I am not really a sword smith - at least not exclusively.

When You look at my posts, it is easy to get the impression that I spend all my time in the forge or doing 3d-design and animations. This is not entirely true.

I do have a dayjob. Thats actually what pays the bills, and it pays ok. I am a computer graphics specialist at a privately owned research facility in Copenhagen. My job here is to make research in, and develop software for, research projects and industry. Sounds boring? It isn´t.

we do what is called applied research, which is a fancy word for the fact that the university budgets have been systematically slimmed down in Denmark over the last 10-20 years, and those money are being channeled into the private research sector.

This has resulted in quite a few privately owned but, for a large part, government funded research institutes. The one I work for is one of these.
The good thing about it (at least for me) is that I get to do more or less the same researchwork , that I would at a university , and at the same time I am payed slightly better and have more security in my job.
We often joke about how we have all the benefits of a privately owned company while also reaping the benefits of being mostly government funded. that why I made this little image to be fitted to the office door of one of my colleagues:

Even though I still think the universities should get a bigger part of these funds, I think the system works fairly well. One of the very nice things about my company is that it bridges the gap between the researchers at universities and the tech companies who need the latest research results in their work.

Quite a lot of this is work in making better solutions for the common good of all people in our society(since we are still 50-60% funded by government grants) and indeed , since this is technology development , for the good of all the world . Big words I know, and most of what we do wont fit this bill, but every once in a while we participate in projects that actually move the border of knowledge or help some real humans out there, much like a university actually.

To give a few examples we have projects that track birds via radar to try and map their movements around windmills, thus in time hopefully preventing rare and endangered birds from being killed by the windmill wings. We have projects where we use drones to detect internal damage in windmill wings, hopefully making it possible to replace the wings before the come flying off.

source

Alot of projects are concerned with artificial intellingence which is a great tool for doing both good and bad. It is perfect for all manners of masssurveillance, but it is also great for detecting cancer in ct or mr data.
My main expertise is in physical simulation of jointed mechanisms, which is useful for robotics but can also be used in computer games.

Here is a video I made for my PhD project.

What looks like mediocre animations are in fact simulated, and the main focus is thus not the visualization, but the methods that makes it possible to make a muscle move. I am hoping to start up another project soon about muscle movement and control of legged robots or simulated creatures.

---

Im EvilHippie, a compulsive creative and jack o' trades. If you want to know more about me, check out my introduction post here

If you like what you see, feel free to upvote, follow and resteem
or you can check out these recent posts

CG goblinhead
dancing with the dead
woodlady drawing
Meat substitution experiments