Thursday, October 30, 2014

How to Ask Questions on Forums

Preamble:
This article is a set of "best practices" based primarily on my own observations from asking, reading, answering, and not answering questions posted on CG forums. The advice here is written with 3D creative software in mind, but many ideas can be generalized to other topics. Likewise, not every point will be relevant for every query; pick and choose what makes sense. Finally, though the advice is intended to increase the probability of a timely and helpful response, there is no guarantee this will happen. Some questions just don't get answered and it's a good idea to have a backup plan in mind.

The presumption here is that you have run into a problem during your creative endeavors. Perhaps you are following a tutorial and the sequence of steps you are doing doesn't match the instructor's result. Or perhaps you've encountered what looks like a hideous bug, complete with jagged legs and colorless eyes. Or maybe you're trying to produce a particular effect and you just don't know how to go about achieving it. You look around the room, but there's no one nearby to help out. Time to go to the interwebs.

The preparation:
Before you create a post on a forum, it's important to do your due diligence.
1) Do some searching to see if an existing solution can be found. Effective web searching, or "googling" as the kids are calling it these days, is an important topic for another time. The basic idea is to use the right terminology, filter for your software version, and try many searches with different phrases. Most problems have been encountered by someone else before you, and it saves everyone time if you can find an existing solution rather than posting about it again.

2) Try to understand a bit more about your problem. Even if you can't find a direct solution, it can be extremely effective to educate yourself about certain terms and ideas related to your problem (e.g. How does Final Gather actually work? What are "normals"? What part of the software controls motion interpolation between keys?). This will help you use the right words in your forum question and sound more intelligent in the process.

The title:
The title of your post should be concise and informative. It is useless to say "Help please" or "Urgent problem"; these types of titles make you sound as though you aren't willing to make an effort. Likewise "Modelling question" or "Issue with render" are equally uninformative. Try to use terms specific to your problem (e.g. "Geometry doesn't follow skeleton", "Creases in mesh after boolean", or "Jagged shadows in render"). Without even clicking on the topic, an experienced user might already have an idea of what the problem might be and a few possible solutions. Congratulations, you've just hooked someone into helping.

The post:
Above all, be courteous. In most instances, the person who ends up helping you will be doing so with no reward or compensation besides the satisfaction of solving a problem and assisting a fellow user. You may be tearing your hair out and warming up your computer-tossing arm, but take a few breaths and approach this professionally.

Start with a one to two sentence summary of your problem. Again, many forum browsers will be doing so in their spare time, so in the event someone doesn't have time to read a longer message, give them the low-down up front. This should be a slightly fleshed out version of your post title (e.g. "I was using the bridge tool to connect a series of edges and the resulting faces don't appear to have any material"). This raises the importance of correct terminology; make sure you're giving tools and commands the right name and look around to find what words other people use when they face similar problems.

Add a couple of line breaks, because smaller chunks of text are visually more inviting to read than a huge block. Then provide some context for the question. What were you doing when you encountered the problem? A detailed sequence of steps will hopefully allow someone to reproduce the problem. What are you trying to achieve? No one can read your mind, so be clear about the desired outcome (maybe you're after more noise in your render). Are you following a tutorial? If so, add a link or share an image of the pertinent step (if copyright allows). What is your experience level? If you've been using software X and have just switched to Y, another convert might be the best person to understand your situation. If you're a senior lighting TD, people will be less likely to assume a newbie error.

Do include what you have already tried. What do you mean you haven't tried anything? Go away and come back when you have. This way users won't waste your time and theirs by suggesting things you've already attempted. It also proves you're serious about finding the answer.

Don't include how frustrated you are and how you have a deadline this weekend and how this always seems to happen and other editorializing. Everyone's project is important and frantic cries will probably not speed things up.

Generally it is a good idea to include your software version. Include hardware info if and only if you suspect a possible hardware problem. Include operating system info if and only if you suspect an operating system problem. If you are getting an error message, copy and paste the error message word for word exactly.

Include screenshots and other images whenever possible. A picture says—what was it, eight hundred words? This being said, don't add eleven screenshots when two will tell the whole story. If you want to show a problem related to geometry, wireframe on shaded is the easiest to interpret. Figure out in your operating system how to take a screenshot of a region of the screen. This will save you time cropping. If you have to capture the whole screen, take that bad boy into an image editor and crop it to the relevant region. No one wants to open and zoom a 2560x1440 image that has a 200 pixel square region showing your glitchy model. Mark up the image too. Take your virtual red pen and add circles, arrows, and exclamation marks (maybe not the last one) to tell others where to look. Use text in your post to tell us what we're looking at too (Is this the broken texture or the one that was working properly?).

Finally, thank readers for their time and assistance and hit submit.  Someone may reply within minutes, hours, days, or perhaps not at all. You've crafted a professional, informative question and now you can't do any more—or can you? While you're waiting for a reply, keep doing your research and experiments to try to solve the problem on your own or at least learn more about it.

The follow-up:
If you don't get any responses within what you feel is a reasonable amount of time, don't "bump" the post or say "Twelve views and no replies? What's the matter with people?" Be patient and keep investigating on your own. If you really feel the thread has been lost among the others, you can add a reply with some new information or other solutions you've attempted.

If you were provided an effective solution, write back to a) say thank you and b) confirm that the suggested solution worked. This will help future readers know what to try. If you were provided a partial solution, write back to say what part worked and what didn't. If you were able to solve the rest on your own, make sure to add the specifics of the complete solution, again for future reference. If the offered solution didn't work, share any new behaviour you're experiencing and, as always, be polite.

Conclusion:
While much of this article may seem like common sense, I hope at least it provided new perspective on composing questions on forums. As a final thought, consider the potential time investment by both parties. If you can get a quick and informative answer, it may save you hours or even days of troubleshooting. On the flip side, another user browsing through a forum likely has many threads available to look through. If they can't understand your problem in a minute or two, they will likely move on and help other people; typically they have nothing invested. Therefore, spend that little bit of extra time to craft your query carefully and it will be rewarded.

Thanks for reading.
Stuart


Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Cover Teaser

I currently have a journal article in review, and if it gets accepted, I can submit an image to be considered for the cover. This, potentially, is a very cool opportunity, so I've been working on an image suitable for the cover and related to the article. I haven't heard back yet about the manuscript, but I couldn't resist sharing a teaser of the image here. Hope you're intrigued.


Later,
Stuart

Sunday, October 26, 2014

The music system

You may have noticed that my blog posts have been rather thin of late. If you haven't, well I'm terribly hurt you haven't been mashing refresh on a daily basis and sighing at the appearance of the post you've already seen 32 times. I have been working on a few things, but the one that has captured my attention most readily and frequently over the past few months has been the idea of a Raspberry Pi based music streaming system. Recently I've made enough progress that I thought I should share what I've been up to and how it's working out so far.

Here's my stereo system. The headphones I got first. I was immediately disappointed to find that I needed more components to really get the audio thing going. So next I got the turntable and receiver from a friend, (thanks Andrea!) and of course speakers. Later I got a CD player. I thought that was pretty good for a Hi-Fi system (incidentally the term WiFi is a play on HiFi, which doesn't make any sense to me... wireless fidelity?).

But what's this new white box on the CD player with a weird brown arch on it?


An aside: Please ignore the creative license in the photography. I was messing around and accidentally stumbled on what I think is a neat 70s film look. No? It looks like an amateur who doesn't know how to use on-camera flash? Fair enough.

Wait, hang on, this white box appears to be made of lego (a collective noun). And the brown stuff is a cleverly constructed headphone-adapter-holder and handle! Handle? Why yes...


The top comes off! And what's inside? Well, if you said a Raspberry Pi, then you are cheating because I told you at the beginning of the post and because you can't see the Raspberry Pi in the below image. What you can actually see is a digital to analog converter (DAC) by IQaudIO that is sitting on top of a Raspberry Pi B+.

At this point I suppose further explanation is in order. Raspberry Pi's are very small computers that are great for many projects like these. In this instance a Pi can be used with a custom operating system to play music. Here's how this works. I have ripped many of my CDs (as lossless FLAC files) to my network attached storage (essentially hard drives that I also use for backup). The Pi has a wireless dongle so it can access the NAS (pictured here) through the local network.

The operating system manages the music playback, queuing, and playlist creation etc. Then it sends the digital signal to the DAC which creates a beautiful analog signal for the receiver to amplify and send to the speakers. CD quality music (which, though a contentious topic, for my ears is as a good as it gets) is wonderfully reproduced. It is delightful to listen to and the Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene in the lego infuses a rich mellowness to the digital conversion. I brushed the base of it with olive oil and that has also made a tremendous impact on the midrange frequencies throughout the burn-in process. Okay, I seem to have gotten slightly off track in my subtle digs at certain constituents of the audiophile community.


Here's where it gets really fun. The OS in question is called RuneAudio and I can access the music player from any mobile device or computer. I've even generated a QR code for the URL used to access the webUI. This is not that critical, since it's a simple URL (http://runeaudio) but maybe friends coming over will get a kick out of scanning the printed QR code and choosing some music.


Note that this QR code won't work for you unless you either happen to be on my local network or also have a Rune Audio setup. The player looks like this on my phone.


Another fun thing I've done is to set up automatically downloaded podcasts on my NAS from specific RSS feeds so I can then play them on the stereo. It's also possible to stream audio (e.g. Rdio) from my computer to the Pi using TuneBlade. For Macs, the airplay protocol is built in so that works pretty seamlessly too.

So that's some stuff I've been getting setup recently. As can be imagined, not everything goes exactly according to plan, and I've had some hiccups with power supplies, wireless signals, etc. It's still very much a work in progress (next up are a 3D-printed case and an IR remote receiver), but I'm going to make an effort to ensure my other projects don't get too stalled.

Later,
Stuart

Friday, October 17, 2014

Hack a USB game controller for browser reading

This is another example of a minor annoyance that snowballed into a time-consuming yet satisfying and elegant solution, all thanks to AutoHotkey (see Better Transcription... and Color Coding...).

I end up reading quite a lot of articles and documents in my web browser as I'm sure you do too. However, I find that I usually end up hunched over with my eyes too close to the screen. My index finger also gets tired from the repetitive scrolling on the mouse wheel. I thought to myself that it would be nice to just have a single button that I could press to scroll the page down while I sat back from the screen a bit. My mouse is wireless but it's awkward to hold it in my lap. I remembered that there are USB foot pedal peripherals that one can buy and program. But then the lightbulb went on!



In my backpack was a knockoff super nintendo USB controller (don't ask me why that was in my backpack, it just was). If I could use the gamepad controller to control my browser, I could sit back and read documents with ease.

A bit of research later, I came across this AutoHotkey script that helped me identify the parameters of the controller to use, such as button numbers. I then modified the script, and with the help of some other useful pages, like this one, I managed to achieve what I was looking for.


Because the default mouse speed was too fast to accurately click buttons on screen, I gave my Right Alt and Right Ctrl keys the function of decreasing and increasing, respectively, the mouse pointer speed. I don't really use those keys for anything else, and they don't execute any other commands when pressed solo, so I thought it made sense. The other thing I didn't show in the video was I mapped the X key to the browser's back button.

You can download the script here and make your own changes however you like.
It isn't totally refined or robust (might take some tweaking to make it work with your own controller), but in its current state, it works how I want it to. One thing I don't like is that pressing the right bumper once is essentially translated into pressing the down arrow key twice. I'd prefer a one-to-one translation for more control and to use with other applications (e.g. did you know using the arrow keys on a google search result page moves between search results?).

Again, the script download link is: http://goo.gl/zGawnD

Later,
Stuart