Tuesday, September 25, 2012

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News: Mathematics, Rendering, Art, Drawing, Painting, Visual, Generalizing, Music, Analyzing

What's going on lately?


The second SIGI conference was postponed
- not enough commitment from the circle.

But I am working on making the conference more interesting when it happens:

I've been into a Mathematical research mode lately, I started it as "Incremental Arithmetic" in an unpublished paper (shared with one person only) in 2011, some insights from 2010-2011 were around that theme. More explicitly on this - when I have beautiful results and demos. :)

Other AGI research/observation/preparations and Neuroscience-my-theory-of-intelligence-matching - it's in parallel with the above.

Drawing, sequential art, visual art/processing, image processing/visual effects/filmmaking software

I've always been a "visual" person (besides all other "persons" living in me), drawing runs in the blood of my family. Drawing/painting - rendering - is useful for focusing on the details of rendering and vision, and it goes from the smallest scale of a pixel to the largest scale of scenes, viewer's position, scene composition, lightning, characters, the world where the illustrated action happens, the story of it, etc. etc... The whole spectrum of generalizing sensorimotor hierarchies. It's cool.

I'm refreshing and upgrading my skills into a more systematic way and I'm aiming to polish my talent. One of the useful reasons is in order to render my graphical/movie stories better... :) The VFX/filmmaking software's one of the many purposes is to improve and speed up the process.

Thanks to http://www.youtube.com/user/thevirtualinstructor for one of his lessons and suggestions,
practiced in these drawings.  

Vector transformations

In another "unpublished paper" from a few months ago, which would turn into a digest one day eventually (it's a "published email discussion), I explained and shared some elegant fundamental AGI operations/generalizations which are based on simple visual 3D transformations.

"Everything" is a bunch of vector transformations and the core of the general intelligence are the simplest representations of those "visual" representations, which are really simple/basic/general.

And "visual" in human terms actually means just:

Something that encompasses features and operations in 1D, 2D, 3D and 4D (video) vector (Euclidian) spaces, and the vectors in these dimensions can be of dimensionality usually of up to 4 or 5, such as: //e.g. (Luma, R,G,B)

1D - luminance
2D - luminance + uniform 1D color space
3D/4D - luminance + splitted/"component" color space

+ Perspective projection, which is a vector transform, it can be represented as a multiplication of matrices - that is - the initial sources of visual data are of higher dimensionality than the stored representation, 3D is projected into 2D (a drawback of the way of sensing)/

Also, of course, there is topology, humans work fine with blended and deformed images - curved spaces, and curves, not simple linear vectors. However the topology is induced from the basic vector spaces, the simplest topological representation is just the adjacency of coordinates in a matrix.

The above may seem obvious, but the goal is namely to make things as explicit as possible.

More on it - later.

The software and music - I don't have enough time for R&D, I'll probably tell more when there are results/pieces which I can show, such as tech demos or new demo records of my music... [Edit+ 2/10/2012:] But the music will probably wait untl I finally develop one software aid for the drums and start playing with it. :)

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Saturday, September 22, 2012

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Extreme Futurist Festival 2012 in LA, Los Angeles USA - Фестивал на дръзки футуристи 2012 в Лос Анджелис - футурология - бъдеще - визионери

That would be a great place for me, a pity I won't be able to visit it this year... :/ :)

Extreme Futurist Festival 2012 Trailer from H+ Worldwide on Vimeo.



Futurists, transhumanists, artificial, general, intelligence, events, футурология - бъдеще - визионери
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Sunday, September 9, 2012

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Super Smartasses - The Premiere of the new Graphical novel/series/comics/pictures/production of Todor Arnaudov/Tosh/The Twenkid





Enjoy the first pilot episode of the "new/old" production of Tosh/The Twenkid/Twenkid Studio, written 3 years ago, but first episode completed and presented now:

Super Smartasses
First Episode: Companions (International Version in English)

About "Super Smartasses" and Twenkid FX Studio
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Monday, September 3, 2012

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News: Comics - Multi-Platform Story Novels - Animation - Cartoon - Voice Acting - Animatic - Visual Effects Software VFX -- Upcoming Twenkid Studio Satirical Production, featuring the IT, Semiconductor, AI, AGI, Science and Everything also | Скоро - мултиплатформена продукция - комикс, озвучен, аниматик, анимация, разкази, роман, филм

На български

Title: S.S. (see later)
Drawings from the first epidose:
Deliberately not telling what's the story about.

It's an amusing and funny satirical series, having serious/intelligent/dramatically/comically presented messages, with many characters, starting from the high-tech industry and people (semiconductors, hardware, software, automotive, aerospace, electronics, architecture, medicine ... researchers), but also spreading everywhere - sports, media, pop-culture, society, politics, celebrities, film industry, all kinds of absurds, comedy and drama, and all kinds of human relationships. It has some educational elements, too.

AI and AGI will probably also join the stories in one funny way or another in the high-tec part.

It have both action/strongy visual and dramatical/verbal stories.

It's a huge Universe (in my imagination), I plan to create multi-platform stories, e.g. various kinds of media and different points of view to the stories told.

The perfect form would be an interactive full-motion animation with sound and additional materials, textual, pictorial, sound. (Or a computer game.) Animating it as I would like to is too expensive and technologically impossible right now though, so it will start as a comics + text, a highly illustrated novel, graphical novel - whatever.

History

 I wrote and sketched the characters, settings and the plots of about 20 episodes, some with complex plot-twist and development, some simple, as early as 3 years ago, but didn't have the time/resources to start implementing it as good as I wished. I finally started the first episode a few weeks ago. The visual quality of the pilot episode that's coming won't be as good as I wished too yet, but I hope it's fine.

As my in-house VFX software technology improves, and I invest some more time in it to put some of the cool accelerating features in my mind, the episodes will become faster and easier to produce, and the animation will become implementable in a short time (I already have designs of how to do it, but it will take time after I start it up).

Indeed, the first public release of my Twenkid FX Studio software is also planned to finally come...

I don't have time to work on it lately (a long "lately" period), that's the reason it's being delayed from the start even though I've always known what to do. I am willing to make some release in the upcoming few months.

It might not be glamorously shiny for average users in the initial releases, but it will work (it already works for me) and it's implemented with impossibly short amount of human-work-hours*. I'd say - insanely low. It's supposed to have the key features available for users even if not perfect yet, for example those:

- chroma keying
- rotoscope with painting and clone tools
- matte painting
- color corrections
- motion tracking (stabilization/compensation trajectories)
- particle effects (some basic stuff for a start)

Even only this is enough to create pretty cool visuals, and these are not all features already existing or planned even for the first early public release, you'll see them when the release come.

BTW, the matte-painting was a function of the "grand-father" of this software back in 2005, matte-painting is one of my favorite visual effects, it's so simple and yet so powerful. Generally, the principles of all visual effects are trivial and obvious, at least for anyone who has talents in visual arts - drawing, photography etc. However coding all, stitching all together in a common interface, project etc. - that's laborious, even if all you have to do is crystal clear to you.


...
Regarding the graphical quality of the initial draft release of the pilot episode - it's drawn by hand with pencil, some of the pictures with a tablet (Wacom Bamboo), there are some editions and layout with GIMP, but it's mostly pencil. Some pictures are more elaborated, others are very quick sketches. There are too much frames to make all smooth and polished, I have other tasks to do too, waiting for a time-slice...

Such as that software that is being delayed for years, and it will include functions to accelerate the production of the comics, drawing and animation, too.

Generally, producing this is fun, and I believe it will be fun for the viewers, as long as they care for the topics of the stories told. :)

Stay tuned and please - show your love and share the fun, if you liked it. :) Thanks.
..
That below is just a small spider-man exercise from January 2012 (assisted by references in a comic book), just to show some skills:

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