"TRANSITIONS PART ONE: THE IMPORTANCE OF CURVES"

As promised, Shawn is starting to blog on transitions with "... The Importance of Curves".

From the post: "... Whenever you are dealing with transitions that take some fixed amount of time to complete, it can be useful to normalize their position along this timeline into a control value in the range 0 to 1. This makes the transition state easier to manipulate ... More importantly, you can apply curves to make the animation speed up or slow down in interesting ways. Normalized control values are useful for this because it is easy to apply curves that will affect their shape without changing the overall range of the motion ...".

Read on!

STOP-MOTION VIDEO: "GURREIROS MALANDROPS®"

A group of students created this funny stop-motion video with over 3000 photos:

Enjoy!

EXTENDING THE CONTENTMANAGER FOR MODELS

There's a new article on Cornflower Blue's blog that demonstrates how to extend the content manager so as to handle the setup of models being imported.

From Eli's post: "... I don't know about everyone else, but usually the first thing I do after loading models is loop over their effects and set up their lighting. (Check Shawn's blog to read more about the standard lighting rig and per pixel lighting. ) The other day I thought of a neat way to tuck this code away a little, so I thought I'd share.

A subclass of ContentManager could easily handle the model setup code for us automatically. It could check what kind of content it's being asked to load, and if the content type is a Model, it can set up the model automatically ...".

Read on!