Dueling Snowmen

Santapaws has posted some video of his animated "dueling snowmen" display. Custom home-built animated light displays are so much cooler than store-bought ones.

Papercraft Crypt and Tangram Handouts from Carnival of Souls 2005

Those of us who put on the Carnival of Souls decided that for Halloween this year, we wouldn't only give out candy. Instead, we decided that some of the giveaways should be things that have a more lasting value. As a result, we designed two single-sheet activity pages which we had printed up on card stock and handed out on Halloween.

I've put the handouts up on the web for you to download and enjoy yourself. There is a papercraft crypt that you can cut out and assemble to create your own replica of our Crypt of the Phantasm attraction, and a Twisted Tangrams activity to cut out and solve.

If you construct the papercraft crypt, please send me a photo - I'd love to see how yours turns out!

How fast they grow up

I was playing Apples to Apples tonight with some family members. The green card was "easy" and the only card I had in my hand that was even remotely applicable was "Choir Boys." Thus the dilemma: the person judging was my eleven-year-old nephew. Cringing, I played it anyway, thinking that, well, at least it would get a good "ewwww" out of the rest of the players.

He collected the cards, turned to me, and said, "You know, I was a choir boy last year." And then judged it as the best of the entries.

He got it. He got it. Excuse me, but I have to go burn my deck of Apples to Apples cards now.

Low-poly modeling

I'm having a hard time finding good resources online for low-polygon modeling techniques. Back when I first looked into this topic ages ago, I remember a few web sites that went into some tricks that I wish I could find now.

In particular, I'm looking for resources that have a good discussion of how to architect your models so that when bones deform them, you don't get nasty creases. I seem to recall that a major factor in having a good model that deforms gracefully is to have the geometry model the anatomical musculature of the entity being modeled. But I want examples.

I also need some good pointers on setting up a bones structure. How many bones do I need, and what are the guidelines for placing them in the figure? And why do some sites mention adding a tiny little bone at the end of every skeletal structure?

I'm plugging along on these issues, and I'm making progress, but I'm getting somewhat frustrated by the lack of good materials to help me online - there are plenty of modeling tutorials aimed at the modeling neophyte, but precious few on rigging. Maybe I'm just not finding them. If I ever master this stuff, or even get good enough at it to achieve decent results, I may have to write some tutorials of my own.

More Jedi Outcast footage

Today, my nephew showed off some more of the footage for the Star Wars fan film he's working on called The Jedi Outcast. Now that I've seen some of the raw footage he's working with, I'm even more impressed. There are scenes where he obviously has to rotoscope things in on a frame-by-frame basis, and where he has to splice together the, shall we say, rather uneven acting job done by his little brother and friends (they tend to crack up a lot while doing the shoots - heh). He's doing this movie on a shoestring. And not a "indie film shoestring" like $15,000. We're talking, like $200-$300 I think. He's having to be very creative with his shots and sequences to get this to work.

I'd love to get my nephew into a place where he has access to good tools, good resources, and good actors. I think he'd own the Creative Media Institute path at NMSU, but I don't get the impression he's interested in that, but maybe. Mostly, I wish After Effects wasn't so expensive, because with a license for that, he could do some even more amazing work.

His affinity for making movies seems to be rubbing off, too, as his sisters are already talking about making another movie with him, a dark superhero fable which sounds pretty fun. One sister is busy knocking out the first draft of the script, and the other is in the process of writing a novel.

I hope they keep up with this creative work - one thing that the Carnival of Souls experience has taught me is how fulfilling a creative outlet that entertains people can be. Even if you don't make a dime on it, it's a valuable thing to have in your life, and I'd love for them to have that. It's too easy to just shuffle through life as a consumer of corporate entertainment offerings - even if you can't match their production values, being a producer of content yourself is so much better, because you bring personal passion to it, and other people pick up on and respond to that. In the end, personal work can be better as a result. I have no doubt I will enjoy Jedi Outcast more than the last Star Wars movie, and it will be because my nephew is pouring himself into it. It shows in every frame of animation and every rotoscoped shot.

Informational Graphic Design using Flash

I've always been a fan of clever informational graphic design,
and it has always seemed to me that the prevalence of Flash on the web would provide a means to bring animation and interactivity to bear on helping people understand complex political issues, but unfortunately, examples are few and far between.

However, I found a good one today - an animated, somewhat interactive work of political journalism that focuses on the issue of presidential approval ratings in a manner that makes the intricacies understandable even to political neophytes. Well worth a look.

More Haley Translation

More Haley translation. First, Issue 248:

It means my speech is all funny-sounding.
Come again?
Can somebody please get weepy transsexual off me?

...and then Issue 249:

Maybe you're right.

Apparently, Haley uses a different cipher each strip, which, as Belkar points out, is good for people who enjoy cryptograms...

Monkey Heads

The UV mapping system in Lightwave was something I was dreading getting into, but it turns out that it is really intuitive and easy to use. I was able to very quickly create a texture map for the monkey head:

The UV mapping functionality of LightWave is really powerful, enabling you to quickly unwrap your model onto a map and then export it for detailing in Photoshop. My texture map is really rudimentary - I just wanted to get the basic look down - but with all the texture channels you could apply, you could really make a model look great with comparatively little trouble.

Monkey boned

Wow, things are moving quickly. I'm learning a lot, and I'm surprised the results I am able to get already. I now have the monkey head pretty much modeled, and I've started experimenting with skelegons and bones. Below you can see the final model and two sample expressions for the monkey:

The next step is texturing so that the monkey doesn't look like it's made out of plastic.

More work on the monkey head

I think I'm really starting to get the hang of this:

I rather quickly added the ear, detailed it, tweaked the nose, added the eyes, and filled in the mouth.