McAlister Matters

Sarah and I are getting married!  We'll be getting married December 29th.  We made a google web site so please visit: https://sites.google.com/site/sarahandryansbigwedding/

For my latest project at school I've been able to play with motion capture ('mocap') data. Motion capture is a popular technique for character animation where live actors perform the actions while wearing special suits and markers. The data is recorded and stored in the form of joint angles and positions. I worked with existing motion capture data made available by CMU Graphics Lab . Basically I made a motion capture data player.  Ultimately I hope to play around a little more with motion retargeting and motion graphs but for now this was good for a two week project.  I'm pretty pleased with the visual results and performance.  It's all C++/OpenGL code.  Here are some video results.

Sarah and I hiked Mt. Timpanogos two weeks ago on the 16th.  We decided to go on a Monday when it wouldn't be too crowded.  Despite a few clouds at the beginning it was really nice weather.  Only a few other people were on the mountain so we had most of the trail to ourselves which was nice.  It was late enough in the season to do the hike but just barely.  There were still huge ice and snow patches that we had to climb over and around.  That made the whole thing a bit more adventurous though.  And I've never seen so many full waterfalls back there!  Absolutely Gorgeous.  

I've been meaning to resurrect my website since I was distracted for a time (curs-ed Facebook!).  I tried a simpler blog but wasn't too happy with it so I'm going with a full blown WordPress site (surprisingly simple to set up).  In the process I also switched my web server to a LAMP box (Linux + Apache + Mysql + Php).  Also quite easy thanks to Ubuntu server edition.  It seems kind of slow on my current hardware so I may have to upgrade in the near future...