The human mouth is kind of a bastard. Animating it frame-by-frame requires a patience that I just don’t have. Blender has shape keys that can help you mold lips into different configurations for each sound, but you still have to set keyframes to match up with a particular word at each and every frame.
Or you can be lazy. Like me.
Getting coordinates to scale properly to Blender units has been extremely frustrating for me since I started attempting more 3D maps. So, finally, in a fit of rage this weekend, I wrote a function to do it for me.
It scales the latitude and longitude down along the Z (height) and X (width) axes, taking into account the size of a base map oriented along those axes. In my version, it places a sphere at each coordinate set, but that can be easily changed to other objects.
Back from vacation! I did a version of this in AutoHotkey a while back, but this one’s in Python. It does require importing modules—check out this post for that. You’ll want both requests and beautifulsoup (I’m using beautifulsoup4) before getting started.
I think I’ve mentioned it before that the Python documentation can be really confusing for beginners. There may be people out there who can look at this Table objects page and completely understand what’s happening.
I am not those people. I need visuals.
So here’s a quick thing to note before we get started. Python will throw a shit-fit if you do not have everything properly formatted. Indentation matters. I can’t figure out how to make WordPress format my tabs, so if you do copy and paste the below code, indent the loops to avoid errors.
Python in ArcGIS is intimidating, so I’m starting simple. This is a quick walk through of how to load a script for use and what a basic Python script looks like.
Every time I start thinking that my job is bad, I try to remind myself that Stanley Kubrick had a secretary. The guy was notorious for driving actors into the ground. Making them do takes over and over and over. Can you imagine having to handle his administrative work?
If IMDB’s trivia page is to be believed, that poor soul had to spend weeks typing out the infamous ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ novel from hell. On the off-chance I ever find myself similarly working for a maniac, I’m attempting to master the Python docx module, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised with how far you can get with just the basics.
