Welcome to March 2018 – the month of the Cambridge Analytica scandal on the Internet, a ball-tampering scandal in Australia and a big-arse broken drill here in Perth.
In happier news, eastern quolls have been reintroduced to the Australian mainland after going extinct there, and both Krita 4.0 and Blender 2.79b came out in March 2018 too! Yay!
Here’s what I got up to.
Synthesiser!
Two new Eurorack modules arrived this month:
- Befaco MIDI Thing (kit, racked up 6 March 2018) [modulargrid]
- Erica Synths Graphic VCO (26 March 2018) [modulargrid]
The MIDI Thing has a simple but useful job: I can now drive my modular synth from my computer’s sequencer like any other external or virtual instrument, allowing finely controlled Nikmis-style baroque electronica… or whatever, I just link to Nikmis whenever I can.
The Graphic VCO is a multiple wavetable oscillator which allows etch-a-sketch style wave-cycle editing from the module itself. Its sound hearkens back to the gritty lo-fi digital scratch of Waldorf’s PPG Wave synths from the 1980s. Here’s a little sample with notes and modulation data coming from the TiNRS Tuesday.
After buying yet another set of dud bucket brigade delay chips off the interweb, I’ve abandoned the 106 Chorus build again. There’s too much counterfeit crap out there and I don’t want that chorus enough to keep buying duds. Yet.
Animation!
For now I want to keep upskilling with CGC’s awesome animation courses, then see how I go with texturing and painting. When Blender 2.8 is stable and feature-complete enough to make a short movie with, I’ll hop back into Fishtank and use it as a way of familiarising myself with this new version.
Also I drew a random monster bandicoot in gumboots thing. Maybe he’d be a good character build. What do you think?
Animation exercises
I’m a couple of exercises shy of finishing CG Cookie’s Animation Bootcamp course. Here’s my exercise submissions for this month, starting with hand-animated physics to develop timing and spacing, then bringing in squash & stretch, drag/overlap and even some character animation!
The bowling ball here is OK but the other balls… eh…
This one is technically good but a little unexciting. It’s surprisingly fiddly to make a ball roll believably over a sharp point. Really proud I pulled it off.
Squash and stretch comes in here and I’m still a bit green with keeping it consistent.
These motion graphics are a little rough on the settle and lack a bit of whoosh on the zoom.
This is the first bit of character animation we got to do in the course. Pretty happy with how it turned out!
This exercise was about hand-animating drag and follow-through into the antenna. We got given a swoop motion to start with but I redid it. The anticipation came out a little bit “square” and the settle needs work, but the antenna work is pretty good!
The last two assignments are both walk cycles. I wanted to have them finished by the end of the month, but the day job is getting more intense and walk cycles are kind of hard.
Thanks for catching up with me. If you’ve got questions or comments, feel free to fire them at me on Mastodon or Twitter. 🙂
