Fighting with computers

If you’ve worked with 3D meshes in Python, you’ve probably heard the name PyMeshLab . It’s the “Python face” of the legendary open-source MeshLab—famous for its ability to clean up, repair, and process even the messiest 3D models. And truly, PyMeshLab is a fantastic tool : powerful, open, scriptable, and (for most operations) robust. But—let’s be honest—getting started with PyMeshLab sometimes feels a bit like entering a quirky, magical forest: full of treasures, but you might trip on some roots along the way . Here’s my little “cautionary tale” and field guide to the weirdness you may encounter, and how to laugh it off while getting things done. 1. “Is That a Snake or a Camel?!”: The Naming Circus You’ll quickly notice that the naming of filters and methods in PyMeshLab is... creative . Sometimes you call a mesh processing function by a method like compute_normal_for_point_sets() . Other times, the same operation is invoked using apply_filter('compute_normal_for_poin...

 I have recently started learning Chen-style Tai Chi. I like the activity and my instructor, but as I am finding out, it requires more than just a few minutes of practice to improve performance. I have started looking for sources for additional help. Recorded videos are very helpful as they can be a tool for practising at home, but the computer nerd in me wonders if there is a better way.  What I came up with is to create 3D animations in a similar way to a video recording, but with the added benefit that the user could set the point of view of the scene at will. So I started to look around to see how that could be achieved, as my knowledge of the field is second to none.  I learned that motion capture could be used to obtain the motion pattern from a human performer, and that piece of information could be later used to animate a 3D character in a virtual environment. However, the way this is done sometimes requires expensive equipment that may also interfere with the ran...