I love everything about monome. Hand-crafted in the mountains, grid pattern with orange and gray squares, the technical interest required to really use one to its full potential, and most of all, it is a wide open device with many possibilities.

Take a look at what is possible with one:

And check out some more info. They come in all shapes and sizes nowadays, originally starting with a 40 node grid, and as long as people keep tinkering with them, they will get more and more interesting over time. Brilliant.

And if you are feeling generous my birthday is in November. . .

[monome.org]

It is amazing to see so many of the major commercial production houses have started to really embrace Vimeo as a place to showcase work and their processes.

PSYOP is a fantastic example, not only have they been posting up most of their recent work, they have also been posting up breakdowns of how it was conceived from start to finish. As much as I enjoy the finished work I must say I enjoy these breakdowns and making of’s even more.

EDIT: Original video was removed by PSYOP, here is the complete ad:
>

Great stuff! Check out the rest on their Vimeo page.

[PSYOP – Vimeo]

I watch a lot of random animation, films, shorts, commercials, tests, whatever. I figured I may as well start sharing some of my favorites on a more consistent basis because it keeps me hunting for more.

Start with a nice little short by Eran Hilleli called “knowledge of the cone”

I am really partial to the character design and style of the motion. Angular characters and quick direct emphasized motions definitely do it for me, and I always enjoy a good slap in the face. Check out the website, as there is a good collection of other work.

[eran hilleli]

Did you know you can look at this website on an iPhone!? Who knew? Now. . .if you add this site to your homescreen you will also get a sexy icon to go along with it, because who can go a day without checking up on what I am up to?

For the nerds: you can easily setup your site with this functionality by including a file named “apple-touch-icon.png” in the root of your site. Most people recommend starting with a simple square 158×158 (72dpi) image, you don’t have to worry about round corners or anything, the iPhone will take care of that for you.

My icon in it’s original form.

I really don’t enjoy setting renders in Maya, and I definitely don’t enjoy manually setting up command line renders, but it is definitely the way to go when it comes to rendering animation.

The purpose of these little apps is to make that a drag and drop process:

MayaRender – Drag any Maya .ma or .mb onto this droplet to automatically start a command line render in terminal. (Asks to choose Renderer and add any additional Render Flags, universal version will ask which Maya version you would like to use)

Maya SW, MentalRay, and RenderMan, and V-Ray are setup to automatically startup up renders as soon as a file has been dragged onto them, avoiding having to put in any options. (The renderer will automatically use whatever you have setup within your Render Globals in your scene)

Download: MayaRender (6.2MB .zip)
-(Based on code originally developed by Dustin & Cody Beltram.)

Log:
-2009-12-1: added 2010 versions plus V-Ray, and 3delight droplets.
-2010-3-10: fixed Maya 2010 versions to work with the changes that were made to the location of the “render” binary.
-2010-3-20: fixed typos in latest Mental Ray versions (2009 & 2010) and removed “mail_cmd” in MayaRender2010 (universal version), top secret feature coming soon. . .
-2010-4-10: Updated for Maya 2011

Enjoy! If there are any issues or concerns please contact: andoruLABS.support.

[andoru.LABS]

Name the sample and I will give you a handshake. . . or a milk shake, the choice is yours.

[EKAHWERDNA]