I realize I've just submitted an animation within one calendar day of my last animation. Wild. It's here if you want to see it:

So what's been going on in the mean time?

In the past year, more and more of my time has ended up dedicated to the creative coding community. It's a vibrant group of people who make art through programming. There are some visuals that actually lend themselves rather well to code, such as when you need to control a large amount of detail at once, or if you're interested in the emergent behaviour of systems. My day job is working on animation software where the building blocks are creative code sketches. The programming environment we build on, p5.js, I also help maintain, and a lot of my time goes into that. I'm happy to report that our local Creative Code Toronto meetups also have continued to run monthly.

While I still spend a lot of time on the engineering side (most recently, working on something for p5.js to make it easier to get into shader programming without doing a boatload of homework first), I find that a lot of my time goes into community management now. A lot of the engineering is in the design, and to a certain extent it's actually bad if I think go and implement it myself. At the very least, it's a missed opportunity: if I teach someone else how to implement a feature or fix a bug, they learn and can take on more responsibility; if I do it myself, I still only have myself to rely on next time. For an open source project that relies on volunteers and aims to let in anyone who wants to contribute, this kind of strategy is critical. It might not be the fastest way to build, but it brings more people along for the ride, and that lets you build something you couldn't have made otherwise. It's pretty rewarding, too! Nothing is better than seeing someone learn and then do cool things on their own.

Another big ish project I worked on this year was some software to automatically turn any city landmark into a version of the Chicago Bean ("Cloud Gate" if you want to be less cool) using some actual rendering and optimization techniques. This was made for SIGBOVIK, a conference taking place around April 1 for joke CS papers. I'm not sure if the Chicago Bean is funny to other people too, but I'm in too deep at this point. Learn how to make your own beans here:

This also isn't new exactly, but I updated some math I've been tinkering with for a few years on how to warp arbitrary 3D models in a shader. This is one of those things that technically you can already do using some other techniques, but they were either not as fast, or required annoying manual tuning. It seemed feasible to I went down this rabbit hole of doing some calculus to figure out exactly what would be necessary. Once you come out the other side, though, it's not too bad! We're going to use this in the animation software my work is building to be able to do some wiggly animations on any model you bring in without you having to rig it or wait for it to render. You can read a writeup of the math, or also listen to this talk from Creative Code Toronto about it.

I've also finally made myself a dank business card. I've been saying I'd do this for a decade now, but they finally exist. They are barely legible. If you see me in real life, I don't have any serious business cards, so you may receive one of these instead. Probably prepares you better for what you're signing up for if you choose to do business anyhow. (I'll be at SIGGRAPH in Denver next week, if anyone else will be there!)

That's all for now. See you all in another year maybe? Or hopefully sooner, if we do another Toronto Newgrounds meetup!

-Dave