We’re not going to have a polished, pretty, finished version of mr. BEHEMOTH kicking around the STUDIO until the show on the 28th, but we’ve managed to make some progress despite the universe’s best efforts to keep us down. With Golan’s help, Asa wrangled the mighty DOT PRODUCT, “an algebraic operation that takes two equal-length sequences of numbers and returns a single number obtained by multiplying corresponding entries and then summing those products.”

In layman’s terms, our program now reads the angles between sets of skeleton joints in 3 dimensions, instead of 2. This is preferable for a multitude of reasons; mostly for the sheer intuitive nature of the project, which was practically nonexistent in the first iteration: Mr. BEHEMOTH moved as nicely as he did because Asa & I understood the precise way to stand in order to make it not look like our puppet was having a seizure.

Now, a person can be much more relaxed when operating the puppet, and the results will be much more fluid.

Caitlin’s in charge of making the BEHEMOTH more dynamic, & created a sound trigger for the star-vomit from our update before last. Now, users can ROAR (or sing, or talk loudly) into a microphone, and the stream of stars will either be tiny or RIDICULOUS depending on the volume and length of the noise.

+ =

Golan is trying to talk Caitlin into using this same feature to make the BEHEMOTH poop. Caitlin really doesn’t wanna make it poop. Your thoughts on poop, class?

C is also still kicking around with Box2D to add some springy, physicsy elements to the puppet, but these need some work, as Caitlin reads slowly and is still picking apart Shiffman’s Box2D lectures. Once she gets this down, she’s adding collision detection; the BEHEMOTH should be able to kick the stars, stomp on them, eat them back up, and generally be able to react to the starsoundvomit (that is the technical term).

In short :: it runs nicer now, we have sound vomit, & the general springiness/animation of the puppet is getting a bit of an overhaul.

Is there any particular feature you REALLY want to see on the BEHEMOTH, other than what we have? We’re focusing on just polishing the one puppet, rather than rushing to make three puppets that are just ehhhhh.