Experiments

This is my "Experiments" page. It's sort of a catch-all topic which will allow me to post things which are, well, experimental. Things like works in progress, experiments in interactivity, and possibly some commercial ventures. It's a little sparse at the moment, but I hope that it will prove to be one of the more active areas of my site....

Since these things will have no rhyme or reason, I'm just going to slap them up here as it occurs to me, and things may become a bit disorganized. Generally, if the experiment is an ongoing project, clicking on the example image will bring you to another page where the thing is more fully fleshed out.

Experiments

This is an ongoing page concerning my attempts to simultaneously reconstruct the pelagic trilobite Opipeuter inconnivus and learn the 3D animation program Maya. The goal is to produce a photorealistic animation of the trilobite.

I had to produce a collage to demonstrate cutting, pasting, layering and scaling in Photoshop for a class that I teach in digital imaging. I like the results a lot.

Extremely simple Flash animation! Actually, I'm pathetically proud of it, since it's all ActionScript. I've always been absolutely horrible at math (although a whiz at geometry), but somehow Flash is able to make it all both clear and enjoyable. I'll be posting more of this stuff as my skills improve.

A small, but extremely frustrating game done as an exercise while working through a text on Flash game design. The book is called "Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Game Programming", by Craig Murray and Justin Everett-Church. It's the most comprehensible book on the subject that I've been able to find. It makes it possible even for artists to understand some aspects of programming.

This is an experiment in "drawing" using ZBrush (see links), an odd and unique piece of software that works in "2.5D". It's sort of a combination of 2D paint software (Photoshop, Painter) and 3D software (3DSMax, Lightwave, Maya). It's easier to use than it is to describe, and I'm beginning to find that the results are both fast and effective. The gnome head on the left took about six hours of work, which makes it much faster than any other 3D software I've used.