Some of you might have seen the Animoitu liike -workshop I did in collaboration with Päivi Hintsanen and Live Herring in Jyväskylä public library (September 2009) http://www.liveherring.org/animoitu_liike/

This week I’m going to do part 2 of the workshop in Jyväskylä in collaboration with Loiskis. The Kinect sensor has greatly improved the project as I no longer need to use IR markers.

Here is a small demo. Running with a customized build of OSCeleton, Quartz Composer and Animata.

For demonstration purposes, I’m changing the character and the background by clapping my hands.

The drawings were made by students from the Keski-Palokka elementary school.

At the same time I fixed a major issue that had been there since I made the plugins. I’m using the VVOSC and VVBasics frameworks from http://code.google.com/p/vvopensource/ and I finally changed the class names to get rid of some errors when using the plugin with other software that uses the same frameworks.

Download from the Software page.

IMPORTANT!

Please remove all of my previous OSC plugins (AnimataOSC and MonsteriOSCSender) before installing this new plugin.

Kallio 26/8/2010

Image by Kirsi Tuura

We couldn’t do a rehearsal on Wednesday so I was a bit worried about how everything would go down on the first night. Everything had worked fine the week before in Tapiola, so I was still quite comfortable… At least I was until Mr. Murphy once again proved that you should really take his law seriously.

Problem #1

No signal to the projector with a long VGA cable, so I had to move all my gear to a different location in the last minute and setup everything again. That left me no time to properly test the motion tracking and everything else.

Problem #2

All of the dozens of WiFi networks on this particular street corner disturbed our wireless network we had set for sending data and pictures. This increased the delay between the tracking and animation to several seconds instead of the normal tenths of a second.  It took me a while to figure out that this was the problem and of course no ethernet cables anywhere. Fortunately, Severi – our technical producer – somehow got a hold of a cable and we finally got the tracking working quite smoothly in the end.

We still had a problem with the communication between my computer and Markku’s laptop, so we couldn’t really update the character as it was planned. Somehow, we still managed to limp through the night and the last hour was actually quite enjoyable.

Emmi Vainio and Kalle Kuisma shot some documentation video.

Giants of the Hoods, Kallio 26/8/10 from Giants of the Hoods on Vimeo.

Kontula 27/8/2010

Kontula worked out a lot better technically as we had ironed out all the problems in Kallio. The mood was also quite different as we had a lot of children coming to dance and also because of the commitment of the people that took part in the workshop some weeks ago. It was also the “Night of the Arts” in Helsinki that day and I think it was nice that we did this in the suburbs of East Helsinki and not downtown where everything else happened.

Giants event in Kontula from Giants of the Hoods on Vimeo.

Tapiola 28/8/2010

Technically, Tapiola worked the best, but there weren’t that many people around. The cold and windy weather was against us, but we still had fun and it was nice to see some people who had been there the week before also when we did some testing.

No video yet, but i will add it here once it’s online.

Next

We are doing two more shows this week. On Wednesday, we are at the Aalto University Opening after-party in Otaniemi and on Saturday we have the event at the Lasipalatsi square. For more details: http://www.giantsofthehoods.com/

Månsteri OSC Sender Plugin v. 1.3 changes:
- Fixed a bug in setting the IP Address. The IP should actually change now.

Animata OSC Plugin v. 1.3 changes:
- Fixed a bug in setting the IP Address. The IP should actually change now.

Download: http://mansteri.com/software/

There is a new version of the Animata OSC plugin available. I’ve had the Z-axis support working for a long time, but I’ve just been too lazy to upload it here. Also added the option to change the IP address and port numbers. Useful when you need to send OSC from QC to a different computer running Animata. You really shouldn’t touch the port, but decided to throw in the option to change it just in case.

Download the plugin here.

Download the example seen on the video.

Version 1.2 Changes
- Added the Z Position port for the Layer patch. That means you can now move layers in Z-axis too. (requires the latest version of Animata 004)
- Added the option to configure the IP address and port number. (Please test this one)

I also updated the VDMX plugins to have the Z Position option.

Please test this and let me know if you run into any problems.

So the first thing I had to do was to update my Quartz Composer Plugins to support Snow Leopard. There were some issues because QC 4.0 runs in 64bit and my plugins had only been compiled for 32bit. But now they should work. I still need to sort out a few issues (check your console for details), but everything seemed to be working fine when I did some tests. Let me know if you have any problems.

Download here: http://mansteri.com/software/

Original concept & background graphics: Päivi Hintsanen
Programming and interaction design: Matti Niinimäki
Full credits and other information (in Finnish)

Photo by: Sirja Moberg

The idea of the workshop/installation was that anyone could participate in the workshop by walking in, drawing their own character and then animating that character just by moving their own body.

This video shot by YLE for Keski-Suomen uutiset illustrates the process. (In Finnish)

The dances were streamed live to the internet. The first video (the last dance we did) has all of the characters on screen at the same time.

You can also browse all the videos over at the bambuser channel http://bambuser.com/channel/animoituliik. Unfortunately due to some technical problems, some of the dances were not recorded. Another issue is the sound. On some of the videos the sound is clipping very badly and on some of them there is no sound at all.

Almost 90 people came and drew their characters, 94 dances were recorded online and probably double that amount came just to see what was going on during the three days this project was running.

The movements of the participants were tracked by a custom built solution based on tBeta and Quartz Composer. The participants wore infrared “beacons” on their ankles and wrists that were being tracked by an infrared camera. The information was then sent over to Animata to animate the characters.

The infrared light can be seen weakly in normal photos as well:

Photo by: Sirja Moberg

Here are some photos from the workshop and behind the scenes. The first photos are from a little workshop that I taught covering the basics of Animata for some of our assistants.

A HUGE THANK YOU to Live Herring and all of the other people who made this possible.

• Animoitu liike website
• Review of the workshop at liikekieli.com (in Finnish)

Here is the basic outline:

Part 1: Basics of Animata
Introduction to creating real-time animations in Animata. How to use the interface. How to set up different characters and scenes from still images. Creating meshes, joints and skeletons. Simple animations inside Animata.

Part 2: External control of Animata with OSC
The real power of Animata is in the way that it can be controlled with external applications using OSC messages. Examples will be shown on how to use MIDI controllers, sound input and Arduino to control real-time animations. Software examples at least in Max/MSP and Quartz Composer. Examples on how to set up a scene for a live visualist gig.

Register for this and the other workshops at the AVIT-Kezmarok website. http://kezmarok.avit.info/

This is a modified rig of the Mr. Cool character I used for my Product Placement animation. I used Max/MSP when I did the animation, but QC is just much more fun.

Mouth and body movement controlled by the sound. Arms have a small LFO on them and you can trigger some other movements with the arrow keys.

Download the example files. Requires the Animata OSC plugin for QC. You also need a recent build of Animata from the svn. Compile it yourself or download this one that I compiled. Should work on intel machines running Leopard.

The first test. Just playing various samples and seeing how the communication works. Not very exciting, since I’m not using any images in Animata.

Click here to download the Quartz composition and the Animata file I used in the video above. The only special thing worth noting in the .qtz is that I’m normalizing the bands a little bit and scaling the values. Otherwise the 0-band would always peak out and the others wouldn’t really output anything useful. Requires the Animata OSC plugin for Quartz Composer.

I will probably post something more interesting tomorrow. The point with this test was more to do something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. That is to figure out exactly what is the frequency range of the different spectrum bands of the Audio Input patch.

My testing method was not the most accurate, but should be fine for this purpose. I just want to have a rough idea of what is going on. They way I measured this was by generating different frequencies with the Max/MSP cycle~ object and then seeing at what frequency the maximum value jumped from one band to the next one. Here are my results. The frequency is in Hz:

• Band 0: 0 – 580
• Band 1: 580 – 1000
• Band 2: 1000 – 1500
• Band 3: 1500 – 2000
• Band 4: 2000 – 3200
• Band 5: 3200 – 4800
• Band 6: 4800 – 6140
• Band 7: 6140 – 8230
• Band 8: 8230 – 10300
• Band 9: 10300 – 12380
• Band 10: 12380 – 15110
• Band 11: 15110 – 17880
• Band 12: 17880 – 20000

There was no point trying to measure Bands 13-15 since they go over 20kHz and my sound card can’t handle that. Actually, in normal use – normal use for me meaning music visualizations – there’s not much point using the bands above 8, since the amplitude at those frequencies is barely noticeable.

Let me know if you are doing something cool with Quartz Composer and Animata.