While working on OWNED, we went through various different ideas for what the characters for Super Ultra Mega Fighter Turbo would be, and figuring out one that would fit Tommy's character. We knew we wanted some sort of mystic/magical martial-arts fighter, so I explored a design inspired by Indian and Sikh cultures.

We're all working on our group senior film now here at BYU, and these were concept designs I made for one of the characters.

This was from another project in Jake Parker's class, a sea captain character design project.

This was an assignment for a class I took from Jake Parker. The assignment was to take a Nintendo character and redesign it. I chose Star Fox, for which I came up with a few interesting silhouettes for.

The dialogue is from 11-Second Club.

Concept sketches for an Aesop's Fable story-boarding group project. Our group chose The Fox and the Crane. Since Aesop was Greek, we considered dressing them in togas, but decided not to in the end.

Another semester over in my career as a student. A lot of things happened, and I learned quite a bit. I worked on a couple of shorts for a professor to pitch to PBS, I made a short comic for a student anthology book titled Reality Not Included (which I'll start posting once I've got access to computer with Photoshop), I went to CTN, and took on 14 credit hours with projects that I'll post once I've gotten a chance to polish them to my liking.

CTN was a fun and informative experience with a lot of cool opportunities. I got to see Rise of the Guardians at Dreamworks and Wreck-it Ralph at Disney, attend panels given by experienced people in the industry, and show my reel to representatives at Disney's booth of the expo floor, thanks to a friend who lent me his MacBook to do so. It was also a bit of a wake-up call. For one, using a USB-drive to hold my portfolio was a terrible idea since those reviewing my portfolio to have a computer to bring it up on (being my first CTN, I didn't know what to expect so a lot was done last-minute). I also realized that I need to devote more time towards my focus than just working on a wider variety of areas in animation. I don't have much of an interest in shader programming, and my work in that class wasn't all that great and it ate into time for projects in other classes that I wanted to put more effort into. I also should have taken the animation track for the 3d Animation class instead of taking the modeling and rigging track.

The lack of a portable computer issue has been resolved, at least. I've ordered a Samsung ATIV 700t, a Windows 8 tablet powerful enough to run Photoshop and Toon Boom, and has a Wacom tablet sensor for pressure-sensitive pen input along with regular touch input. It will be especially useful these next few weeks as I am home for the holidays and don't have access to my desktop PC.

This was the wolf-monster I designed for my comic, a sort of modern variation of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf," for the Reality Not Included anthology.

Over the summer at BYU I took a gesture drawing class from Ryan Woodward. Like most figure drawing classes, we did some of the normal stuff where we just drew the models in at most 5-10 minutes per pose.

There were also a few days that we brought in costumes for the models to wear. The ranger cloak someone brought in ended up as one of the most popular choice.

The most interesting part of the class was when we were told to exaggerate the proportions of the model in various ways.

The last two we had to draw a weird shape and then draw the model within that shape.

7|1|2012 - Updated SFCE to version 1.1:

• Disabled page navigation through scroll wheel. It didn't seem to function correctly in newer browsers for some reason. If you want it, the code is still in the ComicSystem symbol. There's a comment in there telling you what line to un-comment to bring it back.
• Fixed some big GUI bugs that made the interface end up off-screen with customized GUI sets. The AS3 version especially is now capable of making sure all GUI elements appear in the right places.
• New GUI element - a page count indicator. You can edit the Page Counter symbol to change the font, or go into GUI Parts and remove it from the last frame without any issues.
• New GUI Parts set - "Clear," which has transparent buttons that only show when you hover over them with the mouse.
• Included instructions on how to edit the Preloader Screen symbol. Deleting the black backdrop rectangle now doesn't break the engine (You'll probably still want it, though. SFCE would automatically re-size it to cover the first page while everything is still loading).

The Simple Flash Comic Engine is a free Flash-based system that will allow anyone, no matter how little programming knowledge they have, to create Flash-based comics. Creating comics with this engine is as simple as creating frames in the timeline to act as pages. No additional programming is required, the engine deals with all navigation methods and includes a pre-loader.

Another reason for the engine is to provide an expected means of navigating through the pages. As of now, most Flash comics are self-designed and navigating through them changes between each one. This engine maximizes accessibility by providing click-able navigation buttons, and many sets of keyboard shortcuts, and mouse scroll-wheel support*.
Supported keyboard shortcuts: Left & right arrow keys, Page Up & Page Down, Space & Backspace, - & +, A & D, and Enter & Del/. on the number pad.

While Simple Flash Comic Engine is free to download, use, and modify, you do not have the rights to sell the engine in any form. You cannot charge anyone to "provide" them with the engine. I don't care what you do with the end result. You can sell comics that use this engine, you just cannot sell the engine itself.

Regarding credits and the "Powered By" links: while I would prefer that they remain, they are not mandatory and you can remove them if you so desire. The intent for them is to promote the engine so that others who wish to create comics using Flash can easily find the engine.

Contents of zip file:
simple-flash-comic-engine_mx.fla - AS2-based FLA for Flash MX through Flash 8
simple-flash-comic-engine_cs3.fla - AS3-based FLA for Flash CS3 and up

*Scroll wheel navigation is disabled by default on v.1.1. Scroll wheel support depends on the version of the Flash authoring program that you are using. While the code is included in the Flash MX version, scroll wheel support didn't come around until Flash MX 2004. If you are using the AS2-based MX file in a later Flash IDE, you will want to set the Publish Settings to export to Flash Player 7 or above to ensure that the scroll wheel navigates properly.

A short, simple story of a lonely computer creature.

Banjoraptor.