I hope that with some more tuning I might be able to achieve flattened results with the detail of these examples. For now however, it seems that the fastest, easiest, and most beautiful method is also the most simple one — scanning in real paint on real paper.

That red paint got everywhere

Today I went up to the Butte for the first time in a while with a friend. What a great day. We walked down to the field at the bottom of the park, only to discover that it was filled with huge, towering wheat! In some places, the stalks were as tall as I am. In all of the times I have been there, I’ve never seen it like this. It was amazing. I didn’t take a lot of pictures, but here are two that I think came out the best.

Today I worked on an animated “throbber” icon for Qball and the GMPC project. You’ll see it turning up in the SVN Just a fun little Inkscape/Blender project. Sure, there are hundreds out there, but how could I resist the chance to try doing it myself? After recalling reading Jimmac’s write-up of his creation of a throbber in Blender, I set out to create my own in Blender. The method I ended up using actually was much heavier on Inkscape than Blender, which instead became more of a raw animating and compositing tool in the end.

Ta-da:
Just rotation:
With In/Out animation:

The solution I came up quite simply used a single plane with two textures: an Inkscaped shape mask and a Blender conical gradient. Blender is pretty versatile when it comes to mapping, so I simply made the gradient align with the object space, and the shape with the viewing window area. That way, I could just let the camera roll and the coloring rolled with it.

An interesting but unanticipated effect from this texture mapping effect was that somehow, the lighter circles were appearing smaller even though I had nothing that would have made this happening. It turns out that my 22×22 shape mask was so small that I believe the antialiasing/alpha channel of the texture was enough to shave off of the size of the circles when in the light state.

The real bling came in with the in and out animations I added. It started as poking around with the Blender animation system, and ended up as part of the finished project. How sweet would it be if throbbers smoothly moved in and out, like high quality animated parts of a ui? Hopefully eventually Qball will implement this in the GMPC interface.

After stumbling around in the GIMP trying to figure out how everyone made those damn frame montage things. Jimmac’s Image Magick commands at the bottom of his post proved invaluable for putting together the tiled version of the animation Qball wanted. Gotta remember that command-line mojo!

A walk in the park. You find the most amazing things when you’re not looking for them.

I just love how each post tells a story. How each image is just large enough for me to get sucked in. How the site design is simple and clean enough to drive the experience forward. How instead of keeping a schedule, the artist posts when he has something real to share. How it makes me want to go to NYC…

This guy must truly take his camera everywhere. Beautiful, and very inspiring.

This is incredible. Not only is Elephants Dream a high quality Creative Commons licensed short film (in HD 1920 and Surround Sound!), but it was made completely using Blender and other open source tools. And from the images, and their progress reports over the past year, it looks absolutely gorgeous.

My understanding is that the goal of the Orange Project was not simply to create an “Open Movie,” but to embody a symbiotic relationship between Blender development and real animation project. This has been a huge boon for the open source art community. Over the past year, they have created and documented some amazing new features and improvements to the Blender project, ones that will last far beyond the scope of their production. Which is not to say that their artistic creation won’t last for a long time to come.

However, the only thing that will last right now for is the time it will take to download their 815mb top quality version. I am still very much in the dark about the story, and the message of the movie, but anticipate it with very high regard. Ooh, I can’t wait! Downloads for the movie (in various sizes and formats) are available here.

Respect.

It was just one of those random ideas I get in the least opportune moments, like mid-running to the dinner table. In spite of this, I guess I managed to keep the excitement of the concept alive until I was free to work on it. It’s been a while since I’ve done some serious Inkscaping, though I did scoop up a development binary from their (recently redesigned!) official site a few days ago. It was a lot of fun to just loosely work on a picture like this… something I hadn’t really done in a long time.

The comic is essentially a jab at fads and our cultural value for appearances, in a simple 5-panel layout. A friend of mine when shown the image immediately drew a parallel to the iPod craze… though this was not really a direct intention from my creation. Go figure, all this time I was just thinking boxes. But hey, that’s what the job of the interpreter is for. What’s your interpretation?

Real scorcher today… up in the 80s-90s. Maybe it was the heat, or the
chocolate I consumed, but from art to music, today was a day of many
ideas. Maybe they were good ones. I won’t really know until tomorrow