Violin Layering Experiments - 20160629

Today, I played around with some more "layered" recording. Here are some of the better results:







This time, I nailed down my tech setup a lot better - laptop lid up (to not muffle the sound - I usually keep it closed nowadays as I exclusively use the external monitor), and headphones on for playback (it turns out I need to fully extend the cord and to actually have the band flat on top of my head to get the cords out of the way). As a result, there's a lot less "bad noise". Judging from these clips, I might be getting the hang of this... then again, you haven't heard the rejects instead :P

One of the biggest challenges still is keeping track of all the other "sync points" in the other tracks to avoid creating some nasty muddy/confused/out-of-sync clusters that just sound horrid and messy. It's particularly bad once the track count starts ramping up and it's no longer possible to show everything on screen at once. Maybe that'll be the next little "fun hacking experiment" :)

"Piper" Review - Finding Dory Short

I decided to pull this one out into its own post, as it kind of deserves it IMO...



Birds. Macro Photography. Shallow DOF. Awesome Renders. Entertaining + Creative Animation and Sound Effects. Pixar. Fluff-ball Cuteness Overload!

This is one of the best little shorts I've seen. I really, really, really love it! It's just soo adorable, and features a lot of my favourite things.

Finding Dory Review (SPOILERS)

I just got back from a fun rainy afternoon watching Finding Dory  :D

Violin - Layering Experiment (20160625)

This afternoon, I had a bit of fun playing around with doing some "layered" sound recording.



Until now, all my previous attempts have all been pretty much epic failures, as they would all end up getting completely out of sync in pretty nasty/destructive ways. But, "success" at last this time, even if it's just a short 30 second clip that has its own set of technical issues (e.g. use headphones not speakers next time - lowering the levels of each subsequent track helped quell the disquieting noise that had built up by the end).

Sighted in the Night Sky

Over the past two nights, I've noticed a reddish-pink dot in the night sky about 1-2 inches above the moon. This got me thinking: What is that dot? Could it be Mars? Or is it Jupiter instead? Today, I finally figured it out with the help of Stellarium (an awesome Open Source planetarium):

Answer: It's Mars!

And the secondary (weaker/dimmer) spot nearby to the right of the moon was probably Saturn.

I've never really been terribly into star gazing, but wow! That's the first time I've ever been able to actually see one of the other planets in the solar system with my own eyes.

Happy 16/06/16

Just a little bit of fun birdie art for a special date, featuring none other than one of my favourite little silvereyes :)

Painted using Krita

General News and Updates - PSculpt/Sketching, Drivers, GPencil, Uni/Work/Life

It's been a few weeks since by last updates, so I thought I'd do a little post to fill everyone in on where things are at.

Next Gen Animation Dev - Dev Update 3

As promised, here is a video updating showing off the current state of the Pose Sculpting and Pose Sketching tools, and how they can be used for a more fluid animating experience.

Next-Gen Animation Dev Sneak Peak - Teaser Pic

Woohoo! Tonight I finally got stage 1 working at last!  More details about the entire grand plan here will follow in due course, but let's just say that what you're seeing here is just like the tiniest/most basic little stepping stone of the full set of things I've been dreaming about and working towards on and off for a few years now... I'm planning on recording a little demo video of the current state of all this stuff later today/tomorrow, which should help make it a bit clearer what's possibilities this brings. In the meantime, feast your eyes on this little teaser screenshot I grabbed of the tools in action:

Rig: "Basic Animation Rigs" by Beorn Leonard/CG Cookie  (CC-BY-3.0)

Even in the primitive state that things are in now, it's clear that these tools are going to be every bit as amazing as I imagined way back in 2010 as I stood in the bookstore reading Richard Williams' famous "Animators Survival Kit" book and getting quite inspired to push the state of animation tools into a new era :)  

Now, back to work!  Hehe :D

Turbulent Autumn Storms - Violin Improv Session

Letting off some steam on a rainy autumnal-Saturday afternoon with some crazy violin bashing mixed in with some calmer/mystical elements. As usual, everything was fully improvised on the spot with no prior practice/planning, unedited... just whatever crazy noise I felt like making with my violin at the time.

The recording quality is a bit crappy - I should look into getting a standalone mic instead of using my laptop's one with the lid closed! Ah.. hindsight!

An In-Depth Look at How B-Bones Work - Including Details of the New Bendy Bones

Here's a breakdown of how the B-Bones in Blender work (including the new Bendy Bones stuff - see the other post in this series, which focusses more on the features themselves). I'm writing these notes up mainly so that I have something to refer to again in the future, if/when I need to do further work on this stuff. It took me a little while to figure out how some of this magic all fits together. However, now that I've figured this out, it turns out that it's quite easy to see all the extension points that this system has for adding interesting + useful features quite easily in fact. Therefore, before I forget about all this again, here we go!

BTW, all the diagrams within were done using Grease Pencil :)

Bendy Bones Dev Update

It's been a busy few months since I first announced that I was working on bringing Pepeland's Improved Bendy Bones to Blender. After being tied up with many other projects for the past few months, I just spent the weekend having a fun hackathon to get this functionality polished up and ready for general use in Blender proper. Along the way, I've also added a few cool new features, which really take B-Bones to the next level! Here's a sneak peak of some of these in action!

In each of these screenshots, you're seeing just a single B-Bone - no hidden stuff, no tricks. Just a single B-Bone...

UPDATE: It's now in master! (After a little fight with git to let me merge the branch successfully...) Woohoo!