Animation output was broken on some generators recently Sorry, should be fixed now! Thanks to [lara] for the report.

On the plus side, we’ve been improving the animation-making interface. The movie button has been made (hopefully) more prominent, and there’s a clearer movie scroll bar for moving back and forth between frames. Also, you can choose between animations that are cheap-and-cheerful and fast to make, and animations that are slower to make but clearer — just click on the movie icon, and then on either the grainy “fast” button or the crisp “slow” button. Suggestions for cleverer icons are very welcome :-).

In preparation for Valentine’s day, we’ve just added a butterfly animation that looks like this:

To put your own beloved in the picture, just click here (if you think you recognize the butterfly, that’s because it comes from the Big Buck Bunny movie - thanks to the Blender Foundation for releasing their characters into the wild under a friendly license!).

And don’t forget, there’s plenty of other equally romantic designs lying around from Valentine’s past: Heart lockets, heart showers, candles, wine bottles, … we’re doing our best for you on the 14th!

If you know Blender, you can now sign-up at live.makesweet.com to be on call as a designer for people looking for generators. Sign-up is free and requires no commitment. Thanks to those who already signed up before we even advertised this!

MakeSweet Live is a service that converts Blender designs to interactive flash widgets. Think of it as a new medium (and market) for your art. Interested? Sign up here.

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.

We’ve had to bring some services down for unscheduled maintenance. Basic image generation is operational, but animations, high-resolution views, and generator creation services are currently down. Sorry!

We’re seeing unusual server performance problems happening sporadically. We’ll be bringing services back online one by one as we update them to prevent such events recurring.

MakeSweet Mobile is here! Check out m.makesweet.com and let us know how it looks on your phone.

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!

Like the idea of making a generator but you don’t know how to use Blender? You can get started with our Billboard Generator. This lets you take a picture that has a billboard in it, and project pictures or words onto its 3D surface just like any of the Picture Mixer designs.

This is very much a work in progress. The main limitation is that it won’t generate high-resolution results yet, just quick and dirty previews.

(update) High-resolution results are available now, with some imperfections.

Since our shoulder tattoo picture mixer design was getting some interest, we’ve added a more powerful back tattoo design. It looks like this:

You can move your tattoo around the body and scale it as you like. Just prepare it as a “png” image with transparency, upload it, then work on placement. This way, you can get an idea of how the tattoo might look on you.

The body in the design is from the excellent makehuman project.

In preparation for Valentine’s day, we’re expanding our romantic things to do online list. We’ve given some tips for finding unusual reasons to celebrate (including the fooaversary discussion from this blog). For example, for February 14th, why send a boring old Valentine’s greeting when you could send a card celebrating:

• The first trainload of oranges leaves Los Angeles (February 14, 1886)
• Edward Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, becomes the first member of the British royal family to ride in an automobile (February 14, 1896)
• Aretha Franklin tapes “RESPECT” (February 14, 1967)

(facts gathered from the History Channel and Scopesys sites).

Update: we’ve made some sample cards for these alternate valentines.