iPhone recovery

Well, after just getting an iPhone off eBay I've found it's got an error 1015, which means it was jailbroken! I've found a nice little tutorial here which might work.

Yep, it worked. But no sim. Ended up jailbreaking version 3.1.2 with blackrain but the new sim card doesn't work. I found this which looks promising. This has got a good list of all the firmwares that are available.

So, at the moment I have iOS 3.1.2 which is jailbroken with blackrain. The trouble is that it doesn't like the sim card. This might have something to do with the baseband. This is the firmware for the modem. I found this page giving a brief description. I have baseband 06.15.00. This person has baseband 05.14.02 and his is locked to AT&T but he has iOS 4.2.1. I can only assume that this baseband does not like the modem (is not compatible). I would like to take it back to what it normally is.

In the end I would like a factory iphone and then go from there. I've found this which explains how to downgrade the baseband to something normal. This can be unlocked so it's not completely pointless.

I shall start by simply letting iTunes update the phone normally. It's probably going to go wrong but we'll see. Yep, doesn't like it, as soon as it reboots it goes straight back to the DFU.

I re-did it to version 3.1.3 and it says that the sim is not valid for this phone. It basically means that the phone is not "unlocked". I have two choices, one is unlock it officially, the other is to unlock it unofficially. It looks like o2 charge £15! But I recon that is worth it. But I need to find out which carrier it is locked to?

Well, after finding an old o2 card lying around the house (a bit of a fluke), looks like something different is happening. It now says "Waiting for Actiation" "This may take some time".

Just found an informative website which says that if you are not the original owner then it is difficult (maybe impossible) to get it unlocked!

Just found this post which says how you can get around the recovery loop in 4.2.1 version. - Didn't work!

So, I've just restored successfully to 4.1.0! Works beautifully. And now to unlock it. But first to jailbreak! So I've found this post. Bloody complicated but it's working at the moment. After this the plan is to install the unlocking software which is called ultrasnow.

Yep, worked a dream! Next was this post. A little long also, but worked also. Must note that it did come up with this error when installing ultrasnow. But seems fine.

Error
http://apt.saurik.com
netdv:open nodename nor servname provided, or not known


I did notice that it disconnected from the wireless and this might have prompted the error messages. Anyway, it now says "t-mobile" and I've just rang the home phone!! Yay!!!!!

3D Eye Depth Map and Gradient Maps

Now we have a laser cutter I was intrigued to see what sort of 3D objects it could make. The way in which is works is when it is in 'Raster' mode, it works like a dot matrix printer, creating more and more sparse spots the lighter the area is. So the blacker an area, the more dense the dots and the further into the material the laser should go. I think they'll be a slight rough texture to it though.

My idea was to just have sections of the face imprinted into acrylic or some such transparent material. My main focus was on the eye section of a face. I thought of taking the already made 3D me but after many trials it wasn't good enough. Here's some pictures

Sooo, I got a picture of Anaïs' eye and made in mudbox (it's good practive anyway) and here's the result:

I was quite pleased with this, but perhaps I should say how I got the depth map. So, Mudmox doesn't do Depth Maps. I exported from Mudbox as an OBJ and imported into Maya. I had to create another sphere for the eye. I got a new camera and pointed it at the eye. It was quite hard working out how to do a depth pass, but I found it here. Particularly Emil3d - 03-26-2007, 03:31 PM.

So, go to the render properties, check the "Z-Depth" option, and also make sure it saves it as IFF format. Do a batch render and somewhere you'll find an .IFF file. Open this in FCheck and it'll list the channels that were rendered. Check the z-depth one (or something similar) and you'll see the Depth Map. Save this as a TIFF.

I then put this into Photoshop and re-adjusted to get the whites - white and the blacks - black. But I also thought that the lasercutter could only cut 8mm at a time, so I'd need to separate the picture into segments for each cut. I did this by having another curves layer and creating a straight line from bottom to top, for just 1/4 of the graph, 4 times. Images look like this:

 

 

So 8mm X 4 = 32mm = 3.2cm. I think this is about right for the depth of Anaïs' eye?

Another problem would be the 'dithering' that it need to do. To achieve different depths it doesn't vary the power of the laser, just the amount of dots. So this might make it look pretty weird. But it's something we'll need to trial and error.

Whilst looking into the gradients, I found 'Gradient Mask'. It looks at the gradients in the image, and applies whatever gradient over the top of it. Works nicely with depth maps. An example is a multiple black and white gradient based on this depth map. It could be used to make stuff look like terrain maps:

I also overlaid it to keep the depth.

I also thought about adding texture for the eye, but thought it'd look good with skin as well. So I took the original photo of Anaïs and overlaid it.

Confucius

Well, having seen the film, I thought I'd quite like to know of his 'teachings'. Can't find the book at the library though. Here's a good start:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p00547k8/In_Our_Time_Confucius

I'm 11 minutes in and it's quite interesting. I shall add to this post later.

one gear engines

Quite a while ago (over 10 years) I heard of a formula 1 car with only 1 gear, which changed its ratio without needing another gear. I've heard nothing since yet I think it revolutionary. I would like to develop the idea.

Doh! Just read up on it. It's called Continuously Variable Transmission - CVT. Conceptualised in the 1440's by Leonardo da Vinci!!! Used in the 1930's. Drawbacks are that they transmit power through friction and so cannot handle infinite torque.

On the wiki page there is also a link to a page which has newer information about a D-Drive which doesn't use friction but uses gears utilising planetary epicycle. Here's a youtube video about it, and the webpage I found about it - http://fuel-efficient-vehicles.org/energy-news/?p=960

It seems to work very well.  A small drawback is the fact you need to have another engine rotating two shafts to control which ratio you want. Very, very interesting concept, although I think I would like a system where you pull a lever and it changes the ratio (using my own power).

There is room here for a new invention!! Although it'd have to be clever!!

Yay! Just found out about it here. Apparently in 1993 Williams F1 team developed it and made the test car seconds faster in a lap. But it was banned by the FIA. Have to use between 4 and 7 gears!

Another interesting youtube video is a guy who's made a planetary gear system (or cyclic) from technics lego stuff - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuGGbAbd_Ts&feature=PlayList&p=789804284EA4BB9C&index=32&playnext=2

personal website design

A thought occurred to me about my own personal website design. I thought I could have everything I've made tiled in the background of the website. When you click on any of it, it would enlarge and play (if it was a video) with information about that piece. A lot like Johns website, but with the stuff in the background and with videos playing in the background.

I could even convert the videos to flash, but only small versions, and have them playing in a loop in the background, bringing the page to life. This could also be styled with CSS I think.

Flash animation workshop

So I have volunteered to do an animation workshop in Flash on the 14th of June, so students can animate some still work to add to their portfolio of work and help them pass the grade.

To freshen up my knowledge, I shall undertake a personal project which will incorporate most animation techniques they will use in Flash. The best way is to undertake a project which will interest me, add to my portfolio.

Ideas:

• Animated storyboard for an animation i.e:
• Trees everywhere
• Chesterfield college burning down/exploding
• Towerblocks covered in plants
• Totally new animation?
• Johns website
• My portfolio website

The trouble with the first three ideas is that they require time to storyboard. I could schedule this into the project though.

The trouble with Johns website is that he has not decided to go with the flash one and also it does not have adequate animation in it.

The trouble with "My portfolio website" is that it requires interactivity which I will not be focussing on in the lessons and which require a large amount of time to learn.

I am tempted to go with one of my original animations and schedule in the story-boarding to the project. These animations need it anyway. The students might also need to make storyboards, definitely a synopsis. perfect.

The schedule:

• Finish synopsis to perfection - 1 day
• storyboard including rough timing and explanations - 1 days
• breakdown of what needs to be made and how - 1 day
• making the separate models - 3 days
• Put together and animate - 3 days
• add music and titles - 1 day
• finish - 1 day

All this in 11 days. I plan to finish early to allow for unforeseen things or bad planning!! That should leave 6 days of relaxation :-) But I could always refine it.

Camera Tracking with Voodoo and Blender

Well, it's a little bit of a minefield camera tracking using free software as you'd expect. Heres what I've been able to find out in a few hours:

To start with you will need a video file which you want to camera track. I used a simple camera and recorded video on it.

Next you need to convert this to an image sequence (not the most straight forward things to do suprisingly). After 20 mins of looking I found VirtualDub does this and many more video conversions (worth looking at). Also, you can get blender to do it for you by putting a camera with the video in the background and rendering out the sequence (handy).

Now you can get round to using Voodoo. Open the sequence and click on ¨Track¨ down in the bottom right (took me a while to find this the first time! Should be a menu item for it). This takes a while but eventually you'll have a nice bunch of points.

You need to export this as a python script for Blender.

To get this into Blender, you need to open up the text editor, open the .py script that was saved, then click File> Run Python Script (easy!!)

Now you have the camera animated and 3D points corrisponding to points in the real world.

I managed to find the Blender side of things from this web address: http://fictionality.co.uk/doku.php?id=tutorials:matchmoving

I might add to this when I find out more. But I'm still in the testing stages.

3d tree generation

I want to create realistic trees and bushes for a project to visualise Chesterfield covered in trees. I want to use free programs and came across Gen3 - http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:Py/Scripts/Manual/Wizards/Gen3 - http://blendernewbies.blogspot.com/2009/07/gen3-tree-script-url-updated.html for blender and Arbaro http://arbaro.sourceforge.net/

Looks like it is easy to create shrubs and young trees but a little harder to create mature trees. There is some mature trees which look impressive though. Both these programs are based on the findings in the document Jason Weber & Joseph Penn: "Creation and Rendering of Realistic Trees" -PDF - Creation and Rendering of Realistic Trees which gives information on tree generation and some presets for trees. Might be helpful.

Fluid web interface

Navigation is floating ontop of fluid, looking from above it. The fluid combines with other fluid containers which might hold the page contents or something.