Epilogue

Well, my work at Prologue is done for now. Four long months! It was fun and I met some cool people (you know who you are). The main project I worked on was a significant animation for a major motion picture release. Can't say more than that but it was a ool and very "different" project. I'll say more when I'm legally able.

Now I'm back to science animations for the next couple months. Preparing for my lecture at Harvard Medical School. Yeah, that's right I said Harvard Medical School punk! Should be fun. I'm also writing a Houdini tutorial for HDRI 3D magazine and I have a number of other projects going on.

Ruadhan Valentine Keller-McLeer is the name of my newborn nephew. Congratulations Travis and Annie. Travis says the first song the child ever heard was "Brand New Cadillac" as performed by The Clash. What a way to enter the world! Too bad all aural experiences following The Clash can only be a dissapointment, that's life kid!

BTW...I used to sing that song in my high school wannabe garage band. Yeah, i can't really pull off J. Strummer.

Working on some personl artwork these days. What the hell is Psychoscropy anyways?

singed eyebrows

Hey, someone found this video on youtube from teh first Gnomon Live event back in 2006. This shows the enetertainment of the evning - RobotChrist. you can see me standing in the background in a few shots towards the end. I'm next to Sofia. We met in Kevin Llewellyn's liffe drawing class. I bump into here now and again at Gnomon events...but that's not important. Look! Fire-breathing robots!!! This si one of the few live shows I've seen that made me fear for my life. My eyebrows did get a little crispy...

Atom of Fear

This sentence was in a spam email sent to me by one of those African "Spanish Prisoner" scam emails: "I will not fail to bring to your notice that this transaction is hitch-free and that you should not entertain any atom of fear as all required arrangements have been made for the transfer."

I find it very poetic. The author sees fear as not just biochemical, not molecular, but atomic. I reckon its negatively charged?

Brazil...

working late. Whilst the renders slowly chug away I managed to create a more successful Python script. The script now allows you to enter the path of the pdb file on your HD. It displays the first line that starts with "ATOM". You then enter the X, Y, and Z coordinates as shown in the display of this line. There is simple error detection to make sure what you entered is in the line displayed. Based on your entry the script determines where the X, Y, and Z coordinates appear in each line of the PDB file that starts with "ATOM" and then copies these to a new file. So you end up with just the X, Y, and Z, coordinates of the PDB file in a format which will be easily converted to Houdini's .geo format. the whole point of the script is a way to easily opne PDBs in Houdini. they will appear as a point cloud with each point representing the position of an atom in the molecular structure.

next steps: add proper .geo headers and calculate the numebr of lines in the file. After I've accomplihed this and verified that the file will open up correctly in Houdini, I'll then make a GUI.

long term goal is to add an attribute in the file so that Houdini knows which atom is what in the PDB. then I'd like to have the file contain prioperly scaled sphere primitives and the whole bit so that the you can open up a basic molecular structure in Houdini, all set to mess with. This may take a while as i've got a million things going on. However its fun to tinker with whilst rendering.

...where the Amazon flows, we'll be saying "hello", and "fancy meeting you here!"

Images from last weeks show

Here are some photos from last weeks show at Mendenhall Sobieski:

Sean Cheetham:



Suzanne Long:



Kevin Llewellyn:







not sure about the one on the far right:



'night!

Ha!

Ok, I figured out something in Python, very excited. i just spent the last few days overthinking this problem (ain't it always the case). I was trying to convert strings into list and then list elements into tuples and all kind of crazy stuff. All I need to do was some simple string indexing and splicing.

My immediate problem is this: I have a string which is the first line of a PDB file (dna to be exact). I want to display this line and then have the user enter the x xoordinates form the line. The script then says "the (user supplied x coord) is in (the index for the coordinate) and it is (however many caharcters) long. The the script goes to the next line at the same position and retrieves the xcoordinate which is presumably in the same position. Evetually I'll do the same for the Y and Z and then have the script go through each line of the file and copy each coordinate to a new file. Eventually I'll add the proper formatting and headers for the .geo format. pretty cool!

Here's my ugly newbie code (excuse blogger's line wrapping):

pdbline1 = "ATOM 5 05* C A 1 18.935 34.195 25.617 1.00 (etc.)"
pdbline2 = "ATOM 6 C5* C A 1 19.130 33.921 24.219 1.00 (etc.)"
pdbline3 = "ATOM 7 C4* C A 1 19.961 32.668 24.100 1.00 (etc.)"

print "line 1: ",pdbline1
print "line 2: ",pdbline2
print "line 3: ",pdbline3

xcoord = raw_input("\nEnter the X coordinate from the first line of the PDB: ")

if xccord in pdbline1:
   xpos = int(pdbline1.index(xcoord))
   xcoordlength = len(xcoord)
   xvaluelength = xpos+xcoordlenght
   print xcoord, " is in position ", xpos, "it is ",xcoordlength, " characters long."
   print "\nthe x coord of the second line is", pdbline2[xpos:xvaluelength]
   print "\nthe x coord of the third line is", pdbline3[xpos:xvaluelength]

Pretty simple stuff, not bullet proof but its a start! hey i'm proud of myself. I probably don't need to convert xpos to an int, but this is just a test.

I also starting playing with twitter today. note the twitter badge on the side of my blog --->>>

Figure show

This weekend went to see a group show at Mendenhall Sobieakion Saturday night. Kevin Llewellyn had some paintings showing. William Stout , Phil Hale, Sean Cheetham, and many other had some really great work on display. I went with Zoe and we met up with Chris Sanchez. A fun show for all although the hostesses seemd strangely clothed for a show involving Kevin.

This week is all about rendering at Prologue. mighty fun.

I'm working on a Python script that can convert a PDB file to Houdini's .geo format. All it really needs to do is go through the PDB, line by line, and copy the X Y Z point coordinates for each atom to a text file. The tricky part is PDBs are not very strict in their formatting so the X Y Z coords can shif from file to file. Right now I'm learning Python so I'm still struggling with just getting a script which will copy the right part of a line to a file.

anywho...One of these days I'll have a new picture to post.

My book added to highend

www.highend3d.com/bookstore/maya/Maya-Visual-Effects-The-Innovator-s-Guide-179.html