Animation on Creativity Hacker

It's Alive!

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 06:45:14 +0000

After reviewing my archived experiments from a decade ago, I’ve decided to call that effort a “proof of concept” and go back to the drawing board for a full redesign.

PuppetFist

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 08:06:17 +0000

Animation is one of my hobbies, but I’m not particularly good at it. It’s an art form that requires patience, practice, and subtlety - none of which appear on my resume. But just because I suck at something doesn’t mean I’m not going to do it. It just means that I’m going to lean on my other skills to lower the total suckage. In this case, that means programming and electronics.

PuppetFist is the project that will let me create decent quality animation quickly, by capturing a performance instead of slogging through all that tedious keyframing. And the performance part couldn’t be easier. If you can sock-puppet, you can PuppetFist.

DoppelRender

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 14:24:20 +0000

Ever notice how much time you spend rendering identical images? Maybe your animated character pauses to think, or maybe you’re just using (and reusing) a limited number of poses. But sometimes it seems that over half the frames you devote precious time to rendering are identical to the frames you’ve already rendered. Sure, you can try to keep track of which ones are duplicates and then wrangle those files by hand, but situations get complicated quickly, and it ends up being easier to just bite the extra render time and save yourself the headache.