Sam's Blog

I’m excited to announce that I will be starting work on a home-made Cintiq which I am calling Samtiq. :)

A little bit of background first. Cintiq is a product from Wacom catering for artists, animators and designers. It is the same as a drawing tablet with the difference that you are drawing on the display so there is a direct connection with what your hand is doing and what eye is seeing. With a normal tablet your hand draws while the image appears somewhere else and that creates a slight disassociation for the artist. This is an innovative product and my praise goes out to Wacom for developing it but with a price tag of almost AU$4000 it is out of my price range . Hence in the next month or two I will be attempting to build a similar unit from parts that I can get my hands on. Here is what the real thing looks like:

It all started about a week or two ago when I found this link http://bongofish.co.uk/. It is quite amazing what Drew has done and I will be attempting to learn from his experiences and building my own Cintiq.

Drew has also made a forum where people who are taking on this fascinating project can share ideas and knowledge: http://forum.bongofish.co.uk/index.php

My aim is to have a finished product which looks like this

(Yes that is Genndy Tartakovsky!)

Since I want to build the Samtiq into an animation desk I have decided that a 15″ display size is the most suitable. For that size screen I would need a tablet which 9×12. Any bigger and I will lose the functionality of being able to turn the animation disk to work at different angles. Although the active drawing area of the tablet is only 9×12, there are various circuit boards around the active area which result in the physical tablet dimensions to be about 13×17. For a time I was considering a 12×18 tablet which was going cheap but that is just too big and would have been impractical. So I have decided that 9×12 is the size that I will go with and a 15″ LCD screen.

After reading all the info on the Bongofish forums about suitable LCD screens, so far (and it is very early days too, only 3 or 4 builds as of 31 Dec 2006) it seems that the first criteria is that the power supply needs to be external because the tablet sensors are affected by the proximity of the power supply. The second criteria is that it has minimum problems with relocating the circuit boards which drive the LCD panel. There is a huge resource for finding a suitable LCD at Lumenlab. This forum is dedicated to building home-made projectors from LCD screens and they have accumulated a lot of data on which LCD panels can have their circuit boards easily moved (they call them FFC issues, FFC are the flexible cables which connect the circuit boards to the LCD panel. If an LCD has FFC issues then you have to do some work before you can move it’s circuit boards out of the way. For this project the circuit boards need to be moved out of the way so that the tablet circuit board can sit flush against the back of the LCD panel. In the DIY projector case they want to get the circuit boards out of the way so that they can light the LCD from the back and then project the image onto the wall via a lens).

After much searching through LCDs on ebay, I have purchased the following LCD:

It is a 15″ Samsung SyncMaster 152T, which was the top of the range of the 15″ Samsung monitors when it came out about 4 years ago. It only does 1024×768 which might be a problem but it will be good enough to start with. I have a Sharp UXGA 15″ which can do atleast (1280×1024) but that needs to have a controller purchased for it. So I am starting with the Samsung and if the project is useable I will look into getting the controller for Sharp panel.

The monitor should arrive next week, unfortunately it doesn’t have a power supply ( 14V 3 Amp ) so I will have to find that before I can get started.

On the tablet side of things I am looking for a 9×12 in the Wacom range the Intuos3 9×12 goes for AU$500-600, so I am considering different options, one of which is the following: http://www.uc-logic.com/products/products_pf1209.htm
This tablet has the same specs as the Intuos3 at a fraction of the price although I dont think the drivers will be as good as Wacom’s
There is a seller on ebay that’s selling this item, it is in the states and the shipping charges are a bit annoying but I might go that way if there is no other way.

So stay tuned while I get all the pieces together for this fascinating project.

Here is my seasonal greeting card for this year Seasons Greetings.

Today I started working on a new daily animation piece which required a scroller. One thing led to another and I started writing a scroller class in Actionscript 3.0 working with Flash Professional Public Alpha. I wanted a scroller which could attach itself to any graphic and create two instance on each side of the original and then scroll either to the left or the right. For best results the graphic will have to the same size as the stage and an empty MovieClip can be used to position the resulting scroller on the screen.

After a lot of fiddling around I found that using the EnterFrame event would result in jerky scrolling so I started using the new Timer class in AS 3.0 and that gave better results although the is still some jerkiness. You can see in the test below, use the arrow keys to change the parameters.

If anyone is interested in the source, drop me a line.

scroller_as3.zip

Check out this beautiful film by master animator Frederic Back:

The little animation piece, Little Red Tiki Hood, which I did for the November Challenge at AnimationForum has won 2nd prize! I was awarded one Silver Talent Point to my account at the forum and I can’t wait to get my miniature Iron Giant figurine! :)

http://www.animationforum.net/forum/showthread.php?t=2174

Here is the finished piece, there is heaps of stuff I can fix but I am well and truly out of time on this one, it was a great learning experience.

Ok, I have been working really hard on this dancer, it is pretty tricky and there are lots of things I am not happy with but to change them I would basically have to start all over again, so I am going to just finish it the way it is. After all this is just a learning exercise.

Everything is animated except the turns, the contest closes tomorrow so I wont have time to do the turns but maybe I will finish it some other time. Click the image to see it.

I have decided to called my animation for the Dance-Off Challenge Little Red Tiki Hood. Below is a work in progress preview, I still have to draw the dancer (not easy!) and also fine tuning some of the timing.

Here is the main background for the dance-off challenge entry, it is based on the art of Shag which I particularly like.