graphics tablet woes
Full of good intentions after downloading Pencil, I managed to dig out my graphics tablet from storage but was unable to locate the pen required to use it. Rather a major setback. A quick look on e-bay failed to reveal a pen for sale on its own, so I’m keeping an eye on a couple of used tablets with deadlines over the next day or so, and may bid for one or other of them.
In the meantime, out came the sheets of faithful layout paper to be cut into small pieces. You can import scanned drawings into Pencil, so I’ll try that route, and leave the drawing tools until I have a working tablet once more.
cell animation software
In my current state of flitting around creative activities instead of concentrating on any one in particular, I feel like trying some traditional cell animation. I don’t, however, want to scan in lots of drawings on paper (a technique I’ve used in the past), and the only relevant software that I have is Flash.
Flash is a wonderful programme, but its vector tools are annoying - they insist on inserting additional control points. This may result in smooth curves, but it makes amending them ridiculously long-winded and difficult. As a result, I wouldn’t consider using it for hand-drawn animation.
ToonBoom Studio is the other likely contender. I don’t have a copy, but I could download a trial version. That would be a temporary solution because it’s expensive, so I’m unlikely to buy it. I also get the impression that over the last few releases it’s been trying to become all things to all animators and is far more powerful than someone like me would require.
So to see what else is available, I had a quick look round the web for Mac software. Here’s what I found:
Most of these programmes are new to me. Some of them are for Windows as well as Macs. Animatricks creates animated effects for single images, while GIF Builder is more for small web animations, so neither of these is suitable for traditional cell animation.
The rest are much closer to what I was looking for, but Flipbook, The Tab, The Tab Lite and ToonBoom Studio Express all cost significant sums of money (most come in various versions with different features at different prices).
Pencil, however, is free, which immediately makes it more interesting, so it was the only one I bothered to download. First impressions are good, too. I shall investigate further…
lack of activity
I wouldn’t call it a setback as such, but a planned trip out this morning (not a very exciting one, merely to take recycling to the tip and a general shop at the supermarket) had to be cut short because I felt far more tired than I expected. I’ve also achieved little recently in the way of creative stuff, mainly through lack of energy and motivation.
Still, I have it in mind to do some simple drawn animation tomorrow. We’ll see what comes of that.
jasper morello
As a break from the headaches of Processing, I watched ‘The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello‘ by Anthony Lucas. It has a beautiful style, combining a steampunk aesthetic with silhouette animation reminiscent of the work of Lotte Reiniger, with surprisingly subtle detail. The extremely restrained use of colour fits perfectly the industrial machining and edgy voyaging, while Tom said the uneasy nautical theme reminded him a lot of Joseph Conrad. Powerful stuff.
Incidentally, a collection of fairy tales animated by Lotte Reiniger is released today.
rotate? it’s making my head spin
Nope - I still don’t get rotation in Processing. I sometimes think I’ve started to grasp it, but then I change something and the result doesn’t make sense.
rotation
In a previous post, I wrote about trying to rotate some leaves in a Processing sketch, but stated that it was proving more difficult than I’d expected.
Rotation, in Actionscript, is simple. When creating movie clips, you can specify the pivot or accept the default one, then in the code you merely provide a number of degrees for the clip to be rotated around that point.
Processing, however, is not quite that straightforward. There is no concept of choosing a pivot (there’s no concept of movie clips either, for that matter), and the rotate command operates on the origin of the window. I tried writing my own custom rotate function using trigonometry, but even omitting the flexibility I’d built into the leaf function to allow for scaling, it was too complicated to get my head round.
The alternative is to enter the world of affine transformation and matrix resetting. As with bezier curves, you don’t need to understand the maths, but it’s far from intuitive. Or perhaps the subject is merely explained badly in the book I’ve got. I need to experiment more to grasp it (or get another book).
valley of lost things found in the valley of lost things
Way back in time, all the way to 2006, I posted entries to this blog, but was eventually forced to close it down because I was getting a lot of spam, and it was generating a lot too, according to my webhost. Rather than dig around the hundreds of files to find out how I had been hacked, I decided it would be easiest just to delete the entire database that held the various posts, so that’s what I did.
A few weeks ago, when re-starting the blog at this web address, I created a new, empty database. Imagine my surprise, then, when I tested the RSS feed for this new blog, to find it picking up blogposts from October to December 2006. I tried clicking on a couple to see where I would be taken, but I was informed that no such posts exist. Yet the RSS reader found them, so they must exist somewhere. But where? Ah, the mysteries of cyberspace… It must be that pesky Master Control Program that Jeff Bridges had so much trouble with.
(I’m working on the creative stuff, and will start posting about it soon, promise.)
the valley (obscured by clouds)
During my recent stay in hospital, I agreed to be the subject for some environmental portraiture photography by Lisa. In the evening visiting hours, we snuck off to some quiet corridors, where I stood placidly in my pyjamas and dressing gown while she clicked away.
Arnold Newman, perhaps the first to use environmental portraiture, took photographs of people partly obscured by the objects that provided information about them, so Lisa posed me behind doors and bends in the corridor, a relatively small figure in an overpowering and dehumanising surrounding. This morning she took some more shots at home, but these were closer to, and less about the background.
These recent shots were taken after the removal of the tube that has dangled from my nostril for the past three or four months, so I’m less obviously defined by my illness, but we’ve agreed that it’s important to plan other shots that deal with different aspects of my life. As Patrick McGoohan so very nearly said, “I’m not an ill person, I’m a free man”.
good afternoon everybody
“Good afternoon everybody. How are you? Do you remember me, Jasmine Bligh? Well here we are after a lapse of nearly seven years ready to start again and of course we are all terribly excited and thrilled.”
I was due to return to hospital yesterday for a further throat dilation, but a couple of weeks ago, my throat narrowed suddenly and my previous symptoms returned, so in an embarassingly melodramatic fashion I was taken to hospital in an ambulance the day after my previous post. I was discharged today, and now, like the BBC announcer above, I can resume service once more.
leafy glade
I’ve enjoyed creating various interfaces using Actionscript (such as Michiko Koshino, Strange Creatures, a tile pattern generator and an illustration of a food chain). It’s a powerful language, but there’s a lot to get your head round, especially when it comes to manipulating the data in bitmap images. Frankly, I balk at that.
I was pleasantly surprised, therefore, when I came across Processing, an open source (and therefore free) language that was specifically created for people more interested in art than code.
‘Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art‘ is a good introduction, and I’ve been working my way through it, alternating between skim reading and slowly experimenting with some of the many examples. Today, I combined my first steps in coding bezier curves (fortunately you don’t have to grasp the underlying maths) with my rudimentary understanding of functions to create:
The code involves the generation of 100 leaves of random scale, position and colour, though the colour is constrained so that the paler shades tend to be closer to the front and the darker shades further to the back, as though they’re in shadow.
I want to build in a slight random rotation so that the leaves aren’t all at exactly the same angle, but it’s proving more difficult than I first imagined.