Lecture Scribe - Easily Record Digital Whiteboard Lectures

If you have any interest in creating a low-fi whiteboard lecture that will be easy to post and share with students, may I recommend Lecture Scribe?

http://www.cs.clemson.edu/~bcdean/lscribe/

It allows you to record whiteboard lectures on a PC using a wacom tablet. The final output are extremely light-weight flash files. This certainly isn't the prettiest program in the world, but it just might help your students better understand what you're trying to explain.

Originally discovered on The Rapid E-Learning Blog.

Showing Key Presses During Video Tutorials

Because I've been teaching software to beginners for so long, I tend to favor a highly visual working style. I never use the keyboard command, I always go to the most obvious icon or pull down and use that. Even when navigating in the C4D viewport, I'll find myself going to the icons in the upper-right hand corner. Not because it's faster, but because my students will be more able to follow along while watching. Unfortunately, this isn't the most efficient way of working. I've been trying to find a method of showing my key-presses on screen while I make them for a while now, with no luck. Enter "key-mon" an open source tool for displaying keys on-screen as you press them:

Pretty nifty. Unfortunately I've yet to get it working on my OSX or Windows Installation. Once I do, I'll give you full instructions.

L-System Resources

While researching methods for semi-accurately modeling neurons and neural networks, L-Systems came up repeatedly. L-Systems allow you to procedurally model fractals and complex branching structures. Cinema 4D has an implementation of L-Systems found in the MoSpline object's Turtle Mode.

In my research into L-Systems I came upon a number of interesting resources that might be of use to other animators:

The University of Calgary's research into Algorithmic Botany has a number of papers describing ways of modeling different organic systems. But the stand-out is TreeSketch, an astounding free app for interactively drawing trees created by Steven Longay, Adam Runions, Frédéric Boudon, and Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz.

I mean, look at this video:

TreeSketch 2.0 - Promo Video from Steven Longay on Vimeo.

The ease with which they are able to define complex 3D forms is really inspiring. Their research paper cite's the Teddy system, a really cool sketch-based modeling system that I first saw at SIGGRAPH about a decade ago.

The future of 3D is in tools that allow us to model the world simply and expressively. Heck, that's the future of computing in general: let the tech serve the aims of the users, not the users serve the structure of the technology.

But I digress, here are some useful links about L-Systems:
The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants by Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz and Aristid Lindemayer: The 'L' in L-Systems comes from the name Lindemayer. This is the definitive text on L-Systems.

Wikipedia's L-System Article gives a solid overview of L-Systems and their uses.

Selcuk Ergen's personal research into L-Systems provides an astoundingly easy to understand introduction to l-systems. Beginners should probably start here.

For an introduction to the Turtle mode in C4D:

Rick Barrett has a basic tutorial on how to move your turtle available on Cineversity.

Colin Sebestyen shows you how to start moving your turtle in 3D in his NAB demonstration, also available on Cineversity.

In addition to MoSpline's Turtle Mode, there a couple of other implementations of L-Systems for Cinema 4D;

X-Frog - A set of procedural objects that allow you to easily model branching, phyllotaxis, and more without needing to program in the Turtle Graphics language. Also, there are pretty extensive libraries of  realistic plant models you can download.

DPIT Plants - Another set of procedural objects for modeling plants. I'm honestly not sure what distinguishes this from X-Frog.

Areas for further research:

• Look into the Houdini help files for general l-system information.