We hope your new year is an animated one! This year has been a busy one for MakeSweet. From time to time, heavy traffic has forced us to limit generation of animations on our site. In 2010, that should be a thing of the past. For a preview of what is to come, see our New Year 2010 animation generator.

When you add your pictures or words to the animation, you’ll find a new “movie” button. This creates a custom GIF animation that you can save on your computer. So far, so familiar. What is new is that all work is done on your computer, rather than ours. So we can keep this service free for all to use as they like, without bankrupting ourselves. And your photos never leave your computer, so you can be even more sure of your privacy.

And, for distributors of MakeSweet generators, this removes the last requirement for special server support. Now all you need to host a complete, stand-alone generator is a regular webserver. We’ll be updating MakeSweet Live in the new year to reflect the new possibilities.

Happy New Year! (P.S For those that way inclined: our popular Christmas Ornament generator from last year is going strong).

Want to make a picture of a nice shiny shrink-wrap box for your software? It is sometimes useful to make even the most abstract of virtual products tangible. There’s lots of programs out there to do it, but MakeSweet lets you do it live and online. Just click the big “plus” button to add your picture to this box (requires Flash 10):

(don’t see anything? go here).

This design is just a simple test of our new Blender to Flash workshop; if you know how to use Blender, you can upload a design and have it converted to a Flash generator automatically.

There’s a write-up about MakeSweet (html, pdf) in Issue 21 of BlenderArt magazine. It gives some insight on where MakeSweet came from and how it works. The issue is a show-case of fun and odd-ball things that people are doing with Blender. Nice to be in such good company!

We’ve made a nice and cheesy pot-of-gold animation for Saint Patrick’s day, coming up on March 17. Put a photo or text on the gold coins in a leprechaun’s stash at the end of the rainbow:

We’ve had a bit of internal disagreement about what the treasure in the pot should look like. Noemi thinks the rotating-glowing-globe looks silly. However, she admits that the number of leprechauns she’s met in her lifetime is in the single digits, so I don’t see how come she’s this big expert on pots of gold all of a sudden.

However, if you also think the coin-ball is daft, you can instead float a picture on the surface of the Chicago River, dyed green for Paddy’s day every year:

Enjoy!

We’ve added a tutorial for the Billboard Generator Generator (a tool that lets you project pictures or text on any flat surface). Support for masks has been improved, so it is even easier now to project to non-rectangular surfaces. For example, here’s a stop-sign generator:

And here are some boards created recently by users:

Notice JaySticLe’s use of masking for the fingers over the piece of paper on this last one.

(Update: fixed broken links to user boards, sorry about that…)

More and more user-generated billboard designs are showing up; see the “related designs” section of our original ye-olde-billboard-generator that has been on MakeSweet since time began.

Looking at what people have been doing with our billboard generator generator, it seems many of you would like overlaps, so that objects in the foreground can partially cover the billboard.

Done! Look at this new “Laptop at Meeting” generator, made with the billboard GOG:

It puts pictures/text onto a laptop screen. The key novelty here is that, if you look in the bottom right corner, you’ll see that the laptop screen is partially covered by an arm. You can now make generators just like this yourself - check out the new “show mask” button in the billboard GOG. The user interface is very simple, just scribble with the mouse over the foreground area - and if you need to undo a bit, hold down the shift key and “unscribble”. Enjoy!

The picture and animation generators on MakeSweet are designed in Blender. and then converted to a high-speed cached form for the web. For a while now, it has been possible to submit blend files on the site and have them converted to a generator for you. This process has now been fully automated, with the new and improved Generator Wizard.

If you’re interested in learning more, there’s a tutorial write-up on making a custom cup generator. Basically the process is to first have a good idea:

Then implement it in Blender:

Then upload it and make a generator like any other picture mixer generator.

Easy!

The behind-the-scenes plumbing for all this is a little complicated, so we’d really appreciate feedback from Blender folk on this beta service. Thanks!

Thanks to user feedback, the billboard GOG has improved a whole lot. The billboard generator page is now linking to user generators that people have added, such as this one:

Of course you can still make generators for private use, having them listed is optional. Please continue giving us your thoughts, it helps a lot.

Got a 2D logo you’d like to make a little less … flat? Blender is a handy tool for adding the third dimension to your creations. Now you can get an idea of the possibilities with our 3D Logo Generator. You upload a black and white picture, and get out a 3D version of it, like this:

If you know Blender, you can download the .blend file we create and use it as a starting point for your own customized design. If you don’t know Blender, well, stay tuned, there’s more to come.

New addition to the Picture Mixer collection: welcome to Planet 2009, a new year’s animation. Put your photo or words in the year itself, and watch it loom closer and closer.

Happy new year from MakeSweet!