WEEK #3

I really want to work on an interaction between humans (society) and nature. I like the idea of seeing a flower as a metaphor of Nature, it's easy to understand.

But before sticking to any project ideas my main goal is to learn new tools and to understand the possibilities that I have.

1/ C4D : Melting Rose

I first wanted to learn some physics simulation in a 3D software. I wanted to make a flower rot but it looked a bit complicated so as for a first stage, I decided to make it melt/collapse from the bottom of the stem.

Then I also had to learn how to bake the animation to export it to other softwares.

2/ Touchdesigner : Interaction

Then I wanted to find a way to connect the animation speed/play to a data input, a sensor. As I don't have much sensor around me for the moment the easiest way was to take a mouse X position. Therefore, I used Touchdesigner to make this idea work.

I've first connected the image sequence rendered from my 3D animation to understand how things work. I first wanted to connect the mouse X position to the speed parameter of the animation but it didn't work, the video kept looping but slowly or fast or backward. It was a bit tricky to know that I had to connect the mouse position to the frame indexing. Also I had to map the range of the X position to my sequence frame number (91). I also wanted to make the center of the screen as the beginning of the animation. 

Once I understood that, I was ready to export a 3D animation file from C4D. Touchdesigner prefer Alembic files for 3D animations, so that's what I gave it. Then same process I've connected the mouse X position to the frame indexing. This time, I had to learn how to render in live a 3D object in Touchdesigner.    

Finally, I wanted to control my Arduino project of the Prototyping Process class through Touchdesigner instead of Processing. I looked for informations on the internet but I didn't find enough even though I now this is possible. I still tried something but I didn't succeed. Although I succeeded Touchdesigner to receive data from Arduino but not the opposite. My plan was to map the mouse X position to the angular rotation of a servo motor. I will postpone this idea.

The functions I used to try to get/send information to Arduino

Next week I would like to track the head position of the screen viewer to make it interact with the 3D camera of Touchdesigner in order to simulate a depth screen. Maybe I can try something simple with the webcam or I can try something with the Kinect. I would also love to know how to get data out of the Kinect.