Friday, March 30, 2007

Rube Goldberg machine video contest

I've been working on some really fun books lately, and among those was Tony Mullen's Introducing Character Animation with Blender. This book is sneaky-good; not only is Tony an excellent writer and teacher, but because the DVD contains the entire Blender application (it's open-source, meaning distributed freely), the book actually serves as a complete kit to start from absolute scratch making your own digital animations.

The Blender community is small but very active and very vocal. They recently held a contest for animations of weird and complex machines--Rube Goldberg devices--and the winning videos are a lot of fun. The desk chair in the third-place video is great, but I like that the first-place winner uses good audio as well as animation.

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

What *are* they thinking?

Diaries of a dog and a cat:

DAY 771 - There was some sort of gathering of their accomplices. I was placed in solitary throughout the event. However, I could hear the noise and smell the foul odor of the glass tubes filled with what they call "beer." More importantly, I overheard that my confinement was due to MY power of "allergies." Must learn what this is and how to use it to my advantage.