Nao

I know it's a little off topic in terms of assignments but I thought these robots were so cool and this video displays the new upgrades in such a cool way, so I just had to blog about it.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWbZWiC7p3I

Also, this is the Robocup I was talking about in my presentation. The official goal: "By mid-21st century, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players shall win the soccer game, complying with the official rule of the FIFA, against the winner of the most recent World Cup."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y2Cf9nRqOw

Recursion

Again, this is very old I know, I've been trying to catch up on the old stuff before I post more but its proving to be more challenging than I thought.

I called this aquarium  and used recursion in the code, however it was very difficult for me. Recursion and I are rarely a graceful combination, so I spent quite some time trying to create something completely different that never ended up working so I gave up. I called this aquarium because of the fish that I created and made them grow on the bottom with pens down to create an ocean of lines. 

In terms of image manipulation...

I started with some of the coding tools we had talked about in class earlier. I changed all the patch shapes to people, set a background rbg image, and spread the little people randomly around the world. When the program runs, the people fade in and re-organize to form a picture of the North Carolina state flag!

Overall I was pleased with how this turned out, I had a lot of fun trying out different images but ultimately chose this one because I liked the idea of doing a flag and love my home state.

VMRL

Ok I haven't posted in a long time, so here are all the projects I've worked on thus far and forgot to blog about..

This is an image of the vrml file that I created using netLogo 3D program as shown below.

I wanted to make something printable, small and intricate. I might have added a few too many details. This sphere is made up of many spheres connected together in different lines moving in circles. The printed object turned out much better than I expected, however it remained a potential waste of the schools supplies.
I had a very hard time using the vrml extension, and have found it the most difficult one we have learned.

"A Snow Globe" by Jean

This is my computer generated version of a snowglobe! Yes, it is a cube and there is no Santa Claus in the middle, but use your imagination. Growing up I loved snowglobes and thought it looked really cool as genart, so this is my first attempt!
The ground and clouds were a little tricky to create and once I added a wind slider they kept moving. So with the help of my classmates I created some new turtle breads and now the user has complete control of the wind and the number of snowflakes, which was another challenge. The computer got bogged down fairly quickly even when the snowflakes stamped themselves and died at the end. So I started with 100 turtles but quickly scaled back to as little as 2 or 3. In this picture, there are about 10, but it slows down after a few seconds of runtime.
Overall I am pleased with how it turned out!

How stuff works ILM response:

I was interested to learn that all of these simulations were so difficult. I always thought at the higher level once all kinds of breakthroughs were made, one could sort of ride on it. For example once someone figured out an incredibly realistic way to simulate the ocean, everyone else could sort of copy and paste that code and tailor it to their movie. Obviously, ILM is not running around copying other programmers code so this article gave me a renewed appreciation for the film process.

"Too Many Turtles!!"

I was inspired by how much we have talked about turtles in our class recently, programming and otherwise. There is a wind slider that was tricky to get down and still has some kinks. I also attempted to include some spring links between the turtle turtles but it never ended well. I personally like how all the little turtles have green feet and heads and contrast with the red shells. Making things a little more Christmasy ;)