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What creative projects have you been working on?
This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.
Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.
If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.
I just recently completed a minor construction project to prepare for an incoming baby.
Most of our house is wood flooring, but the bedrooms were all carpeted. When we originally moved it, we said someday we would get rid of the carpeting. We had to completely clear out one of the rooms and figured that we might as well replace the carpeting while we had the room empty.
Laminate flooring isn't hard to install at all. Rip up the old carpet, lay down some waterproof tarping, and then you just put the laminate flooring planks down. They click together like the pieces together like a puzzle. Then hit them with a mallet to close any gaps. Stagger them so the joints aren't next to one another and then saw the ends off when you reach the end of a row. Then go around the edges with some waterproof sealant and you're good to go.
It's a pain in the ass to actually do. It took about 8 hours for the entire room and my wife and I were physically exhausted about halfway through. We preserved and got it done in one day. I was sore for almost a week after.
Including buying the flooring, trim and a decent table saw, the whole thing cost about $800. If we had hired a professional, it would have been about $2,500. Am I glad we saved $1,700 by doing it ourselves? Hell yes. Would I pay that money to a professional for the other rooms if I could afford it? Hell yes.
It might not seem like a "creative project", but my wife and I had a great time figuring out the pattern, dimensions and other details. It was fun to help bring my wife's vision of the room to life.
We're in the process of deciding what kind of decorations we want on the walls (suggestions welcome).
I probably won't advance any further than this because it's too big of a project for me to get started on, but I've been doing some research on digital puppeteering. I'm kind of shocked that there's so little interest in the technology; it would appear that only one or two companies have even bothered to develop anything with them, and the last major project to use it appears to be 2017's PBS Kids show Sid the Science kid.
The idea was to build a waldo - that is, a rig with positioning sensors that get reported to a computer to record and transmit into pose data. You log that data continuously over a period of time, and bam; you've got your animation!
Building the waldo and the interface for it looks relatively trivial to do, though it might be a bit time consuming. The hard part is that there's no software package that I'm aware of that will integrate with any animation system, so it would require some really in-depth programming to get it working properly. And that's ultimately why I'm not going to invest too much time with it.
Interestingly enough, I did manage to find one person who managed to build his own mostly-functioning waldo, but his was for a very different project. He built the sensors in his waldo to match exactly with servos on an animatronic figure he built.
I've been working on an sfeed frontend for my rss feeds (1). it's been really fun and I'm pretty much happy with it, style wise.
(1): https://acdw.casa/planet/#