Choosing what platform to build your new app in is always a challenge. Usually, you’ll default to what you know, be that Angular, React, Vue. etc. Sometimes that decision is made for you, sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can define it for yourself. In my case using TypeScript, React and Fluent UI to build applications has been the best development decision I’ve made in a long time.
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This is a two part tutorial that explains how to rig and animate 2D sprites in Blender and export them for use on the internet.
This is Part 2 of 2 of our “Using Blender to Rig and Animate 2D Sprites” tutorial. See part one to get up to speed with what we are creating. In this part, we’re going to be loading our sprite into ThreeJS. Continue reading →
Hallowe’en at gskinner means two traditions:
The first tradition is our annual pumpkin carving afternoon. Earlier in the week, we announced some teams, and on Friday we brought in food, drinks, snacks, and some classic Tim Burton Hallowe’en movies. The day was punctuated with visits from Dodo, our office dog for the day, on loan from Chris K.
The second tradition is the design and development of our Pumpkin Voting App. This privilege falls on our newest team member(s). They manage all the project stages, from initial sketches and ideation, right through deployment! It’s a great opportunity to provide some training and practice with real deadlines.
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It has been a few years since we did it, but this year we decided to spend an afternoon carving some pumpkins.
Last week, our newest team members Chris and Matthew found some time in their very busy schedules to build a voting app. You can check out the app at pumpkin.gskinner.com/2016/.
Please jump in and vote for best pumpkin! Instead of the usual “select your favorite”, this app uses a face-off model. If you don’t like where you end up, start again. We will cut off voting on Friday at 5pm.
Sharing code and visual experiments has always been a huge part of my professional life. Experimentation in Flash launched my career, and remained an important theme in my presentations for years. I exhorted audiences to make time for play, but ultimately forgot to follow my own advice.
As the company grew, and life got busier, I lost the habit of building things for fun. I’d dabble now and then, but there was no real concerted effort to create something worth sharing.
This seems to have affected much of the industry. The lab section used to be an integral part of every agency’s site, now they are rare, and when they do exist, tend to be really sparse.
Hex grid experiment.
It’s time for that to change, at least for us. We’re launching our lab section today. It has a decent smattering of experiments already, and we’ll add to it as time goes on.
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In 2011, we worked with Google on a Chrome experiment to demo the then-new Web Audio API. Although we were only tasked with coming up with something that could show the new audio features, our (often-excitable) team came up with a project that pushed our capabilities in a ton of technologies, including WebGL, Canvas, web sockets for multi-player, and CSS animations. For a great technical dive into the original Technitone.com we launched with, check out the html5rocks.com article!
A while ago, I did a Flash project that was fairly heavily text-oriented. To help keep track of all the text, all the strings were given labels and placed in a JSON, spanning about 1500 lines and calling almost 4000 different references all throughout the code.
Later on down the road, the client contacted us and told me that they wanted the language of the strings in English and in French. Alright, no problem, just have to manually update these 4000 references and run checks to see what language is being used … no, ain’t happening like that.
