PNM's Blog @ HSLU

Done! MMT Trailer is finally uploaded.

You can watch it on vimeo: http://vimeo.com/33773965.

Some scenes were quite demanding, for example:

- 3D CAD Model Animation
I first tried to export the model to blender – which didn’t work out as expected. So I decided to do all the animation in Solidworks 2011. Besides that solidworks sometimes just empties random files (the shape for the power suppply is gone for example), this worked out quite well.

- Import from Processing to Premiere Pro
Altough processing has a MovieMaker Class, I had to save the rendered frames as single png files and add them together in Premiere. It seems that the Processing MovieMaker was not able to find the necessary codecs (e.g. H264) and defaulted to very weird formats (invalid implementation of RLE, JPG streams which cannot be processed in either VLC, virtualdb, ffmpg, Premiere).

- Annotators
The nice annotators you see while the machine is being explained are made with processing. All the lines etc. had to be calculated by custom code (if someone is interested in the code, drop me a line and Ill send it to you. But the code is in quick’n'dirty style).

The following applet shows a spinning (and accelerating) dice in processing.

The rotation is done with
pushMatrix();
rotateX(..)
rotateY(..)
rotateZ(..)
popMatrix()

The texture is loaded as a picture [link to texture] and then mapped with vertices.

My Storyboard would be available online if I had a scanner (I’ll have access to one by monday).

Until I’m able to scan my storyboard, I’ll leave this summary online:

• 3 second Overview of the machine (with Text/Image about who built it..) (Picture 1)
• 2 second Overview of the mechanical system (highlighted elements taken out of the CAD-Model) (Picture 2)
• 2 second Overview of the electronical system (highlighted elements taken out of the CAD-Model) (Picture 3)
• 2s Tablet is being inserted into Machine (Picture 4)
• Normal Picture of the Camera (Fork, Knife) ca. 2.5s (Picture 5)
• Transition of the Picture to a edge-filtered Picture (ca. 2.5s) (Picture 6)
• Animation of the Hough algorithm (I’ll Display the Houghspace and the Picture simultaneously and let the algorithm run in about 5-6 seconds) (Picture 7)
• Display of the final Hough Space with election of the best point. (ca 3) (Picture
• Video from inside ca 3s (Picture 9)
• Video from outside ca. 2s (Picture 10)

[Link to Pictures]

The first few animations are based on the already existing CAD-Modells. The second part of the animations are done in Processing (I’ll reuse my existing implementation of the Houghalgorithm and extend it to be display-friendly). And the last part will be made of normal recordings.

After watching this video, a non-IT person should have a general idea about how computers recognize things. The reason why I’m doing this video is that I sometimes got asked about how our machine sees things – and it is kinda hard to explain

The idea for my multimedia production, which we have to do for the MMT module @ hslu, is to explain the function of our PREN machine, which we built last year.

This machine is able to detect a fork and a knife on a tablet and to grab and sort them.

My short trailer (30 sec) should

• Give a brief explanation of how the objects are recognized (of course simplified with a lot of graphics )
• Explain how the information about the location of the objects is used to control the motors and grab those objects
• show how the machine looks like in real life