Sketch Dump

I've gotten into the habit lately where I'd sketch on my phone when I have a few spare minutes.  As a result, I've accumulated a handful of sketches.  I'm pretty happy with the amount of extra practice I've gotten in.  Nothing is very polished here, but I've been able to push myself on posing, action shots, and more interesting camera angles.

Practice practice practice.  Must get better.

Color study

I'm trying out a new paint program called Krita and enjoying it so far.  Here's a color study I did using it.  It's a frame from a film called Pina.  (A frame picked by the blog Movies In Color.)

It feels good to flex my art muscles again.  I'm finding the hard part is having a mental plan to drive action and also having the endurance and discipline to follow through.  It'll be especially important now that the free time I have is more limited.  It's something to work on this year.

Good bye Dynamite

At 14.5 years old, our cat, Dynamite, suddenly passed away early Thanksgiving morning.  Michael and I were both heartbroken.  The first week was especially rough dealing with the grief of losing her.  She was so much more than a cat or pet to us.  She was family.  She was our baby before we had a baby.  She was our muse.  She taught me a lot about love and honesty.  She provided so much love and joy to us.  She gave us a million moments of absurd hilarity, and millions more moments of perfect, quiet companionship.  Our family feels like it's missing an important piece now.

A quick glance through my doodles will show you that it's mostly cats.  It was all inspired by Dynamite.  The art that flowed most easily and joyfully out of me was always those doodles of cats as I envisioned Dynamite on all kinds of imaginary adventures.

Her passing was a devastating loss for our family, but as I dig up memories of her, I am inspired to resume sketching and dreaming.  I spent the last 3 years diving deep into technical skills.  Now I emerge from it feeling empowered.  But art and story was always food for my soul.  And I can think of no better way to honor Dynamite's memory, than resuming my "Official Kitty Cat Business" comic and just drawing a ridiculous amount of cats.

A month later, the crippling grief is gone (nevermind, it still comes back every other week or so), but the sadness is still there.  I think we'll be okay, but we'll be feeling this for a long time.  We still miss and think about her everyday.  I still listen for her taptaptap on the hardwood floors.  I still look for her in my closet.  I still think about the last affectionate head bump I got from her.

Dynamite, my sweet girl, you will never be forgotten.  Thank you for spending your life with us because you made every moment sweeter.  Thank you for your love, your sass, your inspiration, and the profound impact you had on my relationship with Michael.  I will love you forever and ever.

And here are some new cat sketches.

What a crazy 3 years, it's been!

It's been more than 3 years since I posted.  Wow.

A lot has happened in that time, all contributing to why I was too busy to post and too busy to make progress on most of my projects.

First, of all, I changed jobs.  PDI/DreamWorks was my dream job.  I found like-minded creative people that I had been looking for all my life.  I met my husband there.  I met my closest friends there.  There were so many talented and brilliant people there.  But after 7 years I no longer found the work challenging (maybe a sign of that was all the side projects I poured my energy into) and I found my career had hit a wall.

Along came AltspaceVR.  I had been interested in VR and I didn't know what I was looking for in my next challenge, but when I saw their demo, I knew that was it!  I started as a Software Engineer there in Oct of 2014.  My friends from PDI gave me such a wonderful send off and such love that I knew they would always have a piece of my heart.

AltspaceVR was an amazing ride.  We were trying to build a platform that would best let people communicate in VR.  Everyone was passionate, bold and supportive of each other.  I was learning so much and free to explore my own crazy ideas.  The time I used to funnel into side projects were now used for legit work.

Then in 2015, I got recruited by a friend to be a part of the TEALS program.  Now this was really cool.  It's a volunteer program backed by Microsoft that pairs industry programmers with school teachers to help setup Computer Science classes in schools.  It was high commitment, but extremely rewarding.  For a year, I worked with my friend, who was a teacher at San Mateo High School, following the syllabus from TEALS, to create the lessons for the Introduction to CS class.  I taught 3 mornings a week, did the projects and labs.  It was exhausting and easily one of the most incredible experiences I've ever had.  I got to know the kids and see some of them surprise themselves with what they were learning.  I truly believe this is a great, sustainable way to open the funnel for kids to get into programming who might not otherwise have.

Then in early 2015, I got pregnant!  Pregnancy is crazy, people.  The whole process seems like a ridiculous way to create mini-people.  But our bodies are also incredible.  Pregnancy, child birth, and parenting are the hardest things I've ever done.  I've always respected moms, but actually going through it has increased my respect exponentially.  I'm so blessed to have gotten the support I had from family, my husband, coworkers, employer and medical team.  I can't imagine how hard it is for women in parts of the world who have to walk to get water, or travel miles to get to a doctor.

My husband and I simply ADORE our new son.  For all the projects I've done and all the ones I'm still to do, my little baby boy is the coolest thing I have made and will ever make.  (Well, maybe tied with the next one, if there is another one.)  I was never a baby person before, but now, I find babies AMAZING.

Then a few months after returning from maternity leave, through a series of bad luck, AltspaceVR had trouble securing our next round of funding.  AltspaceVR eventually was acquired by Microsoft!  But I ended up at Oculus in another chapter of my career.

Over the last 3 years there were multiple times when I half-typed up a post, only to forget it and abandon it.  The real event that motivated me to dust off this blog again was the recent passing of our cat, Dynamite.  But that deserves its own post...

Infinite Canvas - Milestone 2

This one latest update on the infinite canvas app took a while longer, partly because it was a lot of work and partly because I haven't had as much free time to work on it.  But I'm so happy it's done!

I now have an editor page that lets me do basic edits (and has features) like the following:

• create a new map
• add an image
• drag and drop to reposition an image
• save out map
• maintain regioning information and keep it up-to-date
• mouse-over highlights images
• dirtied images are highlighted in magenta
• grid lines to show regioning sections for debugging

The interface looks like this for now.  Extra UI elements are minimal to keep the interface clean and simple and very similar to the viewing page.

Using the new edit page I'm experimenting with laying out the 4 comics I have for "Official Kitty Cat Business".  See the comic map here!

Next stage:

• I may revisit some of the design choices I made this time.  In milestone 1, I made more use of cached images and regions.  In milestone 2, I'm forcing more queries to the datastore so the app is guaranteed to have fresher data, but it has started feeling a bit more sluggish. 
• add delete functionality
• add user permisions
• add arrow keys controls
•  get DanAnh, Hoyt or Mari to play with it a bit

That's enough on the tech end of this for a while.  Now the basics are here, I can start using it to put together thumbnails for Project Apricot and put up more comics for Official Kitty Cat Business.  I'll focus more on the artistic side for the next few months.  Yay!

Shaders on Batman!

I figured out how to load up an obj file and now we have Batman!  The toon outline shader is more interesting on Batman than the sphere.  Also, all that fur on Batman makes him look like Oscar the Grouch.
This is still available at: http://www.tingting-wu.com/webgl_projects/ttwu_shaders.html

Webgl shaders

I spent last week teaching myself some webgl and was surprised at how much you can do with it.  Especially when it came to shaders, much of what I could do in C++  8 years ago, I can now do for the web.  I used the three.js library and it was a really handy and fast way to get started with webgl.

There are some really compelling examples of its usage here:  threejs.org

Here's the page to my shaders.  Just click on a shader to start seeing a sphere shaded, and then pick other shaders and shapes as you choose.

Here are some screenshots.  I had a ton of fun working on these and am pretty pleased with how far I got in a week.

The fresnel shader and fur shader are the most interesting shaders, but the toon outline shader would be interesting with a more complex shape with more curvature.  In the future I'll add the ability to load in a model so it's not just generic library shapes.