Fish Modelling (Part 2)

24th December, 2008

Here is a preview of just the fish body with no fins or eyes. The first image shows the already tubular shaped box before I modified the side view, and the second afterwards.

The fish body in three dimensions:

Modelling Fishies

23rd December, 2008

So for my first Programming project I’ve decided to model a fish with moving fins as opposed to the ‘flying thing’ suggestion. But in order to do that I’ll need to make a DirectX fish model…

Here to help are my own goldfish, who it turns out are annoyingly camera-shy.

A good reference and tutorial for making a fish from scratch.

New Laptop RAM

21st December, 2008

Yes, I genuinely thought 1GB was a little bit on the insufficient side these days, so added another chip to bring my laptop up to its maximum capacity. Running my usual set of programs almost always brings memory usage over the GB mark.

This is also one of many photos I’ve forgotten about uploading over the past few weeks because I’ve been busy, so expect a couple more to appear!

Read the rest of this entry »

Scripting Finished

19th December, 2008

So as of Friday the scripting module will be over, done and finished. This is also the first ‘traditional’ hand-in I’ve had in a very long while, so I note now that the uni sends an email the very minute you hand your work in as a receipt.

Screenshot of the Piece

Biofeedback Graphing

16th December, 2008

Using an existing product, the Journey to Wild Divine biofeedback reading device, I have started to experiment to see what sort of responses I should expect from listening to music.

Here is the data compared against the actual waveform of Dire Straits’ Where Do You Think You’re Going?:

Finishing Scripting and Update

11th December, 2008

I haven’t posted in a few days because I have been busy rounding off the rough edges to my scripting coursework, most of which was completed a long while ago. I have solved a couple of the persistent issues, one of which was a depth problem where randomly half-way through a gallery the depths of the images after the one being displayed would reverse their order (a pretty unsightly effect).

Following this I’ve withdrawn some light reading for my dissertation… and of course I need to concentrate on dealing with C++ and DirectX.

Gallery Menu Image

Custom Flash Player Menus

7th December, 2008

I’ve posted a little tutorial here on making custom Flash context (right click) menus because when I learnt to do it (a long while back now though) there was very little out there describing how.

• First of all you need a function to take the menu action. It can do absolutely nothing, but it does need to exist for the menu item to work. For the example here though it will link to a website:
  function menuClick() {
getURL("http://www.srjm.co.uk", _blank);
}
• Next, declare the menu variable, it’s good practice (and incredibly helpful) to do it this way because then whenever you add to the menu you get the Code Hints.
  var menu:ContextMenu = new ContextMenu();
• Finally, hide the existing menu (unless you wish to keep the play/rewind and other options) and add your own options instead, and apply it to the root context menu:
  menu.hideBuiltInItems();
var menuItem1:ContextMenuItem = new ContextMenuItem("http://www.srjm.co.uk/", menuClick);
var menuItem2:ContextMenuItem = new ContextMenuItem("SRJM Design", menuClick, true, false);
menu.customItems.push(menuItem1);
menu.customItems.push(menuItem2);
_root.menu = menu;
  The second ContextMenuItem has additional parameters to give it a horizontal line above and also make it unclickable.

Creating a Visualisation in Visual Studio 2008 (Part 2)

6th December, 2008

Ultimately the point of researching how to create a Media Player visualisation was to be able to include DirectX capability.

After a lot of searching I found information on the subject (http://www.tech-archive.net/Archive/Development/microsoft.public.win32.programmer.directx.graphics/2004-11/0316.html) saying that the Summer 2003 DirectX SDK features a demo being implemented in a Media Player visualisation.

The Summer 2003 SDK: The Summer 2003 DirectX SDK