arghC

Once up a time, this was arghC Consulting, but I have retired so it's not that anymore.

My many hobby sites

The Chinese Knotting Home Page
Knotty Notions - a decorative knotting blog
A Gathering of Knot Tyers - where to find other knot tyers
The Disorganized Crafter
The Kumihimo Home Page
Mistress of My Domain - a blog about web tech
skate.org: Information for the figure skating fan

The rest of this page describes my grad school computer graphics activities.

Disclaimer

My accounts have been moving around quite a bit and everything is backed up on tape, so my files are not as they should be. Consequently, a lot of what should be here I'm going to send you to other people's web pages to find.

Facial Animation

My Masters thesis work at the University of Calgary was on facial animation with hierarchical splines and simulated muscles. Hierarchical B-Splines are the work of David Forsey, who was a professor at UBC in the Imager Lab.

A few of the animations I used to illustrate this work are available as a series of SGI RGB files. When I get the disk space and the time I will convert them into mpegs.

Joseph Provine extended my system to do some speech animation.

Publications

"Langwidere: A New Facial Animation System" In Proceedings of Computer Animation 1994, pages 59-68, Geneva, Switzerland, May 25-28, 1994.

Langwidere: A Hierarchical Spline Based Facial Animation System with Simulated Muscles Master's thesis, University of Calgary, October 1993.

"We Want a Rock!" In Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Western Computer Graphics Symposium, pages 38-40, Silver Star Mountain, Vernon, BC, March 28-30, 1993.

"Talking Heads: Developing Pull" In Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Western Computer Graphics Symposium, pages 114-119, Silver Star Mountain, Vernon, BC, March 28-30, 1993.

"Current Trends in Facial Animation, or Langwidere: Not Just Another Witch." In Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Western Computer Graphics Symposium, pages 103-108, Sunshine Village, Banff, AB, April 6-8 1992.

"Automating Facial Gestures and Synthesized Speech in Human Character Animation." In Proceedings of the Third Annual Western Computer Graphics Symposium, pages 39-40, Silver Star Resort, Vernon, BC, April 8-10 1991.

Rocks

One of my other obsessions are rocks, crystals, and minerals. I've cobbled together a small program to test some personal theories on crystal growth/formation and then used Rayshade to generate a few pictures. These are some of the ones I was most pleased with:

This was one of my first attempts, and is not actually supposed to be anything in particular.
This was my test object to see how much of a difference the index of refraction made. Whether there would be an actual visible difference between halite (salt) and ice (there is, cool, eh? 8).
Increasing the number of iterations on my program produced a more complicated object, and since making it transparent would have taken forever to raytrace, I went for galena 8).
While cubes and octahedra are fun, there are many more shapes to explore. An easy one was spheres and the first mineral that sprung to mind was hematite (ok, so it's reflection index is too high, sue me! 8)
A picture that I've been working on, off and on since I started undergrad. If you've read the fine book After Long Silence (also known as The Enigma Score) by Sherri S. Tepper (and if you haven't go do it now!! 8), you might recognize the image. It is still far from done (trees really should not throw shadows on the sky 8), but I'll keep ya posted. 8)