123D Catch - 3D Fun from AutoDesk

123D Catch is an AutoDesk product. It's free for your iOS device and there is a web version for your laptop available at http://www.123dapp.com/catch . There is also a PC version that you can download from the same site.

According to the iTunes description ...  

Use your camera to capture the people, places and things around you as amazingly realistic 3D experiences. Capture friends, sculptures, buildings or anything else you can photograph. Automatically transform them into interactive 3D models that can be shared with friends, family, and an ever growing community of 3D photographers.

• Turn your photos into realistic 3D models by taking a series of photographs from different angles.
• Be guided through the process of capturing all angles of your subject with the Integrated Photo Compass.
• Capture 3D portraits of your friends, museum displays, architecture, plants, cats or anything else you can photograph.
• Share your captures with friends through Twitter, Facebook, Email and SMS.
• Showcase your work and follow other amazing 3D photographers from around the world through the in-app gallery.
• Store your captured objects in the cloud to access them from all your devices.
• Use the 123D Catch web app for healing and 3D printing your captures in a web browser! (123d.autodesk.com/catch)
• Export 3D models in a variety of formats from the 123D online community for use in other 3D tools and projects.
• Works on your iPad/iPhone & iPod Touch.

I can recall using this app on my iPhone about 12 months ago and being underwhelmed. It was not easy to use and you always seemed to end up with models that were just too buggy for much other than showing that you could capture a 3D image. Since late last year the app has had a major refit and it now has a slick interface and is really easy to use. 

In the classroom next to mine the ever creative media studies teacher has been working with year 8 students on stop motion video and they have all these cute little models - including a Sylvanian families house. It looks like this ..

So, I tried to use 123D Catch to get a 3D image of it ... it looks like this at first cut.

So what? I hear you say. Well, unless you have an ulterior motive, then all you've done is use some disk space up, even if it is in the cloud. But, I just do happen to have an ulterior motive. In fact, a couple of them.

Ulterior motive 1: 

123D Catch lets you download your image in a number of formats.

So, I can take the .stl file into our 3D printing software and print out some replacement parts when the doors get broken.

Ulterior motive 2:

Some of my year 10 students are messing around with 3D modelling, animation and gaming using AutoDesk's Maya and Unity's Unity3D. I am too. Its all new to me, and I'm no a graphic artist. My game is about minions (and zombies) and I need a home base for my minions. So, I can take the mesh file of the Sylvanian house that 123D Catch gives me and take it into Maya, where I can make it the required minion colour.

From there I can output as an .fbx file for use in Unity and ...

... I have my minion base just on the outskirts of town! ( and my own minion on the edge of the path ... but that's another story).

A Smorgasbord of Ideas for the Classroom from EduTECH 2014

As well as the keynotes, there are sessions at conferences where you just need to balance them by finding some solutions that just might work in the classroom to make some of the big picture stuff glue together.

Think of them as the "but what will I do Monday period 1?" answers.

So this post just takes some ideas from a few of the sessions I attended and mentions them as places to go, apps to try or ideas worth exploring.

1. Microsoft OneNote Setup Tool for Teachers - now that OneNote has versions for PC, Mac, Surface, iPad, Android then this app has to be considered for some of the content creation, sharing, collaboration and feedback options. Now, I have to admit that if all Microsoft's products, OneNote is the one that I really think is pretty cool. It's more functional on a PC than a Mac or an iPad, but it still has some cool features on most platforms.

I stumbled upon a session that showed how this add on for OneNote in the Office 365  'store' allows you to construct complete workbooks for yourself, your course and your students and then deploy them automatically through OneDrive. The tool let's you customise the workbooks for students and then by default you can see all of theirs in your version, but they only see their own and any content that you have pushed out. It's new and it looks really cool. Can't wait I see if it works as they showed. 

2. Much talk around the power of programming or coding and it's place, or at least, it's lack of place in current school curricula. It is suggested that every student should know how to code to some degree. Those proposing this state that it is part of the natural flow to digital literacy, that students should know how to control the device and the network for their own creativity, rather than solely rely on using someone else's apps. So there were great examples in Gary Stager's session that showed the awesome art that comes from applying simple mathematic concepts using programming languages such as Scratch and presumably whatever the current version of StarLogo is. The stuff Gary showed was certainly cool. He was big on Turtle Art 

3. The Maker Faire concept. Again, promoted by Gary Stager, but his push on this came from his own passion that kids learn by making stuff. Of course, Gary was a student of the great Seymour Papert and Seymour of course was a firm believer that mathematics education in particular is need of a major overhaul. Gary talked about the recent Maker Faire in San Francisco which was attended by 150,000 people. 

He showed 'awesome Sylvia' and wow - be prepared to be blown away by this now 12 year old girl who was only 8 when she started her website. There are all sorts of ideas here.

You get a sense of how wonderful kids are when you see this from them ... this video from super awesome Sylvia was posted in 2010 ... as Stager says "this is what 8 looks like".

Now, just in passing, I wonder to myself at the use of language, technology, art, mathematics, science that is being shown here... lots of rhetorical questions spring to mind!

4. 3D printing. Build something useful. For the first time we can actually do this. Get kids to explore this. As Gary pointed out, often these 3D printers are tucked away from the 'main stream' classes where they are only seen by the 'dumb' kids in tech classes. (Ian McCrae from Orion Health says exactly the same thing!)
Gary referred to his book "Invent to Learn" and he also has a couple of new books due soon on 3D printing and featuring Super Awesome Sylvia!

5. Augmented Reality. Not too much going on here, but did attend a session by someone using Aurasma with school wide events. Worth exploring more as both teaching resource and letting students have voice. Can be used easily with QR codes if you are in to those or with any kind of trigger.  The guy I saw had used in conjunction with a 3D manipulation tool called Augment. Again, worth exploring. I've used Aurasma before and it's time I revisited it.

6. Chris Betcher is someone I first met at a show in Auckland several years ago. He's an enthusiast and always has good ideas. He ran through a potpourri of simple ideas, often iPad apps to do with image manipulation and photography. But he tried things and he has several ideas worth following. I particularly liked his repurposing of a politician's speech using Audacity and GarageBand. Chris is currently half way through an ambitious project of creating something new every day for a year. Check out his site at mydailycreate.com. His concept with this is that he might just uncover a few things that can be deployed in his classrooms as creative stuff for kids. I'll leave it to his blog to tell you about the apps and ideas that he has already done so far this year.

And as Chris says - "create is a daily activity'.

That's about it as a roundup from the "practical, doing" stuff. 

Motion Capture and Animation with Year 10 Students

Over recent weeks some of my students have been exploring the realms of motion capture and animation - the sort of stuff that makes some of the special effects in Avatar so cool. If you are not too sure what motion capture (or MoCap) is - then this might try and explain it a little.

And while the clip above talks about the facial capture - we haven't worried about that aspect. We have focussed on the animation of the character. As another example of the type of animation that MoCap "captures", this is another short view

We are fortunate to have a good working relationship with the Auckland University of Technology and the department of Digital Design. John Piper, the Head of Digital Design has been a guiding hand for us in our quest to provide our students with a real life application of advanced animation techniques. AUT have the only MoCap studio outside of WETA Workshops in Wellington, and so our students have been very lucky to get access.

So - what is their project all about?

Everyone knows the wild success of Pixar and Dreamworks animated movies. From Toy Story to Cars to Madagascar to TinTin. What we are attempting is to bring the "very" short story concept to animation. Our students have no experience with animation software, but by exploring concepts in short animated stories they have worked in pairs to create a 30 - 60 second animated story.

As a lofty goal we set our sights on this type of thing ... Pixar's Knick Knack ..

After spending time understanding that there is a story board behind the movie - with everything from character development to conflict to theme - students set about creating their own story lines and characters. During the process they also had to create original art work to be the background prop for their animated story and the audio to accompany the story.

At the moment we are at the stage where the background images, audio has been created. The motion capture has been done and the students are now trying to get to grips with the animation process.

This series of short videos shows the start of the journey from motion capture to animation. We'll follow this one as it develops. 

The Story Line: Stickman

Basically "Stickman" is so thin that when he goes to the closet to get a T-shirt to put on - it falls straight to the floor. He gets the idea to put on weight - and the second part sees him start pushing weights to try and bulk up. That doesn't work, so he gets a bike pump, inserts the tube into his mouth and starts inflating himself with air - to the point he explodes.

Here's the motion capture.

Now - you'll notice the "grey dots" on the suit. These are the "dots" that the cameras (on the stands in the background) are focussed on capturing the motion of. There are dots on the cap, the arms, body, hands, legs and feet. Once this motion file is captured, it then needs to be applied to a 3D model. To do this we have been using MotionBuilder. Here are a couple of versions of the process and what the final MotionBuilder output looks like.

The above file is the motion file with the "dots" - try running the 2 videos above at the same time to see how it works.

The video below is a version of the mapping of the dots captured to a standard 3D model.

The next phase will see the students apply this model and it's motion to their context - and I'll document those stages over the next couple of weeks as they get to grips with either Blender or Maya as they continue on their animation journey.

Awesome 3D Visualisation Tools

I had the pleasure today to spend a few hours with Brenda Fisk at nextspace looking at the new version 6 of Right Hemisphere's 3D visualisation software. In particular we looked in detail at the free DeepView Viewer product and the very impressive Deep Exploration Creator product. In particular, both were their new version 6 offerings. To be fair, I had spent a little time with the previous version, 5.7, but v6 is just awesome. Version 6 offers HDR (high dynamic range imaging) which offers unbelievable photographic realism, especially where lighting is a bit of an issue. I'll cover the Crreator product in more detail once I download the new version and can produce some HDR samples.

But the free DeepView Viewer also offers incredible functionality - on a wide range of image formats. I like the fact that it reads Sketchup files as we use this with many of our students. But what it can do with these files is just amazing. You can measure distances and angles, you can cross section, produce orthographic projections, line drawings and a whole hjost more. You can "pull apart" a 3D image created anywhere and label vaious parts - you can also comment on parts of the diagram and share these comments with others. There is another cool function - it embeds into MS Office products so that you can use the 3D viewer for any model that you have included in a Word, PowerPoint or Excel file - very, very cool.

The following images are from a standard house file grabbed from the Google 3D warehouse and opened within DeepView.

You can "pull apart" the model and look at how it was assembled in the first place.

You've got options to measure parts of the image.

DeepView is certainly a fantastic bit of code, very easy to use and affords some very cool functionality for students and teachers - in fact anyone wanting to visualise in 3D.

Seriously cool. Try it. Soon.