#guess who solved my problem with vlc!

[somethingintheforest]

[beyondthetemples-ooc]

“Why” tags are going here because Tumblr’s a baby who can’t handle all these words at once. :P

Why:

#but i spent my whole life absolutely CONVINCED that wings belonged on my body. it just... tok me a good long while to figure out Why.

#Oh THAT'S why everyone's freaking out over that post.

#at first I was like ''Wow this is Srentha to the core!'' And then I read ''why this unreasonable answer at the sight

#honestly this is why i'm basically addicted to empty-mind meditation?

#??? why do people do these awful things to Good People though

#i don't know how or why and i don't remember ever having Learned about That Letter? but my mind automatically knew it was 'hath' somehow

#Of course that DOES beg the question of why a LORd of CHAOS doesn't... you know. CHANGE it? ??

#first of all: REM WHY ARE YOU COMING to OHIO of all places???

#okay but. randy how did they MEET what's the STORY why are they HATING on TEXAS

#or like. a Sarcastic Joke because cyborg was once like ''why aren't you miss mary sunshine''?

#''What are you DOING. You RUN. ALWAYS RUN.'' and i was like. ''why bother getting into adventures if you're gonna RUN though..''

#I don't know why but I always score better on Customer Service Questionaires when I choose responses like ''I'm sorry

#i've never seen that still before and I CAN;T FATHOM WHY because that is FANTASTIC!

#I don't know why but ''novice suddenly ends up with super incredibly powerful abilities'' is one of my FAVORITE TROPES!

#I have no idea how/why but these just gave me Massive Leyla and Srentha Feels.

#my usual turnaround time for Dreams to Real Life is about two weeks. not sure why but it happens to like 7 people in my immediate family

#Especially with the bells. I don't know why but bells always remind me of that place. ~<3

#Nobody intrinsically knows how to solve problems that hurt another person. That's why COMMUNICATION is so important!

#also: Good Post re: Why Danny is So Actually-Great

#why does everyone spell ''bear with me' like that?

#i know right? Why did I never think of that??

#why do i love this so much

#that's basically why Evanescence became my favorite band. it's not all romo-/sexually-centric

#i've always read it the same way and didn't notice Why Everyone Stopped Liking Her but that also brought that particular Change to light...

#groans eternally in Tumblr's direction. why even bother with all these updates.

#Oh THAT'S why Eda could do glyphs! /joke

#thaaaat's probably why Fancie Word Choice has always been a strength in my writing.... {lD;;;;;

#velvet and sheer... why have I never seen that combination before? It's GLORIOUS

#That's probably why he's so good at spontaneous Travelling too. Lots of practice when trying to find her... /owo

#This is why House and Senate votes count though! The President may have a lot of control over the military but a strong H+S

#I know MC Escher was a master of this (whatever This is) and that's why he's one of my favorite artists.

#okay but I'm intensely curious why he didn't have a plan to take HIMSELF out and thought he'd have to rely on THEM dsfndsgmfhdgj

#I wonder why he'd need to attack/defend while shifted? Can he also use such magic when he's not shifted?

#but I think that variety is why her every new album is so refreshingly Different.  Her singing ALONE improves so MUCH with every album!

#the only difference is that I imagined the fire came with smoke and that's why her gasp was so strangled and she grabbed her throa

#honestly this is why i'm basically addicted to empty-mind meditation?

#i'm cleaning my room and i misplaced it. badfnmkngjf;lk this is why i hate cleaning

#but scenes like this are why i love DC's latest gen of animated movies

#that Friends As Family theme was super important to why i love the 80's comics too..........

#this is why i read fanfic

#i think she feels slighted in some way but i can't pinpoint Exactly Why let alone HOW.

#and it's like.. Halfo f why lapis's characterization is so Shaky for me? Because the girl barely talks??? And she has like 7 Speech Modes

#^^^^ GUYS THIS WAS ALERINA. This is the environment Dove was raised in! This is why losing her mother tore her apart! ^^^^^

#This is so so SO important and delves deeply into why language is so important for learners and general humanity alike. ~<333

#that's why my tag for Old People Stories isn't specific to any generation. it's just Shitty Adults Being Shitty

#I write primarily about OCs and I know that's why my readership is so low. I write stories for a Dead Fandom that has declined sharply.

#you know? so that's why my Affirmations Tag is like 60% Steven UniversE Content at this point. 8F It's Helping Me Learn!

#It's a CIRCADIAN THING not an INSOMNIA THING. I don't know why my doctors don't believe it's NOT the same as INSOMNIA

#oh is THAT why my love language is ''all of them''?

#and i hardcore headcanon ry ouwearing glasses when he gets older. so why not?

#i Suck at the aCTUAL DRAWING art but i'm i na bit of a fallow period with the org and personal life. so why not?

#i'm already planning an aviary for the doves. so why not? (they'd be Very Separate from teh raven though. for obvious reasons)

#let's add to the Emotional Whiplash of Today pile. sure! why not!!

#but i got the dvd and i have vlc so why not use them i guess? i already had it in the drive for the extras and this way there's .....

#She can hop dimensions so why on Earth-- ALL the Earths-- hasn't she Been Relevant to ANY multi-timeline crisis yet???

#yes of fucking COURSE Dove and the rest are in Team Transition too!! Why on Earth-- on ANY earth! wouldn't I transition them too?!

#so why on earth did danny chase get shafted so hard?????

#about WHY or if she's GONNA be OKAY or HOW or--

#So gentle and soft and concerned and really quite quiet and subtle... which might be why others didn't pick up on the Love Vibe

#but the last one I reblogged didn't have that specified! 8O i don't know why one of my special interests is Unusual Instruments

#why WOULDN'T you snog a snitch if it could bring your dead loved ones back though? Why on Earth WOULDN'T you???

#but it's about ''they're very different. but they're friends!'' It just never talks about why or how that's important.

#(i think that's her full name for some reason but i don't know why or when i heard/saw it. somebody please correct me if i'm wrong!)

#I must be an Asker. I've never understood why people are so convinced they Can't Say No if someone asks?

#i also think PTSD makes you react to fear Differently from Pure Adrenaline Responses... but i can't unravel Why right now

#And also at the time I couldn't fathom why someone would think she was autistic. because i didn't know myself

#god this foreshadowing was just. so sincere and heart-rending and when this episode came out I *DID* wonder why she'd say that...

#I'm STILL trying to figure out why Srentha thought Dove was confessing that she has heartworm. (i know she Does Not in fact

#at first I was like ''Wow this is Srentha to the core!'' And then I read ''why this unreasonable answer at the sight

#i can't figure out why though

#If my Harmony Core theory is correct: it would explain why they're playing their music So Hard.

#the fact that my first reaction was ''why though'' is..... concerning?

#raven's like How? Why The HELL. and dove doesn't have a good answer besides ''it felt like i needed it.''

#fun fact: i misread this as ''zatana zatara / MICHIGAN '' and i was like... ''why the fUCK--''

#i don't know why there's all this fanart of

#and also sugar skulls are delightful but you should really know what they MEAN and REPRESENT and WHY they're sweet and flamboyant

#if someone is passionate; angry; or distressed over a topic: She doesn't always understand WHY until they EXPLAIN it. If they do at all.)

#oh hey why was THAT line never a meme

#this is why we need

#but that doesn't make it any less FRUSTRATING because I've been wORKING THROUGH the pptsd and why won't it STOP?

#(because that's why we have to pay for everything from movies to individual channels now. let's be real)

#i've never understood why winter and fall were the only ~fashionable~ seasons for wearing black.

#I mean to be FAIR some of the government DID mobilize and that's why we got the Stimulus Bill.

#But DC... this bullshit is why we can't have nice things

#and as soon as I looked it up: y first thought was ''Oh is that why we call them Abner?'' My second was ''Is that what *I* am?''

#also if you're as powerful as zee it probably comes second-nature so why WOULDN'T you throw it around to stop an argument?

#okay but if SPINEL doesn't know then how/why would BLUE know

#what? no i didn't just stare at this for a solid two minutes and read it over five times. no.. why would I do that?

#that's because it's not ''cool'' to hate on it so why would it be ''cool'' to like it ironically?

#why WOULDN'T you snog a snitch if it could bring your dead loved ones back though? Why on Earth WOULDN'T you???

#but it's not like a ragey angry thing. it's like........ war of attrition? why yes i think i WILL sign the 47th petition for the same thing

#over and over again and rewound and replayed until i got the whole spell written down. why YES I'm a little hyperfixated! why do you ask!!!

[danlowe-blog]

Righteous Hacks

A big part of being a technical animator is finding solutions to problems. Sometimes those solutions require out of the box thinking and as part of that, occasionally I’ll stumble across a solution that’s so out of the box, so utterly ridiculous, that regardless of how viable it actually is long-term, I feel compelled to try it, just to see if it works.

Recently, I came up with possibly the most ridiculous hack solution I’ve ever devised, and it’s crazy enough that I thought people might get a kick out of it.

Just to be clear, the following method is incredibly impractical for an actual game production and I’ll never actually use it anywhere. This was just something I did on my own time one evening, partly for fun, and partly to satisfy my curiosity.

The Problem

For a while now, I’ve been thinking about different ways of recording animation out of game engines and back into a DCC application like Maya or Motionbuilder.

There are lots of reasons why you might want to do something like this: At GDC 2017, Naughty Dog showed how sometimes their companion climbing is simply one of their developers playing as Drake, doing the necessary climbing moves and recording the motion. They then play back the whole recorded sequence on the companion character. This saves them a lot of code work, writing complex pathing for every different climbing scenario.

Another use might be to create rough block outs of in-game cinematic sequences, which you can then work over the top of in the DCC (almost like capturing rough mocap).

Or say you have a physics driven movement system in your game: You ideally want the root motion in your animations to match the in-game physics motion; so if you can record that physics motion from the engine, you could get a perfect match in the DCC.

The Ideal Solution

So ideally the best way to do this would be to dig into the engine/game code and write a process that gets the bone transforms for your character, and writes those transforms to some kind of animation file format that the DCC can read.

But hey, maybe you don’t have access to the engine code, or maybe you don’t know the language that the engine code is written in and need to find a programmer to dig into that. Maybe you don’t have a friendly neighborhood programmer who can help you.

So while I’m thinking about all this, I start to come up with some off the wall ways to solve the problem without any programmer support at all.

The Hackiest of Solutions

If I don’t have access to the code, what do I have access to? Maybe I can’t save bone transforms directly, but I can track bone transforms in the engine’s debug window. What if I could use this info somehow?

So I start by running around in the game while tracking the root bone translation in the debug window, which I then capture using standard video capture software like OBS.

I then use VLC to separate the video out into individual frames, which I process into an easier to read format using a Photoshop Action/Droplet.

I then run optical character recognition (OCR), on the frame files to convert the values in the images, into text. There are tons of different programs that do this, but I went with www.onlineocr.net which gives pretty good results and can batch process images by uploading them in a zip archive.

So now I have a bunch of text files, with coordinates in them (plus a bunch of other garbage that the OCR spat out).

I then clean-up the OCR output in a Motionbuilder Python script, giving me translation coordinates in a list, which I can then plot onto an object in the scene in Motionbuilder.

Et voila! Motion from the engine, into the DCC!

So again, I’ll never actually use this in any game production. It’s an insane solution to what should be a simple problem, at least to anyone with the right access. I mostly did this because the idea got stuck in my brain somewhere and I had to see if it would work.

I guess if there’s any semblance of a lesson to be learnt from this, it’s that it’s kinda fun to experiment and try out-of-the-box solutions to problems. I may never use this method ever again, but I learnt a whole bunch about OCR that I didn’t know before, and maybe somewhere down the line, something I learnt here will help to inspire some other solution that’s actually viable.

- DL