12 April 2024 Update

Webrings, light mode, new animations

Heyo! Today marks the first update report to this website!

Light mode

First off, this website now comes in light mode! If your OS or web browser preferences are set to prefer Light Mode, you probably are seeing it already!

Webrings

Speaking of webrings, I’m now part of:

• Safonts
• Focus First
• Responsive Web Directory
• Neocreatives
• Draconic Webring

After contemplation I’ve chosen to put these webrings on my homepage rather than the links section as they were originally going to be. I thought that it made more sense.

Buttons

Shortly after making my website I also designed my own 88x31 badge! It’s on my homepage. If you are interested in linking to my website, feel free to download that badge, put it in your site and link that image back to my website. Please don’t link the image directly to my site.

New animations

I’m trying to stick to a schedule of producing two animations per month. It seems to be the right pace, although I was only able to make one for February.

Today I’m also putting three new animations on the website.

This first new animation, titled Look for Sugarcone at your local park! introduces my first standalone character, Sugarcone! I do have lore for him, and I will be slowly be revealing bits and pieces of it as I make more animations. Sugarcone is also the subject of a character design and reference system I’ve been developing since September 2023, even before I drew myself! I hope to refine and reveal more details about that soon, because it’ll give me a chance to comment about my thoughts on character design.

The second, titled wingbanging??? is a fairly quickly put together looping animation which used the illustration for my website launch article as a basis. Even though that was an illustration, I still had taken it to OpenToonz for cleanup, to make it look consistent with the aesthetic of all my animations. Fortunately this also gave me the advantage that I didn’t have to redraw the whole thing since it was all vector, just adding some claw detail and changing the head pose. There was no rough pass since it was simple enough. People seemed to like it, despite its simplicity.

The third, titled Whoa, that’s a massive easter egg! is definitely one of the more complex pieces of animation I’ve done. Pulling it off took several days. Creating the 3D reference for it was a bit of a nightmare, and there is a lot of movement happening at once, I had to carefully strategize how to get the smoothest results I could. It was sure worth it though!

Something I hoped to add to the update

I’ve been working on a writing titled Encoding variable frame rate animations, which describes the theory behind variable frame rate videos and how to encode them using ffmpeg. It’s interested me because it can make remarkably compact 2D cartoon videos which tend to mix frame rates.

Unfortunately I’ve been running into issues with my implementation as it messed up the timing of my most recent animation during the preparation of this update. So it is officially on hold. Honestly, I’m on the search for more ideal techniques to present cartoon animations on the Web anyway.

Conclusion

Well, that’ll be all for now. I wish I had a new writing all ready to go, but many of them tackle huge subjects so they won’t be ready for a long time. And I don’t really have any ideas for shorter writings, sadly.

Until next time!