid (numerically), or manually enter a pivot location. These functions are very helpful for setting up your model for animation or import into games.
Download the plugin. (Requires Windows XP, AC3D 6.2 or above.)
A friend at work just showed me this, and boy is it cool. “Seam Carving” is a new algorithm for image retargeting. Image retargeting is an alternative to scaling and cropping, but it is content-aware. Scaled images suffer from the problem that the re-sized content may be too small to see. Cropped images may eliminate important content. Image retargeting solves both problems by keeping the image elements the same size and simply eliminating the “unimportant” parts of the image.
Graphic artists occasionally modify images this way by hand when doing page layouts for magazines–think of it like a visual form of copy-fitting–but an automated approach opens a world of possibilities. The number of of potential practical applications are immense, and include everything from dynamic web page re-flowing to widescreen-to-standard aspect texture fitting for games.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIFCV2spKtg 350 292]
A better version of the video as well as the research paper can be found on Dr. Shamir’s home page. What’s really neat is how straight-forward the method seems to be. The paper is well worth the read if you are interested in graphics algorithms.
If you’d like to play around with this technique on your own images, someone’s already implemented the algorithm in Flash.