KODA

You’re looking at a little experiment tonight with fluid dynamics in Blender. I had an idea to use the fluid dynamics in the new version of Blender to simulate the grungy paint splashes that are the staple of many modern vector art styles. The premise was, if Blender will let me simulate throwing a bunch of fluid at a wall, it will hopefully come out looking pretty neat. This technique eventually gave some results, but turned out to be both time-consuming and cpu-consuming. Unfortunately, the computation required to achieve the level of splash detail I desired proved difficult to manage. The image above is one of the most balanced and detailed images I got, and yet is still very simplistic and lacks the fineness that makes the style appealing to the eye.

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.

Download:

192kbps OGG Vorbis

128kbps MP3 VBR

Way back when in April, I wrote about a little song I composed and recorded on my laptop and an iffy vocal mic. It was a frenzied effort at making it work after an hour of mixed success. There were obvious technical flaws in my recording: the micing was mono and sounded terrible, there’s was buzz throughout the piece, and I played it like a new and unfamiliar piece.

Recently, my father acquired some really cool home recording equipment. This meant a chance to try things again and get it right technically; also a chance to test out the new stuff with a song I’d had months to play and practice.

This afternoon we sat down and tried things out. Micing up the piano was very exciting, as we finally had two mics and so were able to do it in stereo. Sitting down and playing was a bit stressful, though this time I was much more used to playing with the mics running. The version I settled upon was the 3rd or 4th rendition — many others were stumble-filled as I was often jarringly aware of being recorded.

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.

Thank you everyone for making this such a magical birthday, and for making everything so meaningful. Today didn’t feel so much like a birthday as much as just a really great day.

Tomorrow I shall wake up one year older. Well, one year older by the arbitrary count of 365 days, but one year older still.

To me this will mark the achievement of another checkpoint in my life, but at the same time also another step finished in it. I find this very exciting. There’s still so much I want to experience, to discover, to do… and so much that I’m immensely grateful and proud of for having experienced.

Time to go sleep, to be able to make tomorrow an amazing day!

6:10 on the Firefox TimeTracker extension today… kind of sad. Then again, I have been making up for being outside all week… but wow. 6 hours on the web. I should declare tomorrow an Internet holiday, but I know I won’t…

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.

It takes so much effort simply to face oneself.

Yesterday, I discovered that the graffiti I found about a month ago has been painted over. Frankly I’m not surprised, but it’s hard to understand how people can take such unique art and slap a dull brown paint over it. It wasn’t even out in the open — you had to look to find it. How much culture and honest self-expression is lost to this “cleaning?”
That image was one of the most personal and raw statements I’ve seen for quite some time, and it is really too bad it had to be painted over. How fascinating that it’s expression should be further emphasized by it’s very destruction.

Today marks the day upon which my beloved childhood pet Mazel passed away. Tonight is the night a year ago that I stayed with her as she died. Tonight is a night of ghosts, of memories, of reaching back to a time that feels so close and yet so far away. I remember sitting with her, that sleepless night, resting on the floor to try to be nearer to her. I remember stroking her body outsite my room, trying to calm her breathing. It’s ironic but fitting that because of company tonight I shall be sleeping in the living room, the room in which she died.

Tonight I’m just feeling melancholic and reflective. I couldn’t stay sad long after I realized I wasn’t mourning for her as much as I was for me. Often when I think of her I feel a boost of love, of motivation. Reconciling her death pushed me to reach out, to imagine higher goals in my life, to try to reach out and connect with people. While I didn’t have the heart to photograph her on her decline, after her death, I felt drawn to photography: to be able to document and capture a bit of the things that I loved. This medium and it’s meaning has grown in different directions on me over the past year, but the process of dealing with her loss was what inspired me to get started.