Tag Archives: Animation

A YouTube Subscriber Counter With A Tetris Twist

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When it comes to YouTube subscriber counters, there’s not much wiggle room for creativity. Sure, you can go with Nixies or even more exotic displays, but in the end a counter is just a bunch of numbers.

But [Brian Lough] found a way to jazz things up with this Tetris-playing YouTube sub counter. For those of you not familiar with [Brian]’s channel, it’s really worth a watch. He tends toward long live-stream videos where he works on one project for a marathon session, and there’s a lot to learn from peeking over his virtual shoulder. This project stems from an …read more

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Buttery Smooth Fades with the Power of HSV

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In firmware-land we usually refer to colors using RGB. This is intuitively pleasing with a little background on color theory and an understanding of how multicolor LEDs work. Most of the colorful LEDs we are use not actually a single diode. They are red, green, and blue diodes shoved together in tight quarters. (Though interestingly very high end LEDs use even more colors than that, but that’s a topic for another article.) When all three light up at once the emitted light munges together into a single color which your brain perceives. Appropriately the schematic symbol for an RGB LED …read more

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Low-Resolution Display Provides High-Nostalgia Animations

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High-definition displays are the de facto standard today, and we’ve come to expect displays that show every pore, blemish, and bead of sweat on everything from phones to stadium-sized Jumbotrons. Despite this,  low-resolution displays continue to have a nostalgic charm all their own.

Take this 32 x 16 display, dubbed PixelTimes, for instance. [Dominic Buchstaller] has gone a step beyond his previous PixelTime, a minimalist weather clock and home hub built around the same P10 RGB matrix. The previous build was a little involved, though, with a nice wood frame that took some time and skill to create.

Building your …read more

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Cutting Paper And Corners In Animation

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Cutting every corner can lead to some shoddy projects, but [Terry Gilliam] shows us that cutting the right corners yields unforgettable animations when mixed with the right amount of quirky imagination. The signature animation style of Monty Python’s Flying Circus is a mixture of [Terry]’s artistic craft and doing it with as little work as possible. You can watch after the break.

For [Terry], cutout animation is the quickest and easiest way he knows to convey an idea, a joke, or a story. With his vocal repertoire, even the sound effects can be produced in a basement studio. Sometimes, he …read more

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Amazing Mechanical Linkages and The Software to Design Them

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Most of us are more bits-and-bytes than nuts-and-bolts, but we have the deepest appreciation for the combination of the two. So, apparently, does [rectorsquid]. Check out the design and flow of his rolling ball sculpture (YouTube, embedded below) to see what we mean. See how the arms hesitate just a bit as the ball is transferred? See how the upper arm gently places it on the ramp with a slight downward gesture? See how it’s done with one motor? There’s no way [rectorsquid] designed this on paper, right?

Of course he didn’t (YouTube). Instead, he wrote a simulator that …read more

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Use a Drill to Power Your Flipbooks

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[WolfCat] of Wolfcatworkshop is creating a hand-animated split-flap animation. But what do you use to test your animation once it’s on the split-flaps? Well, to test it out, [WolfCat] used a drill to give it motion. DoodlersAnonymous has some pics and an interview with [WolfCat] about his animation and there are some pictures on his Instagram page.

Technically, what [WolfCat] wanted to make is a “mutoscope,” a hand-cranked precursor to the movie projector that had its heyday in the late 19th and early 20th century. Originally installed in penny arcades and the like, mutoscopes were single-viewer apparatus. The viewer cranks …read more

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Sense Hat Comes Alive

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Remember the Raspberry Pi Sense Hat? Originally designed for a mission to the International Space Station, the board has quite a few sensors onboard as well as an 8×8 RGB LED matrix. What can you do with an 8×8 screen? You might be surprised if you use [Ethan’s] Python Sense Hat animation library. You can get the full visual effect in the video below.

The code uses an array to represent the screen, which isn’t a big deal since there are only 64 elements. Turning on a particular element to animate, say, a pong puck, isn’t hard with or without …read more

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Neural Networks Walk Better Than Humans for Game Animation

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Modern day video games have come a long way from Mario the plumber hopping across the screen. Incredibly intricate environments of games today are part of the lure for new gamers and this experience is brought to life by the characters interacting with the scene. However the illusion of the virtual world is disrupted by unnatural movements of the figures in performing actions such as turning around suddenly or climbing a hill.

To remedy the abrupt movements, [Daniel Holden et. al] recently published a paper (PDF) and a video showing a method to greatly improve the real-time character control mechanism. …read more

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