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Showing posts from July, 2015

Book Review: Scene of the Crime - a Writer's Guide to Crime-scene Investigations

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I bought Scene of the Crime, a writer's guide to crime-scene investigations by Anne Wingate, Ph.D. at the same time as I bought Modus Operandi so the information, whilst still relevant, much is more relevant to pre 1996 crime scene investigations. That said, this is an excellent companion to that book. Where as Modus Operandi gives you an overview of types of criminals, Scene of the Crime goes into the specifics of how police work a crime scene. Anne Wingate is a retired detective and author of crime novels. Much of this book is based on her personal experience of crime scenes and not only includes anecdotes from her professional career but also includes a specific, real case as a framework for the step by step process of investigating a crime. It is a fascinating read covering everything, from what happens when a crime is first reported, how a crime scene is recorded, how evidence is collected, what evidence can be found, how evidence is processed and what can be concluded fro

Book Review: Modus Operandi - A Writer's Guide to How Criminals Work

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To give you some idea of how long ago it was between buying this book and when I actually read it, the book makes a reference to the movie Jurassic Park being currently popular in theaters. When I read it, Jurassic World was owning theaters everywhere. Despite being published in the mid 1990s much of the information in Modus Operandi, a writer's guide to how criminals work by Mauro V. Corvasce and Joseph R. Paglino is still relevant - especially if you're writing anything set pre 1996 and want to be aware of how things were 20+ years ago. A very useful book for anyone writing crime stories - even something as basic as a Scooby Doo style animated mystery - you'll find plenty of real world criminal behavior to structure a story around. Types of criminals include; Arsonists, Thieves, Hijackers, Con Artists, Counterfeiters, Fences, Murderers, Kidnappers, Prostitutes, Armed Robbers, Safe Crackers, Lockpickers, Smugglers, shoplifters and White Collar Criminals. Each chapter gi

Reallusion iClone 6 - My First Animation (Part 2)

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Custom ToonMaker Character, iClone 6. Last post I introduced you to iClone 6 and my first full project using Reallusion's premiere 3D software animation tool. My project is a short promotional video for my Animation4Business service. As explained last time I actually sketched out a storyboard for this video (like actual hand drawn sketches) which is something I rarely need to do using animation tools like GoAnimate where it's just as easy to create the storyboard directly from the actual components that will be animated. Because of this I thought you may find it interesting to see a key scene comparison of my hand drawn storyboard with the actual finished scenes which I've posted below. As you can see my final scenes aren't too far away from what I had in my sketches. Overall the animation looks fairly simple but it has taken the best part of just over a week to create this 30 second promotion. One of the most complex scenes in my promotional animation, scene 8. The

Reallusion iClone 6 - My First Animation

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Late last year Reallusion released iClone 6 which was both great and annoying at the same time to me as I'd finally worked my way through the basics of iClone 5 after purchasing that the year before. Naturally I upgraded and promptly discovered my laptop running iClone 5 wouldn't run iClone 6. Reallusion did release a patch shortly after that enabled iClone 6 to run on my laptop but it basically scaled back the software so that you couldn't use any of the powerful new features. Fast Forward to June of this year and I decided to finally splash out and buy a desktop computer system powerful enough to take advantage of the full capabilities of iClone 6. Things like the new, enhanced G6 human avatars, access to the Indigo Render Plug-in for more realistic output, along with other features like tessellation, that take full advantage of DirectX11. (I really have no concept of what tessellation is and why I need it but it sure sounds important). To be honest, I mainly bought iCl