Variations

Variations is a film that was developed in the context of experimentation and discovery. It can be described in many ways to be a film that was born out of process. In the same way that many artists may refer to a piece of art as process, the aesthetic development of Variations was linked to the methods in which the work was created and was progressively revealed

Hydrodynamical and radiative modeling of temporal H{\alpha} emission V/R variations caused by a discontinuous mass transfer in binaries

H{\alpha} emission V/R variations caused by a discontinous mass transfer in interacting binaries with a rapidly rotating accreting star are modelled qualititatively for the first time. The program ZEUS-MP was used for a non-linear 3-D hydrodynamical modeling of a development of a blob of gaseous material injected into an orbit around a star. It resulted in the formation of an elongated disk with a slow prograde revolution. The LTE radiative transfer program SHELLSPEC was used to calculate the H{\alpha} profiles originating in the disk for several phases of its revolution. The profiles have the form of a double emission and exhibit V/R and radial velocity variations. However, these variations should be a temporal phenomenon since imposing a viscosity in given model would lead to a circularization of the disk and fading-out of given variations.Comment: accepted for a publication in Astronomical Journa

Moving portraiture

"My finished work of art will take the form of a looped animation, created from a series of several hundred paintings. The piece is the video animation, not the paintings. The animation is comprised of several looped actions that are cut up and recombined to create new actions and movements that may not resemble the elements from which they were taken. My goal is to combine traditional portraiture with multimedia technology to create a hybrid work of art that is still understood as a portrait."--Abstract from author supplied metadata

Considerations for believable emotional facial expression animation

Facial expressions can be used to communicate emotional states through the use of universal signifiers within key regions of the face. Psychology research has identified what these signifiers are and how different combinations and variations can be interpreted. Research into expressions has informed animation practice, but as yet very little is known about the movement within and between emotional expressions. A better understanding of sequence, timing, and duration could better inform the production of believable animation. This paper introduces the idea of expression choreography, and how tests of observer perception might enhance our understanding of moving emotional expressions

Transformation invariance in hand shape recognition

In hand shape recognition, transformation invariance is key for successful recognition. We propose a system that is invariant to small scale, translation and shape variations. This is achieved by using a-priori knowledge to create a transformation subspace for each hand shape. Transformation subspaces are created by performing principal component analysis (PCA) on images produced using computer animation. A method to increase the efficiency of the system is outlined. This is achieved using a technique of grouping subspaces based on their origin and then organising them into a hierarchical decision tree. We compare the accuracy of this technique with that of the tangent distance technique and display the result