Anatomy and Art

So, a cool thing happened last week. A woman from the Museum of Science in Boston contacted me about using a few seconds from my sliding filament animation in a presentation at the museum.  Basically, she wanted the part where the filaments are seen sliding past one another en masse.

It’s really a small contribution, but I can’t help but feel happy to think of my work being used in what sounds like a really awesome museum and further shaping how visiting students think about this process.  I suppose that’s a lot of what I like about working at Sapling Learning too.

Those of you who have been reading here for a long time now, may remember more exasperated posts about the making of that very shot.  There was a time when I really thought that I might have mucked up my whole grad school potential by getting myself stuck with this one.  Halfway through the semester in my first 3D animation class at UIC I realized that I’d come up with a plan that 3DsMax didn’t want to let me do.  I thought that if I didn’t get it, my animation wouldn’t be any good, if I could even find a way to finish it at all, and I might fail the class, and never get anywhere with this whole 3D animation thing.  Well, I did get it, and as of tonight that animation has had 227,517 views on YouTube, and in the very near future, that one little shot will be worked into a Museum of Science stage presentation and I currently work as a 3D animator, and well, that just all feels pretty damn cool.

Oh, and if you watch any of the stage presentations in that link, the woman you see presenting there is Karine Thate.  She’s the one who contacted me.  Apparently she not only performs these presentations, but also puts them together herself.  That sounds like a pretty awesome job too.