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Daniel de Ridder

@filecreation / filecreation.tumblr.com

Visual artist and tinkerer

It is the first day of a new month, and it is a Friday. You know what that means; a new ChitChat episode!

Since I am moving to a new phase of my life, not being a student anymore and entering the adult world of full time employment, I figured this would be a nice moment to rework the style I have been using for these videos. After all, the whole channel was started as a way for me to learn new things while sharing my knowledge with you guys, so it would be a shame if I kept everything in the same basic setup that I used while I was still getting used to the software.

How do you like the new setup? I still need to debug a few things, set up the proper camera to avoid static and find my microphone again, but I like it so far!

Hey you! You like books right?

Of course you do. Especially those with lots of pictures in them. And a few words here and there.

In any case, you can now download a free PDF of a 72 page book in which I describe how I build the Traveling Beastmaster!

 “What is the Traveling Beastmaster?” you ask?

It is the final product of my graduation project as a student Game Artist, in which I brought my imagination to life by building it as a sort of animatronic mini theater. 

In any case, enough words. Go read a more interesting version of this story, with real pictures, over at my website or via your preferred PDF reader!

You can find the book here. Do let me know what you think of it! Feedback makes the world a better place. :D

Ah I just realized that I forgot to export the audio for the last minute.

Oops.

Give me a few minutes to fix this!

And here is the final Project Anima (tronic)  video to cap everything off!

Today was my presentation for a commission of teachers who decided I graduated with this final product.

I`ll still have to show off my Beastmaster in 2 weeks during a big school-wide event, but there is nothing left to do anymore! (Except for finetuning stuff and making a bit more appealing presentation)

In 2012, I was working on a story called “Project VirscA”. It involved a space colony crashing into an alien world, where the survivors had to fight off Reptilian overlords with god-like technology. In order to write that story, I made a world map and gave locations their names.

Now 4 years later, I needed a world  to give the creatures of Project Anima (Tronic) a home. So, I grabbed the old Davellir map, polished it up a bit, and now it looks better than ever!

Sure, the geological features are traced from the old map, but I think it looks nice now. I guess I did learn a few things in the past few years!

So I soldered all the sensors and stuff for my cages and tested them. All my distance sensors give back a value of 0 cm unless I press against the yellow wires. Either 1) all my sensors are broken. 2) I soldered the same wire badly on 6 sensors. 3) my code is wrong. 4) the wire has a bad breadboard connection. 5) there is a weird static or other problem in my wires, which I have used without a problem many times before. 6) the way I place my sensors in the cage messes up their functionality. 7) I switched up my green and yellow wires. 8) I switched up the code for my yellow and green wires.

The list can go on for a little longer but it comes down to the fact that the problem can be anywhere and my knowledge and time is too limited.. Either way I’m gonna sleep first and check back at this problem tomorrow.

It was “9) Didn’t declare the Pinmodes so they didnt knew what to do”.

No clue why it acted the way it did tho, because I reckon they wouldnt give any feedback at all in that case. But eh..

So I soldered all the sensors and stuff for my cages and tested them. All my distance sensors give back a value of 0 cm unless I press against the yellow wires. Either 1) all my sensors are broken. 2) I soldered the same wire badly on 6 sensors. 3) my code is wrong. 4) the wire has a bad breadboard connection. 5) there is a weird static or other problem in my wires, which I have used without a problem many times before. 6) the way I place my sensors in the cage messes up their functionality. 7) I switched up my green and yellow wires. 8) I switched up the code for my yellow and green wires. The list can go on for a little longer but it comes down to the fact that the problem can be anywhere and my knowledge and time is too limited.. Either way I'm gonna sleep first and check back at this problem tomorrow.

So I have over 800 photos to sort through that I made during the last semester, documenting my project.

And I have to go through them all to filter out the trash, duplicates (because the Dropbox app thought they needed a copy of every file, in the same folder) and unrelated photos. Then I have to figure out a good way to put everything together in a book format and then I have to print it.

This may take a while.

Down to 622 photos.

Now I`ll format my thoughts and see which photos I can match with those. Making a book is nice, but nobody likes a wall of text.

So I have over 800 photos to sort through that I made during the last semester, documenting my project. And I have to go through them all to filter out the trash, duplicates (because the Dropbox app thought they needed a copy of every file, in the same folder) and unrelated photos. Then I have to figure out a good way to put everything together in a book format and then I have to print it. This may take a while.