This time, I’m going to do my link of the post first: www.wondertouch.com .  This is the home of ParticleIllusion, a $300 2-D special effects software.  It took me a while to get used to the frames, and only a while after I got the hang of it, the trial ran out.  Yes, from what little you know about me, you could probably tell I got the (free) 30-day trial.  ParticleIllusion does not record sound (which I found more than a little annoying) so you may not want to get it if you want full-fledged movies, but nevertheless it’s nice for fun little things as a hobby (e.g. the movie I made of myself below–you may recognize the girl in the background as Leena from the photoshop post). Sorry all my videos are so short, but the better I get at these things the longer and more complex my movies will get!

WARNING: As the name says, this deals with the technical stuff behind the creation of Yoda.  If you aren't an amateur computer animator or just aren't interested, you can just skip this post. Well.  Going back to Yoda, I may as well start at the beginning: Mark I.  This model was pretty simple.  Lay out a plane as a backdrop, scale five cubes to get his feet, arms and torso, two more cubes for his lightsaber, some cones, spheres and cylinders for the background and party hat, and his head was just an extruded monkey head that's added in to Blender.  Quite simple, in fact the arms aren't even the same color if you look closely enough. Now to Mark II (or I.V, or whatever you want): the movie.  By then I'd fixed the different-arm-color problem, scaled up the backgroud a bit and learned how to render, though the biggest change in my opinion (other than its being a movie instead of a picture) is the addition of disco.  I added (painfully) mul...

Today I’m talking about Photoshops, when you take something that really happened & recreate it digitally because you forgot to take a real picture.  It started out when I was awkwardly warped into the Star Wars universe during the Sith Wars (thousands of years before Episode I), handed a lightsaber, and told to go to a planet to destroy an evil version of me, who also warped in from a different universe.  I didn’t have a camera, so I later recreated it the best I could on photoshop: And what’s more, the same thing happened with my siblings… Klenda got into a saber clash with her clone (not too wittingly as they both have equal strength), Zorg fared well against his (and he stole Mace Windu’s saber, in case you were wondering–never mind that he wouldn’t exist for another few thousand years), and Leena, stuck with two evil clones, just sat back and watched them kill themselves off.  After that was done, then what happened?  You guessed it: I got stuck...

Finally, what I promised: showing off! When I first downloaded Blender, I didn’t know how to do anything other than just scale cubes in odd ways.  Then, after the manual I was reading told me how to actually ADD stuff, I really got going!  I am going to show you my first project ever from before I even knew how to render:   Yoda on Dagobah.  How cool is that?  The general idea here was just to see what I could do.  I remember creating a picture of the interior of his hut (complete with a painting of his glory days–him with a purple mohawk and electric guitar), but I think I deleted it by accident.  But the good news is: I made a video of him!  And I included disco lights!  It’s only about 3 seconds long, but still: After a while I kept working on him between projects and despite the glitches with his clothing I think I got something here with my latest prototype: Today’s link-of-the-post: www.pixologic.com !  This ca...

I use Blender & Sculptris for my animations.  That’s it.  This post is so small it doesn’t even have a link-of-the-post. Ok, so maybe I should make this a bit bigger… First of all, I should talk about one of the things teenagers demidolts* should be interested in: video games.  I  have already changed my mind about no links & instead made there several links.  First, I started “making” computer games with a program called Kodu .  Kodu’s mascot–some sort of robot named Kodu. Kodu is a free (assuming you log in, etc.) 3-D computer game-making software for simple programming.  I goofed around on that until I ran into Scratch (which is also 100% free).  At first Scratch seemed to be more work for less stuff (e.g. it can only make 2-D games), but I actually figured out that Kodu was more limiting than Scratch, not just easier.   And after that, I got into Blender, which is (you guessed it) also free, and it has its own...

First of all, I have to tell you, the title of the blog is totally deceiving.  This is the blog of a junior computer animator , not a group of junior computer animators.   However, why I named this “jrcomputeranimat or s .wordpress.com” is because all of you younger guys (or older guys; I’m only 14 here) can come here for suggestions and great links to digital animation sites. Now that that’s all clear, the second thing is that this is not only computer animation.  It also includes stuff from Photoshop and a bit about book writing, since I sent in a query earlier and plan to have it published.  Then why didn’t I name this blog, “www.jrcomputeranimatorsandphotoshoppersandpotentalfutureauthors.blogspot.com”?  I dunno.  Go figure.  But rest assured that this blog will mostly be about its namesake: computer animation. And then one of the last things: why do I even run this blog?  The answer is a combination of answers: 1: A friend of m...