Now this is MUCH better. Rigged together today after work.

Apartment Lights, etc Test 2 on Vimeo

just went to upload a file and to my delight discovered that we have a new limit from 30mb to 250mb!!!

from my vimeo page: The cartoon I’m going to be making featuring the budgie you’ve been seeing will take place in this apartment living room.

There seem to be two flaws.

1. The camera seems to move in a strange, unanticipated way in the beginnig
2. I need to fix the lighting situation. I had done most of my lighting testing with the walls off, adding the walls has apparently caused a lot of light to be blocked.

Apartment Lights, etc Test 1 on Vimeo

The short will take place in an apartment living room so I’m taking a little bit of a break with the budgie to work on the living room. (This is, in many ways, a lot easier than the bird, so it’s a welcome change)

Finished my first ever couch today. I’m pretty happy with how it came out. I didn’t even look at any tutorials - I just worked at it for about 30 minutes until I figured out the best way to represent a couch and what I would have to do to get it. Blender is one of those tools, like Photoshop, that takes a while to get used to, but then, once you start thinking in the program’s paradigm, you become insanely productive. So here’s what the apartment looks like so far in lo res and, by clicking, hi res. (The object hanging on the wall is a very small LCD Tv. I hope to give him a larger allowance so he can buy a bigger Tv. q;o) But for now this’ll do.

I’ve got a ton of projects going right now, so I’m taking a break from photography until I get a bit more free time. I began to realize that when I was just taking a picture right before going to bed of just about anything, just to fulfill my picture of the day, I was just ending up with mediocre pictures and mediocrity was beginning to creep into my other projects. I’ll come back to it soon enough.

Democracy player is an interesting new type of video software which allows the user to subscribe to video feeds and have them automatically downloaded. One way to think of it is like a TiVo for internet videos. I’ll post some more after I get some experience with it, but if you want to go ahead an use it for my vimeo videos so that they go right to you, just click on the link below. I’ll also be adding a link to the side bar

I’m writing this from flock, a new web browser which comes with a lot of built-in utitlities for the most popular web technologies including flickr and blogging. I’m writing this post from within flock’s blog utility. I’m not sure yet if this is a worthy feature or just a gimmick. I intend to try flock out for a few days and see.

It’s just like the old days of Netscape vs Internet Explorer when more and more technologies kept emerging. After IE won the battle things were stagnant until Firefox came around with their tabbed browsing and so forth. We’ll see how this turns out!

The budgie is almost complete. Here I am testing all of the bones. I just have a few things left to fix up with the bones. Then I need to fix the tapering of the wings. After that I just have a few little things like making the bird blink. Then I’ll be about 80% done towards finishing up the cartoon the budgie will be staring in.

Budgie Final Rig: Test 1 on Vimeo

Finally got to do some more work on the budgie today after having taken about 4-5 days off to do other stuff like photography and be with my wife. Finished rigging up all 6 toes on the bird. All I have left in the rigging is to do his legs and creating a tracking bone for moving his eyes. Here’s another foot animation to showcase all the little toes moving around. I hope the next one will have the entire bird moving through his entire range of motions as a test.

I’ve been inspired by a string of videos on Vimeo involving live action stop-motion. Usually stop motion is used to animate inanimate objects or create movies such as “The Nightmare Before Christmas”. But with the cheapness of digital photography, more and more people are turning to using stop-motion to animate themselves. I didn’t have this intention when I shot this sequence of photos. I was just trying to make sure to get that moment when the person opens their Christmas present and has that sense of excitement in their eyes. So I took a lot of pictures before and after gifts were opened.