My animation for the stop-motion project in the experimental-animation course I'm taking this semester. There are a few things that bug me about it, though there really isn't much I can do about it now but to remember what I learned for the next time I attempt stop-motion.

Another class assignment. We were to find a random person on The Sartorialist and turn them into a character. She has a bag.

A re-imagining of Banjo Chicken as a table-top gaming figurine. Just imagine how scary Jurassic Park would have been if the raptors played banjos...

Watch out for the Hamster Flu!

Some of my old friends from school have been doing these weekly Fanart Fridays, and I thought it would be fun to join in too. For a while I've had a few dip pens and watercolors, so I decided to finally put them to use and learn how to use them. I think I'm going to avoid using printer paper next time.

This first week, I chose to do something from Pokemon. I played the game a lot in junior high, and my first starter was Squirtle. I can't remember what I named him, though. The only one that I can remember what I named them was a Mewtwo that I named "METAPOD."

I know it's actually Saturday, but my computer was too busy rendering something in Maya yesterday to scan this in.

This little guy likes to sit in children's bedroom closets. In the night, he can sometimes be heard plucking away as he watches and waits...

The second project in Intro to 3D Animation was to experiment with Maya's Dynamics effects engine.

My first project in Intro to 3D Animation. We were to take the Lego minifig that we modeled way back in Intro to 3D and do a keyframe animation in Maya.

Like Ursaw Major and Ursaw Minor, Comrade Bearsaw also made the transition to 3D, but with a few improvements along the way.

I wanted to make a render of just the two Ursaws. I also learned how to get smooth depth of field and ambient occlusion renders without them being all grainy in the process. Hopefully I can use this in getting the other scene to render faster.

This is the first of a pair of still-life images I had to make for an intermediate 3D class at school. The only requirements were that there be about 12 objects, made in Maya and Mudbox, arraigned differently for two images. This was our project for the entire semester. The second image isn't currently finished to a point I'm happy with. I've been having a certain rendering issue that I still need to deal with (something caused rendering time to jump from 1-2 hours to 24+ hours...), but I ran out of time before I had to leave for the break.

The vinyl toys have made another comeback, and the third one has received a much-needed revision and has become Comrade Bearzooka.

And it's been another two months since the last update. I've survived another semester at BYU and made the trip back home for Christmas break. I'll likely be more active next year now that I've got all my reading-heavy general ed. requirement classes out of the way.

With the new-found extra time I've had this last week, I was able to code up another new feature for my blog/website that other blogs have had for some time now. This time I've added the feature where if you post a large image, you can size it small and have it show a larger size when somebody clicks the image:

While there are "free" solutions that I could have used, I didn't want to deal with all the licensing issues and extraneous features I don't need, so I wrote my own from scratch. Right now, it automatically works on images I've posted in news posts that I've set to smaller sizes (I don't think I've posted any before now) and on all image posts that are wider than the template's 700px limit, like this one.

I think most of the bugs have been worked out by now, though I still need to do more testing. It works correctly (afaik) on Chrome and Firefox browsers, but I haven't tested Internet Explorer 9, IE 7 & 8 kind of work, and IE 6 just directs the browser window to the image when you click it instead. Bugs in IE 8 and older were expected, though, and there's not much I can do about that. If you're using one of them right now, I'm sure you're used to this kind of stuff anyways.

I've got one more image to post, and I think that will be it for updates this year.

These are various gesture drawings I made during the BYU Animation Club's weekly Wednesday-night gesture-drawing sessions.

This was an exercise in design I chose to do outside of class. I guess the prompt was to create a fairy-tale character, and I decided to go with Coyote from Native American lore. My aim was to imitate the Tlingit art style and try to define a 3-dimensional form with it.

Hello, it's been a while since my last post. A few things have happened since then. School has started back up again, and I was accepted into the Brigham Young University's animation program. I have a couple classes with projects that I'll be able to post up this semester, and I want to get into the habit of posting some of my sketchbook stuff more often.

I've also been trying to find work, though I don't think it helps that most of my past job locations don't even exist any more. Putting phone numbers on the application doesn't help when their disconnected or go to a different place now. I think one of them goes to some guy's house. It also doesn't help that I'm competing with actual computer-science majors for a lot of them. If anyone wants to commission artwork from me, just send me an email with a few details of what you want and I'll get back to you with a price to negotiate with.

I've also done a little re-organization on this site. A few pointless pages have been removed, the Content page has been removed in favor of just having it's categories moved to the main menu on the side. I've also fixed a few broken links. And by "a few," I mean the entire "Links" page was creating dud links.

The final for the Animation class I took during the spring semester required us to animate a character acting through a short voice clip. This was my project, with an additional inbetween pass that I did since the end of the class.

The sound byte is from a segment of a clip provided at the 11-Second Club website.

This is a scene from my latest solo animation project, titled "A Viking's Quest."

All effects are done in Adobe Flash. The fog effects are the easiest, as they comprise of a Movie Clip symbol of a shape tween and given alpha transparency and a thick blur. Layer a few of these on top of each other, and you have a blur effect similar to the one seen here.

Of course, using Movie Clip symbols has a long history of being difficult to convert to video. However, since Flash CS3 was released Quick Time export has been capable of rendering Movie Clip symbols as they would play in a normal Flash file. Unfortunately, the way it works causes complex scenes to render poorly, resulting in choppy scenes as the program drops frames to keep up with the recording process.

My current plan to work around this is to export a version through this method as is, so that I have an accurate audio track. The next step will be to render the movie at around 4 frames per second so that I have a video containing all frames in their proper position. Then it's just a matter of bringing them both into a video editing program and finishing things up there.

While Notepad++ is a very useful freeware program for editing all sorts of code and syntax, it's code highlighting feature leaves a lot to be desired for Flash ActionScript. Not only do .as files default to Haskell, but the syntax highlighting hasn't been updated since ActionScript 2.

This download intends to fix the Haskell issue and add a lot of commands, classes, functions and variables to the language dictionary. The ZIP archive contains two files: langs.xml and langs.model.xml. To use this update, copy and replace the files in Notepad++'s directory, usually located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\.

The application deadline for the BYU Animation program is finally passed, so now I can go back to do other things, like writing an 8-page group paper for History of Animation, getting ready for finals which start at the end of next week, reading things for class, and drawing goofy-looking weasels who live in holes while people talk at me, apparently.

I've also added a Google Friend Connect widget to the main blog page, so people can follow my blog through that thing. I'll move it to the right side bar thing later, as I don't have time to mess with the templates right now.

A rendering of the communist space pirate from a previous sketch done in Flash.