Peter Falkingham

Always a joy to see @arielcamp.bsky.social 's sketch notes from conferences

The new focus stack + pixel shift on the new Nikon Z8 firmware is awesome! Those numbers are mm. 25 focus positions, with 32 pixel shift images at each position, totaling 64GB of RAW images before merge and stack. Nikkor MC 105mm.

We're using bmesh for other stuff, but it didn't seem necessary for this. I did toy with ellipsoids but haven't found a use for them yet. Will take a look though, thanks

Watch Peter L. Falkingham talk about his #BiologyLetters review of the methods used to study dinosaur locomotion, covering extant taxa, bones, muscles, and footprints: cassyni.com/events/RAu9V... #palaeontology

Probably gonna need to downsample that 1.5 /billion/ triangle mesh.

This person is on fire and about to get strangled. Still better than sitting through a 3 minute non-skippable video about not clicking dodgy links.

I hate everything about this.

How do they come up with such cringey titles for mandatory online training...

Aww too kind!

Speed from fossil trackways: calculations not validated by extant birds on compliant substrates | Biology Letters Fossil trackways serve as a valuable tool in understanding the behaviour and locomotion of extinct animals. Calculating speeds from trackways has become a standard approach, particularly for dinosaurs...

New paper led by Tash Prescott - we applied equations for speed, etc that are commonly used on #dinosaur tracks to tracks made by living birds we could watch and time. TLDR: equations aren't even nearly close. Animals moving freely on compliant substrates very different to steady-state lab data

RealityScan 2.0 Released (formerly RealityCapture) As I’d previously noted, RealityCapture has been re-branded to RealityScan, to align branding across desktop and mobile applications. With the rebrand come some major new changes: AI Masking Smarter Alignment Aeriel LiDAR Support Quality Analysis To install it, you need to fire up Epic Games Launcher, then I had to wait a while until the RealityScan tab appeared at the top in place of the old RealityCapture tab:

RealityScan 2.0 Released (formerly RealityCapture)

As I’d previously noted, RealityCapture has been re-branded to RealityScan, to align branding across desktop and mobile applications. With the rebrand come some major new changes: AI Masking Smarter Alignment Aeriel LiDAR Support Quality Analysis…

And a buzzy little bee (youtube: youtu.be/T3rqVRVTu_o)

Sparrows feeding in slow motion (available in 4k on my youtubes: youtu.be/YTVgpIOIxrE)

XROMM XROMM has 9 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

FYI for those doing #XROMM, we've now moved everything over to github: github.com/XROMMPackages

Modern image formats – which is best? Experimenting with .AVIF and .JXL Despite having a terabyte of OneDrive storage (which I've been enjoying for years, though I'm starting to look at Proton as an alternative - that's for another post), it's very nearly full, and a big portion of that is photos: normal snaps of holidays, family, and so forth, but also hundreds and hundreds of gigs of photos taken for photogrammetry. These are almost exclusively JPGs, with some sets of RAW files I've saved elsewhere (mostly in the personal category, as there's…

Modern image formats – which is best? Experimenting with .AVIF and .JXL

Despite having a terabyte of OneDrive storage (which I've been enjoying for years, though I'm starting to look at Proton as an alternative - that's for another post), it's very nearly full, and a big portion of that is photos:…

What is a passkey? | Proton Passkeys are often said to be the future of passwords. What is a passkey, though, and how does it work?

It's not exporting passkeys, it's generating them and storing them on proton pass: proton.me/blog/what-is...

(that's not to explain what a passkey is, which you already know, just what Proton does and what we're discussing). 1Password and Bitwarden do the same.

Most functionalilty is free, or with academic email address you can get 12 months of pass plus for a quid.

Biometrics on phone or desktop (e.g. windows hello, android fingerprint), or pin/password.

Stick your passkeys in a third party password manager like proton pass. Plus, phone is secured with biometrics. I'm all in on passkeys where they are available.

YouTube video by Unreal Engine RealityScan 2.0: New Features and a Rebranded RealityCapture

Actually, the new features look awesome:
youtu.be/UJBIss8q3Gg

Reality Capture being rebranded to Reality Scan 2.0 soon: www.cgchannel.com/2025/06/epic...

If they happen to also lose the CUDA exclusivity on this release, it might be the last thing in my workflow tying my to nvidia #photogrammetry

I've never come across this before, despite programming for 20-odd years

*SERIOUSLY PYTHON???*

Photographer Captures Rare Photos of Flying Foxes Keeping Cool in Indian River It was 113 degrees.

I feel these would make good reference for pterosaur palaeoart

petapixel.com/2025/05/30/p...

Yeah, I also found invesalius a bit limited. MeVisLab looks awesome, but the learning curve is like an overhanging cliff. Slicer always had that middle ground covered.

I've not seen anything else new on the scene in years.

(in case you've not seen it: peterfalkingham.com/2019/02/18/f...)

What the heck happened to 3D Slicer in recent years? It used to be the go-to for segmentation, but it seems loads of tools and functions are missing, and all the documentation is based on old UIs and functionality. It's a complete mess.

Lots more videos like this on my Animals in Motion youtube channel - good for biologists and animators: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

YouTube video by Peter Falkingham Goldfinch eating Dandelion Seeds slow motion 4k

Wanna see a Goldfinch eating dandelion seeds in slow motion? Of course you do:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hKn...

YouTube video by Peter Falkingham Ducks Mating 4k

Was at the park photographing birds, got this video of ducks being bastards:

(CW: Ducks mating)

youtu.be/PKfe6MfNJQE