It looks like the last time I posted something here was in 2020! It's been a while, Newgrounds. So why am I back again?

Short version

I'm back because I made a new video:

Long version

I live in Toronto now! The last time I posted, I was living in Vancouver working on a master's degree in computer graphics. I had hinted at this in the last life update, but I was struggling a lot with the lifestyle required by academia--I learned a lot, but the management style applied a lot of pressure, there wasn't the autonomy (or respect for time) that I would want long term, and I suppose I wanted to work on things for a different sort of audience than for other researchers. An opportunity came up to work on a startup halfway through my degree. I started working on it alongside my thesis, I graduated, and now I'm doing that full time.

A screenshot from my thesis: given a sketchy drawing, my algorithm computed the stroke that a bundle of lines together represented, allowing one to edit a whole set of lines through just the controls of the "centerline." It's cool but requires a licensed quadratic solver in order to run, so it's not super practical to integrate into actual animation software unfortunately.

The startup is tiny, just three of us. We're working on building in-browser animation software for motion graphics. Initially, this is aimed at small businesses who need to make video content; we're trying to squeeze as much value and interesting motion as we can out of whatever assets one has lying around. The longer term goal ties in with the creative coding community: there are so many interesting visuals and animations being made with code (think of the credits sequence of The Queen's Gambit by beesandbombs) and we hope to be a platform to let that community combine their work with a more traditional video editor. I could go anywhere to work on this, but one of the developers lives in Toronto and I have some friends there, so I moved back East.

Using a component in our motion graphics editor.

Although our animation software is still in private beta (for now 👀), I've already been able to connect more with animators and graphics people than I could where I was before. We're using p5.js as a general-purpose JavaScript graphics library for developers to use, and we're investing a lot of time contributing to the library and its community. I personally have been putting a lot of time into its WebGL tools. The recent 1.7.0 release allows one to easily use framebuffer layers, letting you make stuff like this sketch, which uses 120 layers to time-offset each row of pixels to make your webcam look wiggly.

Turns out a lot of my computer graphics work involves getting stuff to wiggle.

Another part of that community-building process has been the creation of Creative Code Toronto, a meetup for creative people who use code to make art. So far we've run it like a show-and-tell for creative code projects. In August we're going to run two more with different formats: a work session and a talks session, so stay tuned for that!

One of the Toronto creative coders I met through this was none other than Newgrounds's own ninjamuffin99, which was kind of like meeting a celebrity! In any case, it got me thinking about Newgrounds again. I'm super happy to hear that this community, which was so instrumental in my becoming who I am now, is still alive and thriving. I was taking some time off this month for a vacation anyway, so I took the opportunity to go back to my roots a bit and make another animation. The result is the one at the top of this post.

Unrelated, but doing this also made me realize that tablets with a screen are cool and all but awful for my posture since I now look down rather than forward while drawing. I bought a stand for my tablet between starting and finishing this cartoon.

In the spirit of open source, I had initially started this in Blender. I contributed some code to Blender last year to help improve the gap closing algorithm in Blender's fill bucket, but I ran into some more issues with it this time around, so for now I've gone back to good ol' Flash CS6. (I can't update my old laptop or else that version will stop working--I guess I have to fix the Blender fill bucket by the time that laptop finally bites the dust.) In any case, it was fun to go work the way I used to for a bit.

Going forward

I can't promise I'm going to do any more of these any time soon. While fun, I've definitely got my hands full with other stuff, so I'll probably disappear for another year or so before releasing another.

I have been busy with other stuff, though!

There's an annual conference on April Fools for dank academic CS papers. This year I made a paper on how to fit jeans to any shape:

I used to work at Figma, and recently my former colleagues and I just got a patent approved for smart selection, a feature I worked on. So I guess I'm legally an inventor now?

Ok, that's all for now. I'm going to go to the Toronto Newgrounds meetup at the end of the month, so I hope to see some of you there!

-Dave