Monday, May 30, 2011

Animation, Legacy Code, and Javascript Challenges


Intro
Getting turned down for a job stinks because rejection stinks. Then again, fertilizer also stinks but it helps things grow. In that sense, rejection is a character builder. Besides, if better web developers than me weren't getting hired to work at some of these companies, there would be no CSS or Javascript examples to "view source" on. Patience may be a virtue but it sure is nice having projects to make that virtue attainable. So let's talk projects.

Animangler
The Mesh Mangler script roughs up 3D meshes by moving the vertices in random directions to one extreme or another. Animangler is basically the same script but with an animaion focus. By creating shape keys and mangling those, it makes it easy to animate weird floating blobs that morph in interesting ways. It's a pretty simple script thanks to the hard work that Blender developers do to make these APIs available for people like me to play with.

Legacy Blend
Getting boring chores out of the way is liberating once done. That's the best way to describe the process of updating tutorial files and making blend files for the old Blender 2.49 tutorials. Occasionally, people do still make inquiries in the Blender Artist forums about that API which makes it worth keeping those old tutorials around awhile longer.

A Cleaner Uncle Squirrely Front End
The Uncle Squirrely project would be better if it's front end code was free of server side PHP logic. It's a very doable task given the right mix of Ajax, JQuery, and JSON. However, it's also a challenging project that pushes my own limits. This limit pushing is a good thing for me as a developer.

The Coming Week
The coming week's challenges will be a continuation of Javascript research, getting hands on with practical Internet marketing and more Python work. Since I'm still in the running for a Django position at a startup, it works out to be one of those good investments that I'd have ended up doing anyways. Will talk later. Cheers all!

No comments:

Post a Comment