Just got a book today that I ordered from Amazon.com - “Inspired 3D Short Film Production”. As I watched the DVD of shorts that came with the book and thought of the dozens of ideas swirling around in my head, I came to terms with the reality of computer animation - the animation step itself, it pretty trivial with respect to the rest of the process. In other words, in a good animation package like Blender, the animation is actually the relatively easy part. The hardest part is making the objects, giving them textures/colors, and rigging them up with bones so they can be animated. After that, animation is relatively easy. Relatively easy because, it’s still pretty hard to create convincing animation. However, making a good model in the first place is tough. It takes the Blender character animation book until page 82 to finish up a character of moderate difficulty. Of course, the process gets fast with time. I was able to model the budgie a lot faster than I was able to model my penguin and Raul Domingo. However, it still takes a fair amount of time to model a reasonably nice character.

Since about my Senior Year at Cornell I’ve been shooting in RAW. When I got Photoshop CS 2 I was so happy with all the new features they added to make the workflow so efficient. It really eliminates the “raw is more work” complain that most people have. Recently, as I was reading a book on raw workflows, I realized that, ever since getting CS2, I’ve still been doing things horribly inefficiently!

Some of these may be repeats from past posts, but so what, it’s *MY* blog

The Departed - for best picture.

I stayed up, so I figured I’d blog it. The movie also won Scorcese his first Oscar.

I just want to share some shots that call out to me. I’ve been so busy with so many things from jump-starting a photography side business to trying to realize all of the Blender Computer animation ideas in my head. So, I may or may not have time to blog. Here are some great shots:

The iPhone commercial shown tonight during the oscars was pretty sweet! It featured clips from a ton of movies where people said, “hello.” It revealed a June release date and, as far as I know, is the first commercial for the phone. Looks like they got the trademark thing settled with Cisco.

Luckily, my younger brother pre-ordered this for me for my birthday (which came months ago), because the book is now sold out. Ever since I heard about it in Oct 2006, I couldn’t wait for it to come out. There are really great tutorials online, but I needed a nice coherent, beginning to end book to guide me through the process at least once. As you know, I’ve already done one animated short, " Penguin Flight", and a few quick animated scenes in preparation for my next animated short, " Budgies". However, although I have the basic techniques down, I know there are enough gaps in my knowledge to make any reasonably length animation a pain in the butt.

One of the biggest trends over the last few years has been customization. People customize their cellphones, myspace pages, websites and computers. Via the popuplar widgets system on the Mac OSX, SuperKaramba for KDE, and gDesklets in Gnome, people customize their desktops to make them unique to their vision. Even Microsoft has jumped on the bandwagon recently and introduced a widget system of its own. All of these customizations would have taken place on the computer no matter what.

Here’s another shot someone has asked to publish: As I mentioned before, getting published (as wish my other shot on NPR or the beach shots in the Tampa guide) is a photographer’s dream come true. It’s an acknowledgment that one has pictures worthy of others adding to their reports, websites, brochures, etc.

Here’s the email for this photo:

That picture is an awesome shot. I would like to know if you would give me permission to use this shot on a college report on the cultural aspect of the Brighton Beach community.

With all the recent hype revolving around Second Life, Darren Barefoot created First Life. In case the site goes down or is sold off, here’s a screenshot. Click it for a full resolution view.