Here’s a little test of Newton – the physics engine for After Effects (almost a snip at €179 from motionboutique.com).

I wondered how easy it would be to build a quick pinball simulation – so I threw together some pretty crude shapes in Illustrator, pasted them on to an After Effects layer and let Newton do the rest. It automatically splits each mask on to individual layers (if you choose to) and allows you to set all kinds of properties for each object (friction, bounce, angular and linear damping etc).

I did cheat the flippers a bit, which in the original project were just flapping about like crazy using wiggle expressions. Tweaking them for the few collisions is the only post-Newton fiddling that’s gone on. Oh, apart from tilting the whole thing in 3D and putting auto-orient towards camera on the ball. The important thing here is that the motion of the ball is entirely automatic and probably next to impossible (or at least mind-numbingly tedious) using traditional keyframing.

Anyway, here’s the result.
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Our famous ‘traditional’ TV-style Weather Symbols are now available on a range of gifts and clothing over at The Weather Symbol Store

Why not pop along for a huge selection of Weather Symbol T-Shirts, Mugs, Clocks and literally hundreds of Weather Symbol branded products.

The downloadable web-sized versions proved so popular I figured it might be time to branch out – so I’ve plastered some symbols on pretty much every available product over at Cafepress. There’s some pretty nifty items including iPad and iPhone cases. Plenty of perfect gift ideas for anyone who knows anyone interested in The Weather. I used to know a few meself as it happens.

Or you could simply wear your very own weather forecast for the day! Here in Ireland, I reckon anything with rain on would be a pretty safe bet.

I might add some more products at some point. Or maybe see if these ones fly off the shelves first…

I was quite pleased to see that the fan trailer I made for an (at the time) non-existent ‘Green Lantern’ movie has been picked up by The Times for a story about the real Green Lantern film that’s due to start shooting in September.

see Times Online – Green Lantern movie: confirmed release date

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I’ve been playing around with wordles and made a wordle based on my blog today.
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