hidden gems among the rugby

yes, that rugby -- the contact cement that's the reputed mood-enhancer of choice for the non-jet-set who're into recreational pharmaceuticals.

not that the inhalation was exactly by choice, mind. our pantry's vinyl wood-plank-look tiles suffered from, shall we say, a failure to bond with the concrete flooring due to some, ahem, septic seepage, in turn due to old, easily clogged pipes (or so we were told). fancy that -- refurbished building, old pipes...

the liquid event was barely a week into our occupancy of this floor -- and immediately after the tiles were laid in the first place. well, today, a week or so later, some brilliant type decided that now would be a good time to re-acquaint the tiles with the floor -- so in treads a worker and dutifully introduces the rubber cement into the tile/floor equation... ...in a room with completely recirculated air courtesy of the air conditioning.

anyway, can't say whether the side-effect to the contact cement's solvent has taken hold of the others -- all i have is yet another headache.

speaking of headaches, now may be a good time to give a code name to the mocap software, so there'll be a simpler reference to it. i dub thee 'reyna'. close enough to the real name -- and a terrible pun to boot. (",)

mocap, as i've encountered it, is about markers. these markers are placed in, well, places on the body of the mocap model. various technologies exist to take the markers' position in 2-D space (the multiple camera ccds) and turn it into movement in 3-D space -- and it gets saved into a file for me (and any other hapless mocap cleanup person) to load and analyze and so on and so forth.

now, by themselves, the markers are for all intents and purposes tracking their individual destinies in some virtual space within the mocap software. playing the file, you can just barely make out the humanoid arrangement of the marker constellations. here's where connecting markers -- much like plotting constellations in the sky -- makes divining movement easier.

last week, i had managed to make a little program in reynascript that fairly automated this constellation process. it was, though, quite straightforward and brute force.

where do the gems in rugby come in?

well, solvent-laced air notwithstanding, i cut some code from the un-commented, un-documented pre-built reynascripts and folded it into a more elegant thing that did the same thing as before -- with the exception that i didn't have to manually include the group marker names in the script itself.

now i'm wondering if there's a way to catch errors. turns out that the improved constellation script just ups and dies when (predictably) some predefined marker names are modified or lost.

still, a good thing.

hmm. maybe there is more to this rugby bit...

...i'll never know.