We made a trip to Baltimore’s Sherwood Gardens this past weekend, just in time to catch the height of the tulip bloom.  Every once in a while my son paused long enough for me to stop chasing him, and catch my breath.  I tried to take advantage of these brief rest-stops, and take a bunch of photos.  Click either of the images to see the whole set on Flickr.

With Spring now officially here, I guess it’s about time I posted a couple photos that I took this past Fall. The first two are from our pumpkin pickin’ trip, and the third is from one of our many weekend trips to Loch Raven.  Only about 5 or 6 months behind here… I’m working on it.

I just recently created a new animation & motion graphics album on vimeo, and I’m now in the process of uploading some more of my work. You can already find most of these pieces either in the animation portion of my site, or in my blog archives, but this is just another great way to make these available for easy viewing in one central location.

If you aren’t already familiar with Vimeo, do yourself a favor and browse around the site - there’s a ton of great inspiration to be found.

‘Rilla wants to be your valentine! The Dude has been a huge fan of gorillas lately. I have to chase him around the house - dragging my knuckles, making gorillla sounds, beating my chest, etc - at least once a day lately, so there had to be a gorilla on his Valentine’s Day card for his buddies and grandparents.

I’m pretty happy with the way that it turned out, but I’m definitely still partial to the one that my son and I collaborated on. he loves the Wacom tablet…

just a couple of gorilla sketches. stay tuned.

It’s been a pretty busy couple of months here, with the holidays, post-holidays, new job, being dad to the coolest little dude in the world, trying to kick-start a personal project… among other things. Somewhere in that blur, Jen and I designed and launched a new site for my father’s insurance agency.  So, if you’re looking for car, homeowners, life, health insurance, or anything in-between, stop by frankdippelagency.com and give them a shout. They do have the handsomest insurance website in (at least) all of Maryland, after all.

We also designed a site for Jen’s brother and his wife a little while back. Round log siding - get it while it’s… round!

I just uploaded a slightly modified version of my chirpy bird design to MySoti - the redesigned, face-lifted, relaunch of Bountee.  Hop on over there and grab yourself a custom-printed birdy T in guys, girls, or kids sizes… or even a cool onesie for your littlest one.  If you happen to like it, log in and give me a vote. Thanks!  Stay tuned for more designs.

I’ve been teaching myself the ins and outs of 3D Max lately. So far, it’s been a fairly easy learning curve. Beyond getting used to the different interface and keyboard/mouse controls compared to Maya, I’ve been trying to take a stab at some different aspects of working with the software. There are a number of things about the Max approach that I think I may actually prefer already. In any event, this video is a brief clip of a double bounce walk cycle. It could still use some finessing, but I basically just wanted to get a feel for the animation process in 3D Max.

Why do you deserve to be considered one of Baltimore’s Best?

Viral spot for Baltimore Magazine’s 2008 Best of Baltimore Party. I took care of all of the animation and audio/video editing. Created in After Effects.

This video clip (click the image to view) is the result of an experiment / challenge that I put myself up to recently. I’m sure everyone has seen the “growing vines” effect that’s been so popular in motion graphics work for a while now. I was playing with one of the new options in Maya’s polygon modeling tool set, and I thought it would be fun to try out that same effect in 3D. Because of the fact that Maya’s poly extrude operation doesn’t have keyable min and max value fields, I had to figure out a few work-arounds.

A step-by-step walkthrough of my roundabout process for growing poly vines in Maya follows below:

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