D.Joseph Design

Yes. That's from rendering on two computers and one of them not being set to render reflections. This is just a draft render. The final will be multipass and consistent. Yes, I notice that too. It's been awhile since I worked on the animation and I'm basically posting so the composer, Dane Walker, can see the implementation of his music. If I remember correctly, I looked at all the animation keys but couldn't figure out what caused that. Now that I've thought more about it, I suspect it's due to difference in "ease" timings. Like axis-a begins slowing before axis-b, which would make axis-a look almost stationary while axis-b is still moving. When animating it, I found the lens flare quite distracting when it'd appear for just a few frames before it was covered again. Would something like this annoy you too? What I plan to do on the final is turn of the lens flare until that last moment when it comes out behind the D.

Try it now. My Mac plays it fine. Check that your QuickTime is the latest version. Are your speakers on? Volume turned up? Popcorn taken out of the microwave?

I think I was using QT6 Apple Loseless. I'll re-encode just in case.

In May 2004, I sponsored a contest among select musicians to compose a unique theme for D.Joseph Design. Dane Walker composed a theme closest to my desires and very pleasing to my tastes. This animation, as company identification, is to precede "professional" media-based productions. I call this the "Gentle Logo" with the piano version of DJD Theme. Go here.

Oops! Thanks for catching that. It's fixed now. Quick link

I'd really like to keep a select group updated on my Year in Review project, but I don't want to make any publically-accessible page on my website lest some clever person from my church gets a preview. So I'm making my project center in my forums, which are restricted to registered access only. But don't worry, I know most of you don't want to register on another site, so I made a standard login and password that I'll give to trusted people: CHANGED USERNAME AND PASSWORD Username: authorized-hash Passcode: martin If you want to register your own account, that's fine. If you do, then you must join the Year in Review usergroup to access the forum. I'll still keep the Hash forum up-to-date on my 3D stuff, but if you want to see more about the project, get more details on progress, or just tap into the whole center for the project, then visit my forums. BTW, thanks for the concern over my collapsed lung. I actually plan a joke about it in my animation.

This has been, what, two years in the making? I recall you mentioning it when you rendered my first animation back in 2002.

Don't fit? The Ark was huge and most people forget that the average size of a dinosaur is that of a sheep. Really big dinosaurs were really old and thus not practical to take aboard the Ark to repopulate the post-flood world.

Cool! Great timing and fun songs! I appreciate that you're not making the Ark an overstuffed bathtub. "Prehistoric carnivours"? Serious problems there. First, there is no such thing as "prehistoric" anything. Second, Noah would have had to take dinosaurs aboard the Ark because God said two of every kind of land animal. Since dinosaurs were created on Day 6 along side of man and lived together, they would be included in the "land animals" that God specified. And what's with the meteor? On another note, you should keep the animals fairly young. Noah needed to take animals that could easily reproduce in the post-flood world, so adolescents would be optimal. I know you're using artistic license, but try to get the history right. "WDAD." I love it!

Just before I went to bed, I checked the render status and it was around pass 40. It looked really good, so I may consider a 32-pass render. However, 16 passes may be enough if animation is going on. I'll play around tonight with the track lights. Each fixture currently uses two lights: one klieg to cast the light and one bulb to illuminate the fixture and give that nice light above the fixture. My home desktop is traditionally slow at rendering. "March of the Rubber Duckies" took about 15–20 minutes per frame (MPF), while everyone that helped reported under 10 MPF. The difficulty with this animation is its platform mandate. I'm using DarkTree SimbointAM and Enhance:AM, which are both Windows-only. This also means that RenderMuscle would need these plug-ins as would anyone else who helps me render.

Just as a test, I rendered the same scene out at 256 passes. It took my AMD 2100+ desktop five hours. The shadows look really nice in this one!

You liked that first render? You'll love this one! Here's with improved lighting and some new models. All lights except the track lighting are Bulbs. This was rendered 16-passes and took about 26 minutes.

It's Apple's Mac-only presentation software. The technology is advanced far beyond PowerPoint (even the Mac edition), but its interface, usability, and features still lag behind nearly all other presentation software.

Nice! Now contact the manufacturer and offer to sell the 3D model to them for the reduced price of $10,000.

In late-July, I had the honor to speak on presentation design at the Answers in Genesis (AiG) Creation College, which was a conference to train people in creation ministry and to present the Genesis messages like Ken Ham, Carl Kerby, other international speakers from AiG. My talk title was "Making Your Presentations Zing!" I taught graphic design principles, eye candy skills, dos and don'ts of design, and more as relates to presentations—digital and otherwise—for the look of high class and professionalism. I used Apple Keynote as my presentation software for its advanced multimedia technologies and awesome transitions. The globe and all silver 3D elements were modeled in A:M 10.5. All animations continually cycled in the live presentation. Using A:M and Photoshop, I created a high-tech, complete theme/template for my presentation, which was given through Apple Keynote. I had not posted this earlier because I suffered an 80% lung collapse during the conference and spent the next several weeks recovering to only have a second collapse. But I'm fully-recovered now. View the Template Showcase under 3D Animations on my website.

I got the chair from ... somewhere. I haven't really focused on it. I plan to make it the same wood as everything else, or else make it black as I'm planning for some other stuff. I think the speckle effect is from a distant and low-res render. JPEG compression didn't do too much to it. It's the same Enhance:AM texture as the other dark wood. Anyone got some good carpet or ceiling textures?

Here's a preview render of my progress for Year in Review 2004. All animation will take place in this room. The current lighting is the default choreography with the addition of the two lamps. I'll tweak the lighting as time goes on. For the moment, I'm looking for modeling critiques, but if you have any helpful thoughts on lighting, textures, design, or anything else, I'd love to hear them!

Some very dear friends of mine are getting married this Saturday and they asked me to produce a special video to be played during the ceremony. I gladly accepted and decided to offer it as my gift to them. I had previously requested help on this, and thanks to all the assistance, here is the final version. Visit my 3D Animations page and watch the first video "Kori & Jeff" (1.53 MB QuickTime). The stuff before the animation is actually longer, but I cut it down to make a smaller file.

I check PlanetBattlefield every day and download everything from it when I'm on highspeed internet. No offense, but I find all of these Battlefield movies quite funny but not because of the production itself. All the Battlefield movies I've seen (probably a couple hundred) follow the same format: here are several guys shooting at each other and crashing stuff with my favorite (copyrighted) song playing in the background. I'm glad to see you at least didn't use the standard Windows Movie Maker title animation.

I can get to the link, but all I see is the bike and the scrolling text. I'm using Firefox 0.9.

I love BF1942! So ... where's the video?

That looks really good!

I would like this model sometime. And maybe you could post a higher-res. render?

Hmm, that's looking good.

One of the points I'm making in my talk is "Special effects: just because you can do them, don't." At least until they develop the skills.