I’m trying to gain a better understanding of the inner workings of javascript. Today I’m learning more about sync & async and javascript’s event loop. 

I started with this jsconf talk: “what the heck is the event loop anyway?” by philip roberts. Highly recommend this one. I feel like I finally know what’s going on with things like setTimeout (I mean, I knew what it did, but not what was going on behind the scenes) and definitely learned more about javascript’s single threaded nature, what happens with asyc calls with respect to the task queue and event loop, non-blocking i/o for fluid UIs. 

I found another tutorial on high order functions, functional programming with js. Also recommend this one. I’m trying to get better at structuring my code and making it more modular. I think it’s a series, but here’s the first one I just watched: 

After watching these tutorials I was wondering about whether all callback functions are asynchronous - I didn’t think so, but here was a useful stack overflow link for understanding that better.

low poly + abstract refraction in cinema 4D

+ pick an author or music artist

+ collect data: books, lyrics, interviews?

+ parse text and visualize recurring themes.

more deformers! 

Continuing C4D tutorials and learning about dynamics, working with rigid bodies and collision bodies. Fun stuff! When I play the animation before rendering it looks fine, but for some reason when I render it the collision doesn’t seem to be working - I think I need to learn more about how to render those settings? Hm...

I’ve been trying to learn more about motion graphics and have been playing with things in Cinema 4D. Having a lot of fun with it! 

I came across Allison House’s work and am very inspired by her and her work! I think I read somewhere that she went through the greyscalegorilla tutorials and so that’s what I’m starting to work through. I like them so far! I’d recommend checking them out if you’re new to C4D for sure.

This is the first thing I’ve animated with C4D and I’m really excited that it was fairly straightforward and easy for me to follow along. I think it helps I have a little experience with 3D modeling concepts so things like sweeps, rails, nurbs, etc. aren’t totally unfamiliar to me. I also got to play with a particle emitter which is always fun. Crazy that I can just click and adjust a few params and have particles animate - takes me a lot more effort to program that! :)

Uses the half-edge mesh library (HEMESH) in Processing by Frederik Vanhoutte, and the tutorial that I learned from by Free Art Bureau. 

Finished Nicholas Feltron's Skillshare on data visualization with Processing and Illustrator! I was really excited to see a course taught by him as I am really inspired by his work. Check out his annual reports! I like the one from 2013 - the printed version is so elegant.

The final output is a data visualization of meteorite landings on earth. I worked with similar data before and made a visualization for lunar meteorites, but for that one I used d3js. 

A work in progress of my first illustration of a face + hair! I'm super happy with how it's turning out so far. I think I'll probably give her pastel hair at some point. 

Man, this took a long time. Hair is so tricky! Not just head hair but eyelashes and eyebrows too. I did this mostly in illustrator, and I'm still figuring out how to work with the brush tool. Right now I'm really annoyed with how many anchors get drawn with it - I had to do a lot of clean up later on to make sure things were intersecting correctly, and I had to delete a bunch of anchors I didn't realize were there. 

I'm slowly trying to figure out a style of my own. I read that it's okay not to worry too much about figuring out a personal distinct style early on - that it'll just happen on its own as you keep drawing and making things. The inspiration for this one is Hajin Bae's amazing illustrations (and thanks to her for her tutorial on drawing lips, I really like how they turned out on this).

Tuts+ Quicktip: Retro Leaves and Flowers with the Transform Effect

Tutorial here.