Like Ursaw Major and Ursaw Minor, Comrade Bearsaw also made the transition to 3D, but with a few improvements along the way.

I wanted to make a render of just the two Ursaws. I also learned how to get smooth depth of field and ambient occlusion renders without them being all grainy in the process. Hopefully I can use this in getting the other scene to render faster.

This is the first of a pair of still-life images I had to make for an intermediate 3D class at school. The only requirements were that there be about 12 objects, made in Maya and Mudbox, arraigned differently for two images. This was our project for the entire semester. The second image isn't currently finished to a point I'm happy with. I've been having a certain rendering issue that I still need to deal with (something caused rendering time to jump from 1-2 hours to 24+ hours...), but I ran out of time before I had to leave for the break.

The vinyl toys have made another comeback, and the third one has received a much-needed revision and has become Comrade Bearzooka.

And it's been another two months since the last update. I've survived another semester at BYU and made the trip back home for Christmas break. I'll likely be more active next year now that I've got all my reading-heavy general ed. requirement classes out of the way.

With the new-found extra time I've had this last week, I was able to code up another new feature for my blog/website that other blogs have had for some time now. This time I've added the feature where if you post a large image, you can size it small and have it show a larger size when somebody clicks the image:

While there are "free" solutions that I could have used, I didn't want to deal with all the licensing issues and extraneous features I don't need, so I wrote my own from scratch. Right now, it automatically works on images I've posted in news posts that I've set to smaller sizes (I don't think I've posted any before now) and on all image posts that are wider than the template's 700px limit, like this one.

I think most of the bugs have been worked out by now, though I still need to do more testing. It works correctly (afaik) on Chrome and Firefox browsers, but I haven't tested Internet Explorer 9, IE 7 & 8 kind of work, and IE 6 just directs the browser window to the image when you click it instead. Bugs in IE 8 and older were expected, though, and there's not much I can do about that. If you're using one of them right now, I'm sure you're used to this kind of stuff anyways.

I've got one more image to post, and I think that will be it for updates this year.

These are various gesture drawings I made during the BYU Animation Club's weekly Wednesday-night gesture-drawing sessions.

This was an exercise in design I chose to do outside of class. I guess the prompt was to create a fairy-tale character, and I decided to go with Coyote from Native American lore. My aim was to imitate the Tlingit art style and try to define a 3-dimensional form with it.

Hello, it's been a while since my last post. A few things have happened since then. School has started back up again, and I was accepted into the Brigham Young University's animation program. I have a couple classes with projects that I'll be able to post up this semester, and I want to get into the habit of posting some of my sketchbook stuff more often.

I've also been trying to find work, though I don't think it helps that most of my past job locations don't even exist any more. Putting phone numbers on the application doesn't help when their disconnected or go to a different place now. I think one of them goes to some guy's house. It also doesn't help that I'm competing with actual computer-science majors for a lot of them. If anyone wants to commission artwork from me, just send me an email with a few details of what you want and I'll get back to you with a price to negotiate with.

I've also done a little re-organization on this site. A few pointless pages have been removed, the Content page has been removed in favor of just having it's categories moved to the main menu on the side. I've also fixed a few broken links. And by "a few," I mean the entire "Links" page was creating dud links.

The final for the Animation class I took during the spring semester required us to animate a character acting through a short voice clip. This was my project, with an additional inbetween pass that I did since the end of the class.

The sound byte is from a segment of a clip provided at the 11-Second Club website.

This is a scene from my latest solo animation project, titled "A Viking's Quest."

All effects are done in Adobe Flash. The fog effects are the easiest, as they comprise of a Movie Clip symbol of a shape tween and given alpha transparency and a thick blur. Layer a few of these on top of each other, and you have a blur effect similar to the one seen here.

Of course, using Movie Clip symbols has a long history of being difficult to convert to video. However, since Flash CS3 was released Quick Time export has been capable of rendering Movie Clip symbols as they would play in a normal Flash file. Unfortunately, the way it works causes complex scenes to render poorly, resulting in choppy scenes as the program drops frames to keep up with the recording process.

My current plan to work around this is to export a version through this method as is, so that I have an accurate audio track. The next step will be to render the movie at around 4 frames per second so that I have a video containing all frames in their proper position. Then it's just a matter of bringing them both into a video editing program and finishing things up there.

While Notepad++ is a very useful freeware program for editing all sorts of code and syntax, it's code highlighting feature leaves a lot to be desired for Flash ActionScript. Not only do .as files default to Haskell, but the syntax highlighting hasn't been updated since ActionScript 2.

This download intends to fix the Haskell issue and add a lot of commands, classes, functions and variables to the language dictionary. The ZIP archive contains two files: langs.xml and langs.model.xml. To use this update, copy and replace the files in Notepad++'s directory, usually located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\.

The application deadline for the BYU Animation program is finally passed, so now I can go back to do other things, like writing an 8-page group paper for History of Animation, getting ready for finals which start at the end of next week, reading things for class, and drawing goofy-looking weasels who live in holes while people talk at me, apparently.

I've also added a Google Friend Connect widget to the main blog page, so people can follow my blog through that thing. I'll move it to the right side bar thing later, as I don't have time to mess with the templates right now.

A rendering of the communist space pirate from a previous sketch done in Flash.

The Simple Flash Comic Engine is a free Flash-based system that will allow anyone, no matter how little programming knowledge they have, to create Flash-based comics. Creating comics with this engine is as simple as creating frames in the timeline to act as pages. No additional programming is required, the engine deals with all navigation methods and includes a preloader.

Another reason for the engine is to provide an expected means of navigating through the pages. As of now, most Flash comics are self-designed and navigating through them changes between each one. This engine maximizes accessibility by providing click-able navigation buttons, many sets of keyboard shortcuts, and mouse scroll-wheel support*.
Supported keyboard shortcuts: Left & right arrow keys, Page Up & Page Down, Space & Backspace, - & +, A & D, and Enter & Del/. on the number pad.

While Simple Flash Comic Engine is free to download, use, and modify, you do not have the rights to sell the engine in any form. You cannot charge anyone to "provide" them with the engine. I don't care what you do with the end result. You can sell comics that use this engine, you just cannot sell the engine itself.

Regarding credits and the "Powered By" links: while I would prefer that they remain, they are not mandatory and you can remove them if you so desire. The intent for them is to promote the engine so that others who wish to create comics using Flash can easily find the engine.

Contents of zip file:
simple-flash-comic-engine_mx.fla - AS2-based FLA for Flash MX through Flash 8
simple-flash-comic-engine_cs3.fla - AS3-based FLA for Flash CS3 and up

*scroll wheel support depends on the version of the Flash authoring program that you are using. While the code is included in the Flash MX version, scroll wheel support didn't come around until Flash MX 2004. If you are using the AS2-based MX file in a later Flash IDE, you will want to set the Publish Settings to export to Flash Player 7 or above to ensure that the scroll wheel navigates properly.

A short animated skip cycle to get used to using a tablet again.

This is a random walk cycle I made a while ago.

This is the explosion sample from when I was working on the graphics for Shattered Colony: The Survivors.

Those Soviet scientists are at it again!

Another piece from Drawing for Animation. For the midterm, we were to take the vinyl toy design we created, and add another element to it. Our class chose "soviet."

We had a "vinyl toy" project for the Drawing for Animation class that I took last semester. We were to pick a theme for a vinyl toy and design one over the week. The theme we chose was "disturbed circus."

So here is my disturbed circus vinyl toy design (right to left), Ursaw Major and Ursaw Minor.

This was the final project for the Drawing for Animation class I took this semester. We were supposed to use the character derived from a fashion photograph from the previous project, give them a non-human sidekick, pit them in a fight with an ice-monster, and tune it for an audience of 12-to-14-year-olds. Therefore, the result is the Happy Scooter Guy and his hyrax-sidekick are fleeing from the villainous Ice Cream Man, who requires a bio-suit made out of a refrigerator to survive in his current environment.

Unfortunately, since I seem to be permanently locked out of my laptop thanks to some kind of BIOS "feature" Toshiba felt was necessary, this is the only project from that class that I can currently post. The others, including the one with an explanation to the origin of the Happy Scooter Guy, will have to wait until next year to be posted.

So with that, I think this is it for this year.

The final project in the Intro to 3D class I took this semester was to create a bug and place it in a scene, using Maya.