The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 11,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
I started using Ubuntu 11.10 (Upgraded from 11.04) lately because my 2-yr old Macbook White has been experiencing kernel panics which deems unusable at the moment. So far, I am very much liking Ubuntu and would probably keep using it for work and quick hacks. However, one problem that arises with my Ubuntu is that it blanks out when resized.
To fix this :
A more graphical how-to can be seen at http://askubuntu.com/questions/66652/windows-go-blank-when-resizing. Credits to the guy who was able to solve this!
I have made a work-in-progress rigging demo reel for the time I’ve spent in school. I have yet to show my expertise in building biped/quadruped character rigs and my knowledge in scripting and programming.
Animation is truly challenging. It’s when you sit down and spend your time thinking about story poses and breakdowns and drawing them all out. It’s also about how you want the timing and spacing to be as accurate as possible so the movements look believable. Sometimes, I find that the classically trained animators have a better grasp of moving the characters because they know how to draw out the story poses, extremes, breakdowns, secondary breakdowns, etc. Although as challenging as it may be, it is still fun to learn because it takes a lot of patience to master this craft and it makes my observation and understanding of life more enjoyable.
Moving on, I animated Bill Cosby’s Noah’s Ark for an assignment in class. What I did in the first pass is that I modeled simple props and focused on the Carpenter’s (a.k.a Noah) movement first.
Then on the second pass, I keyed the neighbor’s story poses in stepped tangent and arranged some of the timing and spacing on the Carpenter Rig.
I still have a lot to learn though and I’m learning a lot during these few months in school. Hopefully, I could continue improving in the future. 
Eclipse and Maya
I am currently stumped with connecting the Eclipse Maya Editor on my macbook. It always shows a “Bad version number in .class file” error, that’s why the Maya Editor Prefs Page throws a NoClassDefFoundError whenever I load Eclipse. I tried checking the jar file which was unhelpful because it was producing “non-human readable” ASCII characters. I also changed my Java Preferences to version 1.6 which caused the JVM on Eclipse to crash after I rebooted my macbook. I am hoping I could make this work without installing Bootcamp so I won’t waste my time installing Windows 7 (and Maya later on). I’ll try looking for other solutions on the forums but it seems that installing Bootcamp is an optimal solution right now.
Eclipse and Project Euler
Anywhoo, I decided to take a break on working with Maya and try to do a little bit of coding in Java. I am solving some of the problems on ProjectEuler even though I haven’t done much. My goal for doing this is to develop my logical thinking and to come up with efficient algorithms in the long run. I will be using Eclipse as my IDE for the exercises so it should be fun! Yaay!
Problem 1
If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23.
Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.
In Java…
public class NatNumMult35 {
/*
*If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5,
*we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23.
*
*Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.
*
*/
private int num;
private int sumMult=0;
public NatNumMult35(int num) {
this.num = num;
sumMult = this.sumOfMultiples(this.getMultiplesOfThreeAndFive(num));
}
public int[] getMultiplesOfThreeAndFive(int num){
int[] multThreeAndFive = new int[2];
multThreeAndFive[0] = (num-1)/3;
//Determines how many multiples of 3 in a given number;
multThreeAndFive[1] = (num-1)/5;
//Determines how many multiples of 5 in a given number;
return multThreeAndFive;
}
public int sumOfMultiples(int[] temp){
int sum=0;
for(int i=1; i = temp[0]; i++){
// Adds up multiples of 3;
sum+=(3*i);
}
for(int i=1; i = temp[1]; i++){
// Adds up multiples of 5 which are not divisible by 3.
if(((5*i)%3) != 0) {
sum+=(5*i);
}
}
return sum;
}
}
Yesterday at Life Drawing Class, we discussed about draperies. Ian, our professor, talked about how to use different tonal values for the creases of the drapery. These were some of the drapery studies that I did during class. And so I played around with the tonal values – Yay! 
I hope that it turned out well.
2-5 minute study
5-10 minute study
10 minute study
We were assigned to create 10 poses with the Norman rig. I finished 6 stills for the first two days. Hopefully I can finish the four remaining stills by tonight. For now, here’s a set of the poses that I’ve been working on.
Pose from the movie, Dirty Dancing
Tripping on Floors
Rockstar Pose
“Say Cheese”
“Huh?”
Gymnastics Pose
This was something I have drawn unconsciously at Life Drawing last month. I couldn’t redraw something similar to this one right now. Nothing’s impossible though! It just needs a little bit of practice and application of a wider range of techniques/styles.
We studied and drew bones as part of our Life Drawing class last semester. It was not as in-depth as the bone studies that the ANI program has but we got a clear perspective of how bones are placed inside the body. By drawing bones, it gives me a good sense of human proportion. These are some of the sketches that I’ve submitted as part of my final portfolio last semester.
Honestly, I’m afraid of tangible anatomical representations – whether it be real or not. Good thing that we’d be drawing the muscles from reference materials and not from real ones. I just hope that no one suggests that we’d be going to a morgue for our field trip. (Gulps) T__T
About two months ago, we had our mini field trip at the ROM. It was a week day and we thought that we’d have the museum all to ourselves. We didn’t expect that we’d be having our field trip on the same week as the March break. So when we arrived at the ROM, there were a lot of kids roaming around the lobby area. Anyway, we spread out the museum so we could find our ‘drawing spot’ amidst the crowd.
I roamed around the second floor and I couldn’t find a good spot where I could put my stool down and draw. I entered the Birds section and found that there were fewer people who pass that area. So I sat in front of the bird models and drew away. It was until later that two of my classmates joined me in that section.
Such a copycat that I was, I saw my classmate drawing just specific parts of the bird. This time, I drew the wings and added a little bit of texture using my blue animation pencil.
Later that day, we handed our drawings to our life drawing instructor. He gave his assessment of our drawings then we headed back to school because we had class that evening. Overall, it was a good drawing experience for me at the ROM. I’ll try to come back when I get some free time.
