Cardboard Millennium Falcon

Why drop $160 for Hasbro’s Millennium Falcon when you can build your own?

Supplies Used:

• Studioscale’s Millennium Falcon blueprints
• Scissors
• Compass
• String (for drawing large circles)
• X-Acto knife
• Scotch tape
• Elmer’s glue (for reinforcement—I wanted it to be relatively kid-proof)
• An old vacuum box, toilet paper tubes, and other miscellaneous cardboard scraps
• Paper
• Posterboard
• A rubber band (aka Han’s seatbelt)

Punch it, Chewie!

Interview with Animator Broose Johnson

While at Disney, Broose Johnson worked on movies such as Oliver and Company, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Lion King, and Brother Bear. He has been a clean-up animator, a lead animator, head of story, and just about everything in between. After Disney Animation closed its Florida studio in 2004, Broose joined Cecropia and helped create a unique hand-animated video game called The Act. He currently works for a company that is producing a series of books and DVDs to teach English to children in Japan.

Broose was kind enough to allow me to interview him about his career, the future of animation, and much more. Hope you enjoy it!

Interview with Broose Johnson – Part 1 (mp3): Broose introduces himself, explains how he got interested in animation, and gives an overview of his time at Disney. He also shares his thoughts on the closing of the Florida studio.

Interview with Broose Johnson – Part 2 (mp3): Broose talks about transitioning from movies to working for a video game company, explains the challenges of freelancing (and the benefits of his current gig), describes how being a Christian has affected his work as an animator, ponders animation’s future, and gives advice to aspiring animators.

When Good News Backfires

What excites one customer has the potential to leave another miffed.

A price cut will upset the woman who bought yesterday. A free upgrade will irk the guy who doesn’t qualify. The new product that merges products A and B will alienate those who liked A and B just fine the way they were.

Some companies seem oblivious to this. Others formulate plans to avoid it. But even the best plans can fail to predict actual customer behavior.

The best companies don’t just plan. They flex.

Here’s a small example of this from an interview with entrepreneur David Eckoff.

David Eckoff: I just ordered an item on amazon.com recently and before it had even arrived, the price had declined. I got in contact with Amazon and on the technology side, they’ve got something on their website where they make it easy to get in touch with them. They don’t just publish their phone number, but all you have to do is enter your phone number and click and bang, they call you right back.

Stone Payton: Oh that’s cool. I didn’t realize that.

David Eckoff: But it gets better, Stone. It gets better because at this point you can imagine as a customer I’m not too happy that the price went down. I didn’t even have the item yet. So I asked them “Could you issue me a refund for the difference.” And I didn’t really think they would but I figured it was worth talking to them anyway since they made it so easy to get in touch. And you know, they did.

Unity Resource: VelocityLimiter

One of the cool things about Unity3D is its built-in physics engine. Instead of having to manually code interactions between objects, gravitational acceleration, etc., in many cases you can just specify an object’s mass, drag, and so on, and let the physics engine do the rest.

However, when working with non-kinematic rigidbodies (i.e. objects controlled by the physics engine), there can be situations where collisions with static colliders and other rigidbodies result in large increases in velocity. This can lead to undesirable effects, such as objects suddenly “teleporting” to random parts of the screen or breaking through static collider scenery.

Miyazaki On Scope Creep

From an interview with animator/director Hideaki Anno:

Anno still has regrets about the scene of the revival of the God Warrior. He wanted to use seven pieces of animation cels between key frame animations. But Miyazaki did not allow it because there was no time. So, five pieces animation cel were used. And Miyazaki did not allow the use of three colors for a shade. He did not allow two colors either at first, but accepted it. Anno says “There was a memo ‘If you use three colors, I will kill you’ from Miya-san.”

Unity Resource: XYController

A while back, someone asked a question on the UnityAnswers site about how to write a script that moves an object in the X/Y direction based on input from the arrow keys.

I wrote a simple script in answer to the question, and I think it makes a nice little example for someone who is new to Unity3D and wondering how to move objects around. It isn’t game-ready (for example, it will plow right through walls and other static scenery), but its simplicity makes it relatively easy to understand and a good starting point for further learning and experimentation.

The Ballad of Ned the Hamster

This was one of my entries in Chip MacGregor’s 2009 Bad Poetry Contest. I imagine it sung in a bluegrass style, to the tune of “M.T.A.”

I am just a hamster
running in a wheel.
I spin my wheel faster all the time.
But the spaceship I am powering
with my little hamster wheel
never seems to reach warp 8 or 9.

The aliens, they took me
from a pet store in Des Moines.
They feed me pellets hourly as I run.
But when I go to sleep at night
in my steel cocoon,
I dream of breaking free on Alpha-1.

Fantasy and Everyday Life

I once heard a writer say that, although reading Tolkien was one of the great experiences of her life, his work had had no bearing on her everyday existence. And she’s not alone. For many people, fantasy is at best entertaining escapism, entirely disconnected from real life.

But at its best, fantasy changes how we see the world. It opens our eyes to the astounding magic all around us.

Take a tree.

Water falls from mountains in the sky. A flaming orb rises in the heavens, shining like a phoenix. And in a forest, nestled in the remains of its ancestors, a lone seed receives rain and sun and springs to life.

There is nothing humdrum about a tree, much less everyday life.

Unity Resource: GameObjectPool

One way to improve a game’s performance in Unity3D is to avoid creating and destroying game objects, and instead activating/deactivating them. However, doing so can be a bit tricky and time consuming—especially if there isn’t a hard limit on the number of game objects that can be active at any given time, and/or their lifetimes are unpredictable.

Below is a pool class I developed for Intergalactic Sheep Pong. Here’s a rundown of its features.

• It allows you to pre-instantiate a specific number of prefab instances.
• It dynamically grows if you end up needing more objects than you originally allocated.
• It allows objects to be spawned/unspawned in any order (in other words, it doesn’t assume that the objects spawned first will go back into the pool before objects spawned later).
• It doesn’t require any special scripts to be attached to the objects it contains. They only need to use the built-in OnEnable/OnDisable functions to do their initialization and cleanup.

I hope you find it useful. Feel free to use/tweak/retool for your own purposes.

Miyazaki On Prizes

“Prizes do not mean anything to me. I think it is more important to make a child aware of the existence of a weird creature like a water spider that breathes through its backside.”

- Hayao Miyazaki

(From a 2006 interview)