Sodium Interactive

And you thought I’d flat lined on you. I’ve been working some crazy hours on couple of 3D animations for the Spirit of Youth Awards 2008. I work at Frost Design which, as my flatmate pointed out yesterday, means I’m a Flash Developer working on a TV ad in Maya for a company primarily focused on print design. Certainly keeps me on my toes!

It’s been fun getting to know Maya again – it really is an amazing piece of software both from an output and user interface point of view. Concealing such an awesome array of tools and functionality behind an intuitive user interface is a feat in itself. It’s inspired me to brush up on my skills and try to marry it with my interactive work. I’ve been experimenting a lot in PaperVision3D lately (more on this later) so I’m sure it’ll come in handy.

I’ll post the animations when they’re finished (if I’m allowed). In the meantime, check out this amazing animation I found on my travels around the internet today:

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Someone posted an amazing news visualisation to the PaperVision3D mailing list today. I’m not sure how much the 3D floating headlines add to the news consuming experience, pretty though it may be. But the rest of the interface is simply gorgeous! Colourful, minimalist, utilitarian designs like this always do things to me. Kind of makes me wish they had an easier way to actually read the stories. Hopefully they have plans on evolving the visualisation side of things to add a bit more structure to the content now they’ve nutted out all the hard stuff.

Make sure you check out the webcam mode if you have one, it selects storied based on whatever you wave around in front of it. Frankie (our Staffordshire Terrier) fell in the top headline/blog category for some reason.