A Hundred Dollar Drawing with deluxe “making-of” video:
Category: Computer
“Library Futures” for Library Futures
“Daemon Rocket” for Cath
“Nerdy Hacking” for Pamela
Pamela tells me she commissioned these for her husband. I hope they’re still married after he sees them.
GNU & Improved GIFs
Big ups to my friend Barry Israelewitz, who wrote a shell script for ffmpeg (based on this article shared in this comment by Paul Wise) and taught me how to use Terminal on my mac to make much better animated gifs than Flash exports directly. Currently it’s significantly more work than just exporting .gif from Flash, because I have to instead export a PNG sequence, import the frames to Quicktime 7, and export as a new .mov to use as an input file for making the gif. This may be streamlined a little bit in the future, but for now at least I can make higher quality gifs if I need to.
Below are close-up details of single frames. “Before” is here, “after” is above.
Here’s a smaller-sized (because fewer frames) animated gif for side-by-side before-and-after comparison:
Much better, no? Plus using Terminal is METAL.
A Bug in My Ass
So I’m animating an ass for Seder-Masochism, so the Hebrews have something to carry their stuff out of Egypt so their arms are free to let them walk jauntily and leap around. I export a test and see this weird artifact on the upper foreleg. Flash is rendering the shape as it looks in vector editing mode. If you look carefully you’ll see the point on the upper right has a little bezier handle. Weird, right?
It’s a bug in Flash (pre-Adobe Macromedia Flash 8, the only Flash I use), the likes of which I’ve never seen before. To make the artifact go away I had to re-draw the foreleg. Below is a render sans bug.
What’s great about this is it solved my problem about how to best use “ass” in a blog post title. I was considering “What an Ass” or “A Fine Ass” or “I Made Myself an Ass,” but this is much better.