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The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Inchworm Animation
Being a giant, beloved video game site has its downsides. For example, we sometimes neglect to give independent developers our coverage love (or loverage, if you will) as we get caught up in AAA, AAAA or the rare quintuple-A titles. To remedy that, we're giving indies the chance to create their own loverage and sell you, the fans, on their studios and products. This week we talk with Bob Sabiston and about his DSiWare animation app, Inchworm Animation. What's your game called, and what's it about? Inchworm Animation. It's about $5. It's an overly ambitious paint and animation program on Nintendo DSiWare. It was just released on April 25, in the USA only for now.
Treebot climbs trees, is a robot (video)
Remember when you didn't consider climbing trees a chore? Treebot doesn't -- but then, it wasn't programmed to know boredom. The robot was designed by a team at The Chinese University of Hong Kong for the express purpose of shimmying up trees autonomously, figuring out the best route up a trunk using built-in touch sensors. The 'bot's body is designed like an inchworm, expanding and contracting as it works it way up -- unlike other climbers we've seen. Treebot can carry up to 3.7 pounds as it inches along, opening up the possibility of using the machine to prune hard to reach leaves. It can also shuffle up a variety of different plants, including bamboo stems, as evidenced by the sped-up video after the break. Unwieldy foliage, you've been put on notice.
NintendoWare Weekly: Inchworm Animation, Airport Mania
Today's DSiWare and WiiWare lineup definitely looks like the work of a company that isn't paying the strictest attention to its current generation of consoles. As Nintendo turns its eye toward the future, the downloadable Wii and DS lineup is looking pretty sparse. The good news is that Flat Black Films was finally able to sneak its remarkable-looking animation app, Inchworm Animation, into the DSi Shop. That DSi in your hand just magically became an animation studio. Or it will, later, if you buy the program.%Gallery-122193%
DSiWare animation program 'Inchworm' races toward April 25 release
Remember Inchworm? Chances are, unless you've been employed as a DS blogger for the last three years, you don't. Inchworm Animation is a DS animation program by Bob Sabiston's Flat Black Films, the company responsible for the rotoscoped animation in Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. It was shown off at GDC in 2008, and then it disappeared for a while, before being announced as a DSiWare application last year. And now, finally, the drawing and animation app has a real release date. "Great news!," the developer announced on the website. "Inchworm Animation has been approved! It will be released as DSiWare for 500 Nintendo points on April 25, 2011." To see what kind of art you can make with that five-dollar outlay (if you are also a professional animator) check out the gallery, and watch a new trailer after the break.
Video: Scientists create walking goo, Steve McQueen put on alert
Who needs servos and a degree in robotics? The real threat to humanity is brewing in the distillation columns of chemists at Waseda University in Tokyo where researchers have developed a chemical gel that walks like an inchworm. Really, just check the video after the break. The color-changing, motile gel reacts to chemicals in its environment to create its own oscillating locomotion without the need for electrical stimulation. The idea is to augment the electronics in future robotics with these "self organized" chemical systems to avoid additional circuitry complexity and external controls. Our advice? Run.
GDC08: Joystiq gets their hands dirty with Inchworm
If any of you are familiar with rotoscoping (see: A Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly), the man behind the software responsible for the movie magic, Bob Sabiston, decided he wanted to animate on his DS. So, he made Inchworm. "[It was] sort of a passion project, something we really want to see on the DS," he says.Joystiq got their hands on the application, running it through its paces. And, after reading their hands-on impressions, we're excited about this avenue for creativity on the DS. We just love stuff like this, to tell the truth, so suffice to say we're incredibly angry we didn't get to try it.Oh well ...
GDC08: Hands-on Inchworm
Bob Sabiston, creator of the rotoscoping software behind A Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly wanted to draw and animate on his DS. So he wrote his own application, Inchworm. He says, "[It was] sort of a passion project, something we really want to see on the DS." In between his GDC meetings to find a publisher, I sketched through the latest build of the tool.Even though Inchworm is closer to Painter than Mario Paint, it's still fun for dabbling. Artists use the stylus to scribble out stills or cels. Top-tier tools that I'd expect in Photoshop even filter down to this level, including layers, opacity settings, alpha channels, selections, and onion-skin animations. Sabiston also intends to add smear brushes to blend paints and sound effects for animations.
GDC08: Inchworm: Mario Paint meets Photoshop
It has been almost a year since we heard anything new about Fatbits Pocket Painter, and we were beginning to worry that the project had been abandoned. While homebrewers already have Colors! to satisfy their DS-digital-painting needs, we really wanted to see what Bob Sabiston, the programmer behind Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly's Rotoshop software, had come up with.Dismissing concerns of its halted development, the painting and animation application has appeared at GDC, this time under the name Inchworm. Along with its reintroduction comes a new site packed with tutorial videos and user-uploaded samples/flipbooks. Artists can easily create and share their work online, all with a robust selection of drawing and editing tools.One unique feature we spotted in Inchworm is the ability to draw under a painting without having to create and move around new layers. Very useful for animation, we hear!We're not sure if Inchworm has found a publisher yet, but we hope someone helps this program hit the mainstream market. Bob Sabiston definitely sees potential in the software: "If people can make money selling math and brain teasers to kids, imagine how popular a program that lets you draw and make cartoons [would be]!"
