This is one of the first versions of the 1000 Pound Cake website. It is coming along thanks to Tyler Kupferer's help with Flash compression schemes. A week ago I thought I was going to have to pack up my things and move back to West Lafayette early when I was getting seventy megabyte SWF's!

It turns out that I was importing the frames individually into Flash and then attempting to compress the images only by converting PNG's to JPEG's with 80 per cent quality. That is the worst idea! The correct way to import frames into Flash is to export a FLV from After Effects and it will compress the video inbetween frames. The same video with even higher quality and music is a six point four megabyte SWF instead of being ten times larger (and stupider).

In this version of the website, nothing is coded to be interactive yet and a lot of the animation is rudimentary. It just feels good to lay down keyframes sometimes. Also, each frame is taking a bit over two minutes to render and I set a batch last night so it only rendered four hundred new frames. Halfway through you can see what it used to look like. I am rendering with Final Gathering, Image Based Lighting, and two particle systems that simulate clouds (and hike up rendering time).