Another little experiment that’s not meant to be anything in particular, but that might turn into something more exciting one day.

Take any old polygon, inset then extrude some of it’s faces, add some twist and then warp it’s vertices into a sphere. Then go crazy with the key frames and randomly animate the % of sphericalness (that’s probably not a word by the way), degree of twist and change the initial number of polygons on the base shape and this is the sort of animation you’ll probably get.

Animated and rendered in 3D Studio Max, post done in After Effetcs.

The music track is All To All by Broken Social Scene.

What’s more fun than going to the playground with one of your daughters and using it as an excuse for her to dress up as a tiger in a tu-tu and for you to play with your new Canon 550D? Anyone? That’s right, nothing.

A quick entry to another Greyscale Gorilla Five Second Project. This time the subject was CMYK.

The blobs were animated with RealFlow and then rendered in 3D Studio Max with Vray’s ‘Fast SSS2′ material to get the waxy look.

A short motion graphics piece I did for SeeVue Digital in London to highlight the various routes MS’s online advertising takes.

The various assets were screen-cammed and positioned in space using 3D layers in After Effects with the obligatory corporate copy. Video Copilot’s Sure Target plugin was used to jump between the layers.

Sprinkle on a little wiggle() with some motion blur and depth of field and you’ve got yourself a nice little corporate video.

It would have been nice to sync it to the audio a little better and maybe drive some of the particles in the background with SoundKeys or something similar. Maybe next time…

A quick test setup using Rayfire for 3DSMax. The shattering glass was simulated and rendered in slow motion anyway, then slowed down again in After Effects.

This scene only took about 3 or 4 minutes (on an Intel Core i7-860) to simulate using the Physx option in Rayfire (rather than Reactor). There’s around 30,000 poly’s and over 1000 objects in the scene.

Using reactor that same simulation would probably take hours, even of a fast machine.

The original render output was 250 frames (10 seconds long) and took about 2 hours to render with Mental Ray. Then I slowed it down again and added some depth-of-field in After Effects.

It was a slow work day, so I made this short animation for the latest greyscalegorilla Five Second Project instead.

The subject was “Fail“

Some credit needs to go to:
The characters are just the (awesome) free rig made by Brad Noble with eyes and a moustache stuck on.

The 1920′s piano track is spliced together from a free file downloaded from freesound

Animation: 3D Studio Max
Post: After Effects

In this case the spam squisher in question is called Simple Spam Filter for WordPress, and so far it’s been more effective at eliminating cerain types of spam to my blog than any other plugin.

Having any sort of comment functionality on your blog means you’re going to get spam at some point or another. Even a little site like mine with virtually no traffic compared to a lot of other blogs out there can get plenty.
As this is a WordPress based site I’ve got the Askimet plugin running on it by default, and it does catch it’s fair share of rubbish comments, but I was still getting a good 10 or more spam comments in my comment queue to moderate every day. Again, not a lot, but enough to get on your wick after a while – especially seen as 99% of them were just big, long lists of spammy links. In the WordPress admin you can already set up a filter to say… “Hold a comment in the queue if it contains 5 or more links. (A common characteristic of comment spam is a large number of hyperlinks.)”… but that still meant I had to manually delete all those dud comments.

After much deliberation about whether or not to use one of the many fancy online invoicing apps available to make my life that little bit easier, I ended up giving FreshBooks a go…

…and so far I’ve been very impressed, as have the people on the other end of my invoices. But that’s a whole other post I need to write. This one’s just a little one to big-up the boys and girls who work at FreshBooks who listen to what their customers want and act on it – a rare thing indeed.

I’ve been at i-to-i in Leeds for the last few weeks, mostly working their new Campfire Online Travel Community site, but also working on helping update their main website and on a little promotional website their currently pushing called Guilt Trips.

Stripped down it’s just a really simple form, but they wanted a nice front end to it that matched their previous Be Part of It campaign that they’d designed in-house – big bold graphics and colours seemed to be the order of the day. They suggested a slider for the ‘good > bad’ rating and it turned out pretty neat and tidy.

I made the slider work with a bit of Scriptaculous magic instead of jQuery which is what I’d have ordinarily used – but they use Prototype in-house so it made sense to stick with their clever developer folk are used to.

If you’ve been designing web or print work for any amount of time, chances are you’ve copied and pasted your fair share of Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet dummy text to fill in otherwise blank pages while you mock up designs or wait for the client to send you some real content.

Chances are you’re also probably getting a little bored of it too, and who doesn’t like a little choice these days anyway.

The Alternatives

These aren’t in any particular order, so just dig in and see if there’s any you like…

• Malevole’s text generator Paragraphs of text from TV show intro’s or theme tunes etc. If you’re younger than 20, you might want to skip this one
• BlindTextGenerator Lots of options and variations to play with
• Corporate Ipsum A widget for OSX generating some cliched, buzz-word filled business jabber
• sfco.uld.be As far as I can tell it’s text generated by the Corporate Ipsum widget above, but for the benefit of us people without a Mac -you can just copy and paste.
• Leon’s random essay generator Not strictly for this purpose, but it seems some folk do use it to create their dummy text
• adhesiontext™ Lots of options and different langauges/character stes to play with
• Generator3 Yes it has Lipsum in there but there’s plenty options to play with for other languages etc.
• HintPlus Very Lipsummy style output, but with much less old Latin style words.
• Gangsta Lorem ippzle If you’re a fan od words beginning with, including and ending with ‘izzle‘, this one’s for you.
• HTML Ipsum Lipsum ready to copy and paste, but pre-formatted with various HTML tags
• Lorem2 Some dummy text just waiting for you to copy and paste. Basically Lipsum.com without the need to click the ‘generate’ button

If you know of any others that are work a mention just let me know!