Pharan

That's all I wanted to write.

Oh, and here are some friends.

I noticed recent a spike in the number people faving and collecting my infographics/tutorial/rambling deviations.
That's cool. Thanks for visiting! And I'm glad you find them at least interesting enough to keep in your lists.
I'm really busy these days but I hope to update those deviations sometime soon.
They annoyingly don't reflect what advice, information, focus and context I would share to learners these days.

The thing though is I don't know where you all came from, and I'm curious.

Did you get those links from a popular deviation featuring tutorials or something? Or did you do a search?

EDIT:
My metrics show I'm getting a lot of people from my tumblr. That's probably all it is.
So yeah, for my dA watchers, I do have a few tumblr blogs. I have ramblings there too.
pharandrawsnonsense.tumblr.com…
pharantriestoanimatestuff.tumb…

I also have a purely reblog site for art and art-related tips. I try to be a little broad with the stuff I reblog there. It's kind of my personal belief that artists shouldn't narrow themselves too much in terms of sources of knowledge. Snobbery (and not-snobbery but just dismissal of fields that seem too far removed from our own interests to matter) is a hindrance to the eager learner.
pharanreblogsarttips.tumblr.co…

Thanks, !

(this is big news)

• long-gone friends
• ghosts of the past
• dumbness
  
• maxed subwoofers
• unequal distribution of learning opportunities.
  
• the eternal space between what is thought and what is spoken
• not having a pet cat
• damnably expensive musical instruments compared to their prices in the US
• the prejudice of the prejudged
• social ills in general
  
• loose analogies
  
• bad mouse microswitches
• the lack of soldering experience and EEE knowhow.
• moving large numbers of stuff around
  
• unripe wisdom
• the lack of context

But for all the love, friendship and experience I've been a part of this year, I say, forward and onward to making things better and making better things!

And to these demons, I wave my clickety-clackety plastic thing. Shoo!

We have work to do in 2014!

Hey guys!
If you have any 2D game developer or animator friends, please pass this along:

Spine Kickstarter
www.kickstarter.com/projects/e…

I'm sorry this post doesn't have an image. Just pretend it does, and that your eye was caught. 'cause this is important!
If you are a game developer or know any or work with any, please check out this really great 2D skeletal animation system for games called Spine (comprised of a collection of open-source runtimes for several popular game engines and programming languages, and a paid animation/editor application). I'm not trying to sell it to you, I'm not even part of the team. So I don't get any money if you buy it or whatever. lol
But it is a great tool, and it's only been getting better and better over the past few months of its existence.

I'm posting so you'll support this Kickstarter if you can, by telling people you know or throwing money at their new Kickstarter yourself— and not as a favor to me but because it's seriously a damned good system and tool and deserves support by its own right and what it means for independent game developers and animation quality in indie games.

Spine itself is already available, usable and constantly being updated and improved. There's also a free trial you can try out (there's bit of a learning curve though, but I've seen my friend pick it up and animate really awesome stuff in only a couple of days).

The engineering on the runtimes is superb. That's some really solid and flexible stuff. It's fast. It has a neat API, and all open-source so you don't need to wait for the devs to get back to you if you need to implement or find out something specific. Plus there's a good chance that it's available for the 2D engine/framework you use— if you use something popular anyway, and maybe even if you don't.

But this new kickstarter elevates its already powerful feature-set to rival that of animation systems that are only kept within top game development studios (yes, rival the different animation systems behind Muramasa, Dragon's Crown or Rayman Legends, look them up on YouTube and see how pretty they are).

It's easy to get support from their team. The lead developer, Nate, is a really nice guy (and a genius, IMO).
He's really active in the forums and quickly squashes bugs and responds to small requests (and keeps a note of big ones) really quickly.

Anyway, just trying to spread the word. These new features they're trying to kickstart are really powerful and would mean making REALLY GREAT SUPERMEGAOMGIDEK 2D animation available to indie developers who don't have the resources to develop a tool this powerful by themselves. Plus, again, the dev is a really nice guy who lives a simple life and has a cute puggle named Moo. He's an experienced and passionate game tools developer - he co-authored libGDX and a bunch of other stuff and I think deserves all the support you can spare.

I'm not part of their team, but I swear I will come to your house and murder your cat if this Kickstarter fails.
(just kidding. I love cats. But do support Spine. It's REALLY GOOD. I'm saying this with a straight face.)

PS
Yes, it's better than Spriter and Smooth Moves. There. I said it.

EDIT:
ooh. found the video: