My budgie is almost ready to perch. I finally finished getting all the bones in the right front toes. This is the annoying part of computer animation. I need to make bones for each part of the body I wish to move and then tell the bones what parts of the flesh they move.

So here he is moving his toes around and getting ready to perch.

Budgie Feet: Front Toes Test on Vimeo

Here are two great captures of my grandfather from my Christmas vacation.

Bet you’ve wanted to see the budgie all the way around, eh? Well, here it is! I was doing a test on timing and light. Naturally, the timing is wrong! That’s why I’m doing a test! The camera is moving too fast, I’m going to try and work on that as I continue working on the modeling aspect.

Here ya go:

Budgie Camera Timing & Lighting Test 1 on Vimeo

Didn’t get to do any work on the budgie 3 Jan 2007. However, I did get a lot of texturing and adding of bones done late on the second, I just didn’t post it. Here are some of the highlights.

I added the strips behind the head, which you can see much better in the picture after this one.

I also added some “feathery-white” textures based on a picture I saw online of a blue budgie.

Part three, freshly posted just two days ago and here it is for you to see the exciting conclusion to “10 Little S’mores”.

10 Little S’mores Part 3 of 3 on Vimeo

I know you’ve been waiting in anticipation to see part two. That is, unless you went to vimeo and watched it already.

10 Little S’mores (Part 2 of 3) on Vimeo

So lycos died today and they provide the name servers for my blog. So my server, all tripod, and all angelfire pages were inaccessible today. Didn’t see anything about it off their home page, but the roughly 6 hour outage was annoying as heck!

Glad to be back!

For any creator of content, be it music, photos, or music, the greatest praise is to have people experience your content. This is why I care about how many views I have on my photos on flickr. It’s not that I want to compare myself to others - there are many who gets thousands of views on each photo they upload. I just want to know people are looking at my photos.

My wife gave me the idea to have some budgies star in my next short, my first true short after understanding everything I learned from " Penguin Flight" and " Hello World". So I started work on modeling them last night around 2200.

At first I figured it would be very hard and was getting quite discouraged. But then, I figured out a shape that seems to approximate the bird enough for a cartoon. After all, I’m not making a scientific textbook or something. I still have things to add (such as eyes) and texttured materials, but I think I’ve made some amazing progress.