http://www.box.net/shared/bvzf82q04s

more coming soon…

Luke Kirkwood

KT086423

March 2008

I have chosen the Typography as art artefact (eg. 2D Photoshop/Illustrator or 3D modelled or animated artefact) as my negotiated brief for a project. There seem to be two schools of thought on typography, people such as Jonathan Barnbrook immerse themselves in the theory and practise where as others prefer a more freeform approached based on the instinct for what is ‘right’, this style having advocates such as David Carson.

One incontrovertible thing about type is that its more subject to trends and fashions than any other aspect of design. Some such trends last for centuries (Roman Type) while others flitting and out of favour (cooper black and souvenir in the 1930’s then 70’s). Rarely these trends can be explained. One example is Nazi Germany moving from blackletter faces to san serifs such as future because the occupied territories could not read Third Reich proclamations. For the best part though tends to merge organically, one into the next.

The thing I like most about fonts is how intertwined they are with our everyday lives, to generalise slightly (something I know you like us doing) over half the planet probably knows the Coca Cola logo font, even if it’s not spelling out Coca Cola. This shows how much attention people actually take to type and how it influences how we think.

Since I’m creating the Discworld MMORPG for the Interactive Project module I have decided that I’d like to create a font with some traditional style with a bit of a modern twist instead of using something generically associated with calligraphic style of writing such as Old English Text MT.

presentation.ppt

Presentation in PDF Format:

presentation.pdf

I tried to make the font look flowing and natural, i think this has been accomplished to some degree althought i might edit the sharp edges on the type face.

Link to pictures of which the font is based on:

http://www.shellintons.com/typo_pics.html 

Understanding How Blind Users Use a Computer

Some blind and partially sighted people use the same equipment as sighted people, i.e. an ordinary computer with an Internet connection but will likely supplement it with a large screen for text magnification, a voice synthesiser or a Braille output device.

Blind users access software or Web pages using a screen reader. A screen reader is a combination of special software with a hardware or a software speech synthesiser. A synthesiser offers software that translates complex user interfaces for blind users.

The synthesiser uses a sound card in the PC. The sound card itself verbalises what is on the screen. When the screen reader “reads” aloud the text from an application or a Web site, it reads from left-to-right and top-to-bottom, just as you would read a page. The screen reader reads the underlying code of the application and translates that code to speech.

To get an idea of what it is like for a blind user to use a computer, imagine
a person reading you a description of what is happening on the screen or under your cursor.

If the ‘reader’ encounters a control that has no text label, (an icon or a custom control), the blind user probably won’t hear anything, or the screen reader sometimes just says “icon.” A blind user might not even know that this icon is even there. If the icon, graphic or button is a key piece of navigation for the application, this can render the application useless to a blind user.

A higher percentage of homes with computers and Internet access were run by individuals aged 35-44 than by any other age group. That’s the finding from the “Computer and Internet Use in the United States: 2003″ report released by the U.S. Census Bureau.

In 2003, of the 35-44 age group 73.3 percent owned computers and 65.3 percent had Internet access at home. The next-highest penetration was households run by 45-54 year olds. Nearly 72 percent owned computers, and 65.1 percent of those households had Internet access.

Computer adoption among households run by 65 year olds and older was 34.7 percent; Internet adoption was 29.4 percent.

The survey finds the presence of a school-aged child (6-17 years old) influenced whether a household had a computer or Internet access. Over three-quarters of households in this group had a computer versus nearly 57 percent of households without school-aged children.

I had a look at some statistics for blindness.

Australia Statistics

In 1988, 2,543,100 people or 16 per cent of the Australian population were disabled. Of these people, 2,120,600 (13% of the population) were found to be also handicapped.
Australia Statistics

UK Statistics

1.7 million people in the UK have a serious sight problem. There are around 23,000 people in the UK who have a severe loss of both sight and hearing. Approximately 200,000 have less serious dual sensory loss. UK Statistics

US Statistics

While it is difficult to calculate precisely the number of people impacted by inaccessible computer and software design it is estimated that over 50 million in the United States alone have disabilities. In the US estimates indicate that as many as 20 percent of Americans are affected.

Nearly nine million people in the United States have severe visual impairments and a much larger number have minor vision problems. Many require a reasonably high contrast between text and the background to be able to read. They may even need a particular scheme, such as light text on a dark background, to prevent the background from “bleeding” over and obscuring the foreground text. Other people consider the default colour scheme quite legible, but find that it causes eyestrain over longer periods of time. Still others, including nearly 10 percent of males, have some form of colour blindness that makes certain colour combinations unreadable. Lighthouse International

The likelihood of acquiring a disability increases considerably with age. In the U.S., 10 percent of people aged 21 and younger have disabilities, compared with 36 percent for people aged 55 – 64, and 72 percent for people over 80.

Age Group Proportion of People with Disabilities
0 – 21 10%
22 – 44 14.9%
45 – 54 24.5%
55 – 64 36.3%
65 – 79 47.3%
80+ 71.5%

World Wide Statistics

Worldwide estimates are as many as 500 million people with disabilities. Based on 1996 population estimates approximately 45 million people are blind and 135 million people have low vision. It is also estimated that 7 million people become blind each year, which puts the 1996 figure of 45 million to be 73 million for 2001. (World Health Organisation).
Increasing Font Size;

Size Change Javascript:

sizechange.txt

Cookies Javascript (to remember user prefrences);

cookies.txt

CSS/HTML for the size increase;

css.txt

Simple CSS demo;

Alternative Style Sheets Demo;

A document doesn’t need to have a single style sheet. You can give it a default style and any number of alternatives for the reader to choose from. This page, for example, has as alternatives all the W3C Core Styles, plus two style sheets found elsewhere on the Web (author: David Baron).How the reader can select the alternatives depends on the browser. Not all browsers yet offer a menu for it, but in Netscape 6, for example, you can find all the styles under the menu “View” -> “Use Stylesheet”.

To include extra style sheets, it suffices to add more <LINK> elements in the header, with the right REL and TITLE attributes, as follows. (I left out some of the styles; see the source of this document for even more links.)

  <link rel="stylesheet"
    title="Gold (right, fixed) + navbar"
    href="../threepart-f.css">

  <link rel="alternate stylesheet"
    title="Oldstyle"
    href="http://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/Core/Oldstyle">

  <link rel="alternate stylesheet"
    title="Modernist"
    href="http://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/Core/Modernist">
  ...
  <link rel="alternate stylesheet"
    title="Steely"
    href="http://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/Core/Steely">

  <link rel="alternate stylesheet"
    title="Forest (by David Baron)"
    href="http://dbaron.org/style/forest">

  <link rel="alternate stylesheet"
    title="Plain (by David Baron)"
    href="http://dbaron.org/style/plain">

Groups of links with the same TITLE are automatically combined into one style sheet.

Learning CSS;

Anatomy of a rule

A rule consists of two parts:

• Selector – the part before the left curly brace
• Declaration – the part within the curly braces

  

The selector is the link between the HTML document and the style. It specifies what elements are affected by the declaration. The declaration is that part of the rule that sets forth what the effect will be. In the example above, the selector is h1 and the declaration is “color: green.” Hence, all h1 elements will be affected by the declaration, that is, they will be turned green. (The color property just affects the foreground text color, there are other properties for background, border, etc.)

The above selector is based on the type of the element: it selects all elements of type “h1.” This kind of selector is called type selector. Any HTML element type can be used as a type selector. Type selectors are the simplest kind of selectors. We discuss other kinds of selectors in See CSS selectors. , “CSS selectors.”

Anatomy of a declaration

A declaration has two parts separated by a colon:

• Property – that part before the colon
• Value – that part after the colon

  

The property is a quality or characteristic that something possesses. In the previous example, it is color. CSS2 (see separate box) defines around 120 properties and we can assign values to all of them.

HTML has a link element to link to external style sheets, but not every XML-based format will have such an element. If there is no suitable element, you can still attach external style sheets by means of the xml-stylesheet processing instruction like this:

<?xml-stylesheet href="my-style.css" type="text/css"?>
... rest of document here...

This processing instruction (PI) must come before the first tag of the document. The type="text/css" is not required, but it helps the browser: if it doesn’t support CSS, it knows it won’t have to download this file.

Just as with the link element of HTML, there can be multiple xml-stylesheet PIs and they can have attributes to set the type, medium and title.

Here is a larger example. Let’s assume we have three style sheets, one that sets the basic display type of each element (inline, block, list-item, etc.) and two different ones that each set colors and margins. The two last ones are each other’s alternative, and the reader of the document may choose which one to use. Except when the document is printed, in which case we only want to use the last style. Here is the common style sheet:

/* common.css */
INSTRUMENT { display: inline }
ARTICLE, HEADLINE, AUTHOR, PARA { display: block }

This is one of the alternative styles, in a file called “modern.css“:

/* modern.css */
ARTICLE { font-family: sans-serif; background: white; color: black }
AUTHOR { margin: 1em; color: red }
HEADLINE { text-align: right; margin-bottom: 2em }
PARA { line-height: 1.5; margin-left: 15% }
INSTRUMENT { color: blue }

And here is the other one, called “classic.css“:

/* classic.css */
ARTICLE { font-family: serif; background: white; color: #003 }
AUTHOR { font-size: large; margin: 1em 0 }
HEADLINE { font-size: x-large; margin-bottom: 1em }
PARA { text-indent: 1em; text-align: justify }
INSTRUMENT { font-style: italic }

The XML document with these three style sheets linked to it looks like this:

<?xml-stylesheet href="common.css" type="text/css"?>
<?xml-stylesheet href="modern.css" title="Modern" media="screen"
  type="text/css"?>
<?xml-stylesheet href="classic.css" alternate="yes"
  title="Classic" media="screen, print" type="text/css"?>
<ARTICLE>
  <HEADLINE>Fredrick the Great meets Bach</HEADLINE>
  <AUTHOR>Johann Nikolaus Forkel</AUTHOR>
  <PARA>
    One evening, just as he was getting his
    <INSTRUMENT>flute</INSTRUMENT> ready and his
    musicians were assembled, an officer brought him a list of
    the strangers who had arrived.
  </PARA>
</ARTICLE>

For more details, see the W3C Recommendation “Associating Style Sheets with XML documents”

Embedded style sheets

Tip: try it in your browser

HTML has a style element that allows the style sheet(s) to be embedded directly in the HTML file, without the need for an external file. In some cases that is easier, especially when the style sheet is very specific to that document.

Most XML-based formats will not have such an element, but the same PI that links to external style sheets can also be used to point to style sheets that are embedded in the document itself. As of February 2006, there are still technical problems with this and no formal specification exists. For example:

<?xml-stylesheet href="#style" type="text/css"?>
<ARTICLE>
  <EXTRAS id="style">
    INSTRUMENT { display: inline }
    ARTICLE, HEADLINE, AUTHOR, PARA { display: block }
    EXTRAS { display: none }
  </EXTRAS>
  <HEADLINE>Fredrick the Great meets Bach</HEADLINE>
  ...
</ARTICLE>

In this case the type="text/css" attribute must be present, otherwise the browser (or other program) has to guess the style sheet language. The xml-stylesheet PI now points not to an external style sheet, but to an element of the document itself. That element is identified by an id attribute that serves as the target of the link. (Depending on the particular XML format, the id attribute may be called something else; in some formats there may not be a suitable attribute at all.)

 

Word Document: Ms Word 2007 Document Link

PDF File: Adobe PDF File Link

Rotoscoping

Silhouette Roto is designed only for the matte creation process and uses spline-based tools to cut mattes. It’s not used for cloning out blemishes or painting mattes; it doesn’t have any of these tools. Essentially, it’s a standalone “rotospline” tool that can work on its own or as a plug-in to other applications such as Adobe After Effects and Apple Final Cut Pro. The standalone app, which is also available for Linux, can load a wide range of file formats, including Cineon and OpenEXR, then export bitmap mattes or splines to other applications including Adobe After Effects, Apple Shake, and Discreet fire, flame, flint, inferno, and smoke. Mattes are automatically applied to the layer in the host app after rotoscoping. Like the standalone version, the plug-in can also export splines to other supported apps.

Silhouette Roto’s streamlined interface gives you immediate access to everything you need to cut your matte. In this example, the b-splines on the shin and foot have variable feathering, and the green overlay is turned on to preview the feathered matte over the image, using OpenGL rendering.

Ergonomic correctness

I did the bulk of my testing with the After Effects plug-in. When the plug-in is selected, a warning pops up telling you to hit the Options button. The Silhouette Roto effect parameters in the Effects window have very few controls: only the Options button and a pop-up dialog to select a layer if you want a background image to use for test comps. When you press the Options button, the Silhouette Roto interface overtakes your screen, locking you out of the After Effects UI. Unlike the limitations found in some other plug-ins when they overtake the UI, Silhouette Roto works just fine because you’re just tracing the edges of an object and have the ability to load in a background plate or solid color to preview the comp.

Ergonomics are important when rotoscoping because it is a very repetitive, mundane task. The Silhouette Roto user interface is very clean and intuitive. The dark gray color is easy on the eyes, and the tools and options are all there in front of you, where you need them to be. Navigation can be greatly enhanced using a mouse with a scroll wheel. As your mouse hovers over the different panels in the UI, the scroll wheel changes functionality. At first I thought that some of the key and mouse commands were odd, but after using them for a few hours, I found they worked well. Unfortunately, there is no option to define custom keyboard shortcuts, which would be very useful because the mattes and splines can be used in multiple host compositing apps, which all have different shortcuts.

The B Words

Even though roto is a four-letter word, cutting mattes in Silhouette Roto is as painless as it gets. Like other professional-level rotoscoping tools, it gives you the ability to work with an unlimited number of both Bezier splines and b-splines, and provides a nice layering palette to name and organize these splines. Bezier splines are similar to those found in the Adobe suite of tools and most compositing applications.

These are created by setting points then pulling handles out to create curves between the points. Beziers tend to work well when you’re creating a still image or animated matte with hard corners but fall apart when you’re creating organic mattes-the handles become problematic when animated over time. This is especially true when the handles must be broken, or when shapes rotate, because each point’s handles have to be rotated over time as well, which seriously increases the time it takes to cut a matte. B-splines do not have handles. Instead, the curves are defined by placing control points at various distances from one another, then the tension at each point can be adjusted from loose to tight. Animating these b-spline shapes is much simpler-adjusting the shape is like molding clay.

Whether you use Beziers or b-splines, Silhouette Roto provides a lot of fantastic tools for creating and editing your splines. The addition of rectangular and elliptical rotospline tools comes in handy in certain circumstances and is sorely lacking in other popular roto tools. Silhouette Roto’s editing tools include the ability to move, rotate, scale, shear, and corner-pin shapes or points. This control allows you to transform groups of points together, which results in less edge chatter and better final mattes. Silhouette Roto has the ability to convert b-splines accurately into Bezier splines and uses this conversion when exporting splines to other applications that don’t support b-splines. It also has the ability to import splines from Commotion and Elastic Reality, both of which are discontinued, aging products still heavily used for rotoscoping.

Close to the edit

Spline edges can be softened with a sophisticated edge-feathering tool that allows you to interactively pull out selective feathering on different parts of your spline. For example, if you have a person walking through water, you can draw a spline around the leg and have the overall edge hard and feather off going down the shin as the leg goes into the water.

The feathering design and workflow is brilliant. It’s fast and intuitive; by far the best I’ve experienced. Unlike similar tools in other apps, Silhouette Roto allows you to add feathering anywhere, not just from preexisting control points. Silhouette Roto also provides an automatic, accurate motion blur based on the speed and direction the spline moves. The shutter angle and number of samples can be controlled by the user, and even cranking the number of samples up to 128 didn’t kill performance on my PowerBook, which is very impressive.

The key to good roto is to use multiple shapes, and Silhouette Roto handles this well. Users can add an unlimited number of shapes, hide the visibility of any shape, and preview composites over a background image. Spline interaction over moving footage is very good, thanks to OpenGL acceleration and the use of Pixel Shaders. When you’re compositing the rotoscoped image over a background or filling the alpha with an overlay color, moving the splines produces silky-smooth response as the edges change, even with feathering and motion blur.

Silhouette Roto also gives the user the ability to easily color-code each spline. I usually let the color of the splines be dictated by the color of the underlying footage. If I need to roto a plane against a blue sky, I prefer using a yellow spline instead of a blue spline.

One feature that is missing is the ability to parent one spline to another, which helps when you’re segmenting an object. Creating forward and inverse kinematics chains would be a fantastic feature for a future version.

Do the locomotion tracker

To help speed up the roto-scoping process, a motion tracker is included. The tracker’s speed and accuracy is very good, and the tracked data can be applied to the entire shape or individual points. When the tracking tool is selected, users can Alt-click (Option-click) on the canvas to define the tracking point while a magnified box appears next to the selected area. This workflow design is really nice compared with the standard approach used by most other apps, which always requires you to move the tracker from the center of the frame to the desired location. Two trackers can be used to rotate and/or scale a spline, and four trackers can be used to corner-pin a spline.

There are a few post-tracking functions, including the ability to smooth tracks and average multiple tracks. A good use of the averaging function is to track your footage forward, then track it backward, and then average these together into a final track. The motion tracker also has the ability to offset tracking, which helps when objects get obscured or go off-frame. By repositioning the tracker on an object following a similar path as the original track, these obscured or off-screen objects can continue to be tracked. Another unique feature is the ability to Pre-Keyframe the tracker. This allows you to position the tracker manually on various frames to assist the tracker as it goes. You can also manually keyframe the spline on some of the frames, then apply the tracker so that these keyframes assist the tracker.

Unfortunately, when a tracker is applied to a spline or a single point, a keyframe is set for all of the points on this frame. This causes a serious workflow problem because this automatic keyframing prevents the shape or points from being offset gradually once a tracker is applied. It’s common for a tracker to start out accurately and slip off over time, and the current workflow in Silhouette Roto doesn’t allow you to bring this slip gradually back into position. For example, if a talking head is being roto’d, a tracker can be applied to the spline’s shape to follow the general position, rotation, and scale of the head. But now there’s a keyframe on every frame, and you can’t offset the points gradually over time. You can either offset one frame at a time or all together through a global offset.

The tracker also has a stabilization mode, which can help out on some difficult shots. If an object being rotoscoped is moving around the frame, you can stabilize the footage to make the matte cutting process easier and then reverse the stabilization after the matte is cut. Unlike stabilizers in other applications that stabilize the shot by explicitly transforming the pixels, Silhouette Roto stabilizes only the viewport and never actually moves the pixels in the image. This prevents a loss in quality, which is an inherent problem in most stabilizers. Although this stabilization function can help with some of the offsetting problems mentioned previously, it is not a substitute for the lack of nulls and parenting.

Greenscreening