In hindsight I was a little optimistic in my previous post. Or in denial that the semester vortex was about to suck me in. I also did not anticipate the cold snap during which the temperature in our basement dropped quite a bit, which my 3D printer did not like. On top of that I decided I wanted part of the base of each 3D printed figure black. After messing with black duct tape, I ended up using sharpies, which was way faster but still took a while. But I think I have all the 3D prints ready to melt.

Meanwhile I have been making things in Blender during this Spring Semester. I was teaching 2D animation, and when Adobe suddenly decided to kill off Animate, before putting it back on life support, I needed an alternative. Teaching already obsolete software felt wrong. There is commercial software out there, and Moho seems like a good choice, but procurement at a University can be a tad sluggish, so that was not really an option. I tested the 2D animation feature in Blender and found it to be quite capable. It seems to work well for the cut-out style animation exercise I had assigned my students (for “hand drawn” or pixel based 2D animation we use Krita)

One of my students ended up doing his final project for the 2D animation course in Blender, where they can choose to use any of the techniques covered.

Geometry Nodes

Resistance was futile, and I did allow myself to get sucked into the rabbit hole of playing doing creative research with Geometry Nodes. I compiled some of the results in a short:

And here is my latest “doodle”:

Grades have been posted (we are not using Canvas), Spring semester is over. Time to go down to the basement and record some stop motion!