Welcome Back

Hello everyone, I'd like to update you all on my progress over the past few weeks. I took last weekend off to see my folks in MA, but now I'm back to work. I spent a lot of time refining some of the environmental effects (ripples, god-ray, particles). Most of the following animations will require a second pass.

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Growth Animation:
Responding to previous feedback, this was an attempt to both show the character's growth from different angles and to highlight specific changes (in the overhead shot, the orbit is highlighted with a texture). I still need to include a scale bar. 


Opening Animation:
This was an earlier attempt to work some god-rays into an environment.


Overwater Animation:
I spend time trying to get fake-water to fake-ripple believably. The solution was rather inelegant & round-about, but hey, I finally got some results.


Juvi_surface Animation:
(the particles will probably need to be rendered as a separate pass)


Flop Animation:
The unfortunate fate of the juveniles. (There's a weird thing going on with the ground texture: easy fix)


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Web Portal:
Parallel to developing this animation, I've been trying to come up with a way of presenting the final product. There is a lot of information that I'm trying to convey, and I run the risk of overwhelming the viewer. At the end of last term I found a Javascript framework, called Popcorn.js, for using an embedded web video to drive content on a webpage. With it I can sync up annotations, peripheral content, subtitles, and more to the video. In my latest build, I put toggle buttons so that the viewer can choose to hide that layer of content if he or she just wants to view the video.

Test site:http://www.danieljoelnewman.com/Popcorn/

The front page:

I can sync google maps to different parts of the video:

If the additional content is overwhelming, it can all be hidden:

 I can sync up manipulatable 3D models

 I can sync up text annotations (top):

Test site: http://www.danieljoelnewman.com/Popcorn/

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Submissions:
I plan on submitting my project to a couple different venues. I just got word that I was accepted to give a talk at AMI 2014 (could have sworn I missed the submission deadline).

AMI 2014: 69th Annual Association of Medical Illustrators Meeting:
20 Minute talk
Rochester, MN
July 24-26

Lazendorf PaleoArt Prize:
Submit by April 22nd
Category: Digital Modeling and Animation

Siggraph International Student Poster Competition:
Deadline: May 15
Theme: “Naturally Digital”

CG Student Awards:
Category: VFX/Animation
Deadline: May 15

IEEE VIS 2014 Arts Program:
Submit by June 15th
Theme: “Art + Interpretation”