It’s based on the Start Here robot from LetsMakeRobots.com which I thought would be a reasonable project for broadening my knowledge on electronics, expanding my repertoire of microprocessors – this one using Picaxe – and getting a bit puzzled by the usage of BASIC programming language in modern technology.

Getting it going wasn’t really a big challenge with the fairly thorough walkthrough on letsmakerobots but I learned heaps and feel confident that next project will be more of a push

Without further ado, here’s the beast. First autonomous dude with several to follow. This guy’s a simpleton but manages through slow and safe progress.

As I happen to be quite a big fan of animatronics, animation, building things and programming I’ve been playing around with a couple of Robotis Dynamixel actuators during the last month to see what they can and cannot do, and have now managed to set up my base for something that I see a bit of potential in.

Feeling so very comfortable in my favourite (and most hated) animation software Maya, my initial setup is by hooking up the actuators directly to Maya through a python-based server and a USB2Dynamixel which works as a close-to realtime connection allowing me to pose/animate/playback from Maya and seeing the result on the actuators while doing so, pretty neat hey?

The learning curve has been rather steep getting into bits and bytes when communicating with the hardware but I’m starting to get a hang of it now and my interest in the field is growing exponentially.

Video shows a preanimated motion that’s being played back from Maya on the laptop in the background.

The motion is currently being written as a goal angle at about 25fps with a static speed so my next big job is to get rid of as much jitter as possible by analysing the motion a bit tho I do have a hunch that the resolution is too small.

It started around my initial entry into the animation industry as a modelor, by frustration towards Mayas modeling toolset.
I had plenty of ideas for how to speed up my workflow with different tools but I couldn’t find the available online so I had to do my own, leading to my introduction to MEL.

After finishing the initial couple of tools I released them to the public under the name JWToolbox which by public demand later got turned into Open Maya Toolbox, meaning a community-based and maintained opensource toolbox for everything Maya. This caught the attention of Alias (Who owned Maya at that point) who featured the toolbox on their developers corner, however the community sadly died out when I no longer had the time to organize everything and couldn’t find a replacement, returning OMToolbox to a compilation of opensource Maya tools maintained by me… and I haven’t done a very good job at that lately with priorities not really pulling in that direction any longer. I’ll still update it occasionally tho, when I see fit.

Open Maya Toolbox @ Creative Crash

A bunch of my longstudies being the by-product of 5 months at The Drawing Academy in Viborg, Denmark back in 2006.

Good times!

PAIE is a script I initially wrote for Radar Film on an animated feature called Berry and the Disco Worms and having grown tired of doing the same type of tools over and over again for different companies each time I got hired some place new, I decided to take a small cut in my pay to be able to release it opensource afterwards.. here it is

It’s a rather basic tool that allows you to export attribute values from a desired selection, save to a file and then load again to same or different selection afterwards.
It can export animation as well as poses, export from multiple namespaces at once and a bunch of other things.

Tool can be found on CreativeCrash – PAIE

I’ll prolly update it eventually and I reckon I might just update this post about it instead of cluttering up with more posts about same thing, but I’m not sure yet.

Cheers

As hinted in the title, this will be nothing in the direction of Animation or at least nothing that I myself will consider in regards to my professional life as an animator.
All of that stuff can be found on my website: http://www.jakob.welner.dk

This page however, is dedicated to everything else that I do and want to share. Mostly programming and tech stuff I reckon but I have yet to decide exactly what shows up here.

Word…
- Jakob