Rodney

Robert, Roger and I were discussing various topics and some of Walter Lantz's drawing and animation resources were shared and discussed. Here's one that we didn't discuss on creating characters that includes a storyboarding session. Several currrent day legends in the animation business such as Eric Goldberg claim that watching Walter Lantz's shows delving into the process of animation were early inspirations to them. What got me thinking in the direction of Walter Lantz was his book 'The Easy Way to Draw' which I had never heard of but have recently added to my library.

Change: Along with processing the different values of coins we add some error checking in this one.

Attempt at Scrabble: Note for the curious: A key element of the program is changing inputs to uppercase.

Guest speaker for the CS50 course in 2005... some guy named Mark: As is the case these days... not a lot of people in attendance in the class.

I seriously have issues... JUST DO THE ASSIGNMENT. Is that so hard? Me: I think I'll change the assignment to make a pyramid instead. Gah! J U S T... D O... T H E... A S S I G N M E N T !

Wow! Outstanding. That's a lot of characters. I hadn't realized just how many characters you've created.

In Week 0 the Harvard CS50 course demos programming using the learning tool called 'Scratch'. The first intro course I took in programming used 'Alice'. I liked Alice because it could load OBJ models and Animation:Master could output OBJ models! Scratch is more popular and used more often and its likely if you are younger than 30 you've been exposed to it if you had any computer related classes in school. In Week 1 the course move on to using the C language. This being quite useful as C++ derives much of its standard usage from C. And C++ is what drives programs like Animation:Master.

Here's your chance to master the art of programming and computer science. The course is starting today (officially) but has been ran continuously for the past few years. The course is self paced. Link: https://www.edx.org/learn/computer-science/harvard-university-cs50-s-introduction-to-computer-science Take the plunge. You know you want to. You know you need to.

My current take on this gap between bipartite grids and four color theory is that at the moment we join 'areas' (grid squares) we need to establish a new 'color'. According to the science we don't need more than 4 colors but we can have as many colors as we want. So... Underlying the whole gamut of shape and group assignments our algoritm can chug away at reducing to 4 colors. We then dictate in some fashion the shapes and extents of those areas and build upon and extrapolate from that. To the observant this might appear to place us at the intersection between raster and vector graphics. Attached is this 'nonbipartite' grid project: nonbipartite.prj

Here's an example of a non-bipartite grid, meaning that no two grid squares of the same color touch (even at the corners). If they could touch at the corners they could be termed 'bipartite'. In A:M we can work around this by having multiple groups of the same color. In effect, masking or hiding what is actually happening. In other words, presenting a grid that appears bipartite when in fact it is not. Something worth observing here might be that initial choice of what grid squares were white (given that underneath it all all the grid squares are black). In the first row our white group has started with the second patch. In the second row we shift and choose the patch to the left. We could have just as easily chose to shift right and add that to our group instead. There is something of significance in this choice as it sets the stage for what other grid squares can be selected and included in our group and what grid squares must be left out. But we must make a choice... so is one choice more correct than the other? Should we turn left or turn right? As with continuity it would at least intially appear that consistency is key. Our decision being made we must proceed and deal with the consequences.

If A:M were autogrouping I'm curious how it would color these areas of continuity. Especially as A:M's named groups can consist of areas also covered by other named groups. Four color theory would suggest we need a minimum of 4 colors to assign a unique color to every patch and have no two patches adjacent to each other be the same color. If the surface is a grid... we can get away with only 2 colors (ala checkerboard). But our models rarerly fit into a perfect grid. And discontinuity leads to many problems... In fact, I'd say it runs smack dab into the 4 color theory problem but in this particular case (that of grids (read: patches) thinking we can eternally steer clear of being represented with a less than 4 control points/colors. Added: Here we likely need to look into 'strongly colored grids' or 'king's grids' where no two grid squares of the same color can touch each other. If they do touch then that creates a cascading effect where other grid squares also must change color/grouping. In A:M we see this when we attempt to group patches and inadvertently have other patches join our group becuase they share those other area's control points

One of the (many) plusses of spline continuity is how we can use processes such as 'splitpatch' and autobeveling to increase or potentially decrease the density of our meshes. We do have to watch out for those extraordinary vertexes... er... patches. We don't control all the processes so we have to consider closely how those processes deal with discontinuity (whether preceived or actual).

This intermediary outline (ala lofting*) has a few advantages. One of those is how it avoids creating internal patches. *I rarely here the term 'lofting' anymore. Extrusion seems to have displaced the term almost entirely. I had to think hard just to remember the term and that old A:M plugin A:M Loft.

At this point we should note that there are other ways we can resolve this crisis of continuity. For instance rather than connect edges prior to extrusion into depth we might add a contour of our surface inbetween that surface and its other side. This middleman approach can be used if the surface has continuity at its corners or not but here I show it with the surface with corner continuity:

Moving too quickly to resolve our model to be all 4 point patches can lead to new issues of continuity: That might be fine... if we able and willing to track those cases of discontinuity. Perhaps, even leverage those outliers as opportunity.