MESHBOARD: the easiest way to save, search and share content.
Together with David Duckworth and Moritz Daan I’ve been building a prototype for a new content management service lately: MESHBOARD
MESHBOARD will be the one place where you store, share and search links and content that you come across on the web or mobile. You want to keep track of content and perhaps share it with friends and colleagues but you don’t always want to broadcast that into the entire world. MESHBOARD takes care of this by providing you a swift tool to save, privately share and browse content as quick as possible.
The current prototype (or MVP in startup jargon) is implemented as a chrome extension which sits in your chrome toolbar and lets you super easily save the page you’re browsing, ping it to friends via email and consume the content you save and links your friends share with you by a quick glance at your mesh board, wherever you are!
To quit copy/pasting links into emails or loose track of content in endless timelines or feeds head over to the chrome webstore https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/meshboard/lhmehnaaophebpiainbfappomanogafg
to give it a whirl and let us know what you think, it’s free!
Cheers
Jo
buur (noun) ♦ neighbour
A once strongly social concept that has become virtually extinct in todays cities and digital world.
Although for centuries neighbours have been like families to each other.
Do you know who else lives in your building, street or hood?
Most likely there’s likeminded people around you could connect and share experiences with.
After all you picked the same area to live in!
Buur wants to bring social back to local.
Check out www.buur.me for more info and leave us your details if interested 🙂
Presenting at SIGGRAPH Vancouver
I’m very excited to announce that I will be presenting at SIGGRAPH 2014 in Vancouver: s2014.siggraph.org/attendees/talks/sessions/creature-feature
My talk: Comanches vs. Cavalry: Artistically Directable In-Crowd Ragdoll Simulation
For the comanches vs. cavalry sequence in Disney′s “The Lone Ranger”, MPC was tasked with complex horse and rider simulations. To achieve this, MPC had to extend its proprietary crowd system, ALICE, to allow for highly artistically directable ragdoll simulations blended with motion captured and animated clips.
Talk abstract found here http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2614164
Guardians Of The Galaxy’s Space Battle!
It’s out in theatres and you should definitely go and see it because it is pretty awesome!!! 🙂
I worked on this project for about a year at MPC mainly on the final space battle leading our amazing London crowd simulation team.
There will be an MPC talk at SIGGRAPH this year covering some of our work, if you are around definitely come and say hi! s2014.siggraph.org/attendees/talks/sessions/got-crowds The talk abstract can be seen here: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2614127
We’ve built a lot of new tech on top of our in-house MPC crowd system ALICE to allow those thousands of spaceships in the final battle to whizz around through space and combat each other. One of them was a bridge between Softimage’s ICE framework and ALICE. The motivation behind this was to utilise the performance, flexibility and speed of development that framework provided for the behavioural point simulations whilst still having MPC’s sophisticated motion engine behind it for intricate clip blending.
The flight system built in ICE was modular allowing our artists to either highly art-direct their simulations or let more autonomous behaviours simulate battle without much intervention. The flight core would at all time ensure correct flight manoeuvres and enforce the specific per-ship characteristics.
Based on that simulation data and extra trajectory analysis our ALICE motion engine would then ensure blending of the proper ship motions either procedurally or as predefined by animators. Our sims also contained tons of extra data describing the battling (explosions, firing, damage percentages, etc) for down the line departments to pick up.
Big kudos to Ciaran Moloney and Alan Stanzione who participated in developing all this with me and off course the rest of the crowd team for delivering some amazing work using it!
Plus on that note I’d like to say: farewell Softimage, you’ve been a great companion, I hope there will be a worthy replacement for your ICE framework soon!
Cheers
Jo
Piccit
Hi,
little plug: last weekend I joined seedhack 4.0 at Google Campus London. With the topic on content-remixing I created a little chrome extension together with @dDuckworth_ and @elmargasimov to facilitate finding and dropping images into your browser! Give it a go – it’s actually a lot of fun communicating with images..
Chrome users, get it here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/piccit/ppjhikpgniabjoohdifiegpkacafidob
We had a pretty good weekend (thanks @felixmeissner) and took home the price for best use of image apis – thanks getty images!
Cheers
Jo
The Lone Ranger talk at BFX
If you happen to attend Bournemouth’s exciting new Visual Effects and Animation Festival: BFX, then be sure to join in Thursday morning at 10.00 for MPC’s talk on Disney’s The Lone Ranger’s Cavalry vs Comanche sequence 🙂
For this sequence I was leading the crowd team that completed some complex horse and rider simulations for scenes where stampeding Comanche’s are getting mowed down by gatling guns. In the talk I will explore how we extended our proprietary crowd system ALICE to allow for artistically directable ragdoll rigid-body physics mixed with motion captured and hand animated clips. See you there!
Crowd work on World War Z
Been a long while since I did a post… but here’s a little update with something I have extensively worked on at The Moving Picture Company in London: World War Z.
I was involved early on as a senior member of the MPC Crowd Team led by Marco Carboni that brought the zombie crowd shots of the Israel sequence to life. We started of doing a lot of crowd motion/look development and had to considerably push our proprietary ALICE crowd technology to achieve the more complex crowd shots that had dense masses of zombies swarming, climbing walls, crawling over eachother and physically interacting with eachother. It has been an exiting (sometimes exhausting;) ride prototyping and implementing new behaviours, systems and ragdoll simulations to achieve some interesting crowd work seen on the big screen 🙂 !
Here’s a fairly high-level look into some of the work we’ve done:
More info can be found in following articles:
http://www.fxguide.com/featured/zombie-warfare-world-war-z
http://www.awn.com/articles/visual-effects/the-zombification-of-world-war-z
http://www.moving-picture.com/showreels/making-of/the-making-of-world-war-z
Jo
Unifying Social Media Networks: iBark
Hi there!
Over the last few months as a side project I have been playing around with a social media networks minded side project: iBark! Together with my friend @jelledeweerdt we created an android app that unifies your Facebook – Twitter – LinkedIn and lets you Share, Get and Send comments, All In One Place!
If you own an android device and this sounds like a tool for you make sure to head to the Google Play Store and give it a go! Any feedback would be very very welcome… feel free to comment here or drop a mail to team@ibark.it.
Thanks!
Jo
Legend of the Guardians – The Owls of Ga’Hoole
Hi!
Quick shout to announce that a movie I worked on in Sydney over the past one and a half years has made its way into the theaters!
If you fancy some Zack Snyder 3D adventure with stunning visuals – be sure to go and check it out! I was involved in crowd simulation and animation td’ing 🙂
Enjoy!
Jo
Jo Plaete 