And we have another site redesign
I went ahead and redid my site for the millionth time, mainly because the original header (hero) was too data heavy, and also not very interesting. Also, I wanted to clean up the look of the site, and improve its mobile presentation as well.
The core of this site is a normalization and base HTML5 stylesheet, as well as a companion JavaScript file with a set of functions that correlate to the added element styles. I sourced these two docs based on information that I had gathered from all over the web, and are easily portable.
My picture of a bunny in the Journal Sentinel
I got a picture that I took of a small bunny from my folks backyard printed in the Weather Photo of the day section of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 📰 today. Pretty neat!
Link to the article: jsonline.com
The Mischievous Bears Re-rendering
I just completed the High-Definition re-rendering of The Mischievous Bears short animated movie. The process went smoother than I expected it to, considering the assets I was using were 15 years old, and plus, I haven’t really worked with 3ds Max in 10 years or so. It goes to show how little 3ds Max has changed after all of these years.
This is a list of changes made to the original 2003 movie:
- Rendered in full 16:9 1080p.
- The bear’s fur is now modeled with 3ds Max’s built in hair and fur plugin.
- Changes to a few background objects.
- Improvements to some of the camera motion.
- Adjustments to some of character animation.
- Sound effects are slightly altered and new ones included.
- Inclusion of music, created with GarageBand.
- Inclusion of the animated M20 logo at the beginning of the movie.
- Altered camera movement in the opening shot.
New Renderings with 3ds Max
I recently began playing with 3ds Max again, mainly to see if I can load up some of my old renderings. To my amazement very little has changed with that software in the last 12-ish years since I last worked with it. Suffice to say, I was able to re-render a few of my old favorites and I even made 8×10 prints from them. This whole process has reinvigorated my desire to remaster Mischievous Bears in 4K and fix a few lingering issues I had with the original movie that I made 15 years ago. With computers being significantly better than they were back then, I hope I can get this movie rendered sometime this year.
You can see these final renderings on my Google Photos album.
Update:
And on YouTube as well.
Raspberry Pi ramblings
Last Spring, when I rebuilt this website, I used a Raspberry Pi on my home network as an internal web server to host the site development. Setting it up for that purpose was fairly easy once I got php/mysql and WordPress installed on it. However, there were a couple of config files that had to be manually modified that required a little research on my part to configure correctly.
Since that project is now completed, and now that I’m currently between projects that would utilize the Pi as a development server, I need to find a good use for it. It’s running Ubuntu Mate and it’s also hooked up to my TV as a display, however, I already have an Apple TV hooked up to the TV for my usual TV-type watching purposes. I may try and set it up as an arcade or console system, similar to the RetroPi.
Overall, the Pi really is a neat little computer.
New site, new logo for 2016
I spent the last year working on redesigning MarchTwenty and it’s respective logo. I figured the ‘m20’ logo with the title ‘Marchtwenty’ seemed a little redundant, so I went with something more dramatic, plus I wanted a logo that would fit nicely in a square.
The site itself is built around a WordPress template that I created from scratch. The template itself was made so that it would be flexible enough to be used with other websites that I could end up working on in the future.
Also, I’ve been dabbling with Xcode and I hope to have an iOS app of this site soon as well. 😗
10th Anniversary of MarchTwenty.com
It’s been 10 years since I registered MarchTwenty.com. The years before I registered this domain name, I had registered march-twenty.com and then later marchtwenty.net. As such, I redesigned the site… again. With luck, I will now try and focus on my next book(s).
iPhone Art
I’ve been dabbling with SketchBook Pro on my iPhone and iPad for over a year now. These are some samples I made on my phone (with my finger).
New toy
I guess I haven’t posted on here in a while. I just don’t have a lot to write about to update my blog on a regular basis. But anyway, I finally bought myself a new car, it’s the first nice or even decent car I have ever owned and it’s about time. It should be fun until the first snow fall that is.
I picked up the new iPad a couple of months back. It happens to be the first Apple product that I have ever bought. I pretty much use it like a laptop or notebook, a little productivity and a little games. I may try writing and illustrating a book with it at some point. Should be fun.
My next book is coming along nicely, even though it’s taking a little longer than I expected. I’m to easily distracted at the moment.
Drawing on the iPad
I have been dabbling with Sketchbook Pro (among other drawing apps) on my Mom’s iPad lately. I have to say it’s pretty fun to work with. Not quite a Wacom tablet killer, Sketchbook has a few limitations, but it certainly has it’s uses considering the price difference between the two. Sketchbook just needs to support larger canvases and it’ll be golden.
When the next generation iPads come out next spring, I’m going to have to look into getting one. For a device that doesn’t really have any uses, it certainly is a lot of fun to play with.