After Effects Cross Process Look

June 30th, 2010


Transfer your iTunes ratings to another Mac

November 11th, 2009

I don’t know anybody who actually uses ratings in iTunes, but I certainly do. It enables me to keep track of the tracks I liked so I don’t have to waste time listening to tracks I know I didn’t like and conversely go straight to the tracks I love. Unfortunately, Apple has yet to make an easy way to transfer ratings to another Mac. Apparently, ratings are stored in the metadata of the mp3 of the audio files. The XML file, iTunes Music Library.xml, stores the file paths to the audio files which is the reason why the key to making this work is to mimic the same folder structure of the computer you’re transferring from to the computer you’re trasferring to in addition to transferring the xml file.

Play FLACs in iTunes

November 10th, 2009

FLAC is my format of choice when it comes music. Unfortunately, my favorite audio player, iTunes, still doesn’t support the format. Luckily, I found an Mac utility app called Fluke that enables you to listen to your FLAC files right within iTunes without needing to convert anything.

Juan Matos

September 14th, 2009

My new salsa inspiration.

More Liquid Beauty

August 16th, 2009



There are some very beautiful moments in this piece. I especially like it when the spurts have depth… reminds me of when I was a child holding a marble up close to my eye and looking through the seaweed-like shapes. Created with After Effects and Particular.

OOP in one sentence

June 21st, 2009

OOP is all about isolating the variable elements. By doing so, you are protecting all the non-changing elements from the ripple effects of the change. As a result, the code is much easier to update and less prone to fail due to some unforeseen result of the change. The isolation of components also has the added benefit enabling multiple developers to work on the same project.

HTTP error 412 with Flash file upload

February 20th, 2009

I almost gave up on this one, but I decided to buckle down to give it another good shot and resolved the problem. The lesson learned: make sure to give yourself as much feedback as possible through the resources you have available to you. I could’ve figured it out much sooner if I had figured out a way to get the error code. Instead, I frustrated myself by making many educated guesses, convinced for some reason that this has only happened to me. No. The chances are very high that someone else has run into the same exact problem and solved it somehow. You just have to ask the right questions, and to do that you need feedback.

The solution was to add the following in the .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine on
<IfModule mod_security.c>
	SecFilterScanPOST Off
</IfModule>

Filling an Invisible Glass Test

November 29th, 2008
RealFlow is simply amazing. This is only my first test too! Looking forward to moving the camera around it while the liquid is being poured.

Silk test 2

November 23rd, 2008

I don’t know wtf I’m doing, but I’m getting somewhere. I haven’t delved into C4D’s dynamics yet, but I’m very impressed so far with Maya’s dynamics engine. Adding a point light to the scene is what made it look much more realistic. Adding turbulence to the wind was the key to the wavy movement and adding friction to both the cloth and the rectangular object was the perfect balancing force to complement the wind. I should note that the constraining element is a single point on the cloth, meaning that it’s not attached to the rectangular object in any way but instead attached to a point in space. The only reason it’s conformed to the shape of the object is because I turned the object into a “collider” to the cloth.

Silk test 1

November 22nd, 2008
My first attempt at modeling and animating a piece of silk blowing in the wind. Looks like kinda cartoony right now.