Knitting Babapapa Family

    After hard working for ONE YEAR (more specifically 1 year + 1 month), I finally finished my giant piece of work: Babapapa Family.

               

   If I know I would spend more than one year on a knitting work, I probably would not even start. I thought about giving up for several times. The biggest difficulty is you never know what is the best portion of your character before you started. Especially Babapapa had a soft round shape of body, after I filled the cotton, all the body curves were gone, became a round ball. It is hard to make all boys and girls the same size with the same body curves;it is hard to tell the best size of the eyes and the smile because 3D effective is just so different from your drawing on a paper; It is hard to design the gestures of every character, which have to reflect their personalities and can be presentable by knitting.      

Mimic Babapapa Logo

    If you are too young, you might not hear about this cartoon. Babapapa is a French animation that was very popular during early 1990's. Babapapa family members have a special ability: they can change to anything they want like transformers. This cartoon talks about the life of Babapapa and his family, describes how they overcome difficulties to build their home and how they help people and animals. My mom bought me this cartoon book translated in Chinese when I was a child. I can not remember how many times I read it. It is a animation that accompanied me to grow, which is also the reason I made this knitting work.

Before adding faces,like a  rainbow

Babapapa and Babamama

    Below is each character in details:

    --Babapapa & Babamama
    The story started with Babapapa born from the earth just like a seed. He helped a lot of people with his transformation ability.

    Babapapa went for a long trip to looking for other kind of "Babapapa". He went to British, America, India, Africa even outer space, finally found Babamama. They fell in love and have 7 kids represents rainbow.

    ----Bababravo
    Red Bababravo is good at all kinds of sports.He is holding a dumbbell.

 

    ----Babalib

    Orange Babalib is a hard working girl. She likes reading and studying.

   

    ----Babazoo

    Yellow Babazoo is a kind-hearted boy，and likes make friend with animals. I thought about which animal to make for long time. Chose pig because it can stand on the ground and the color matches yellow very well. 

    ----Babalala

    Green Babalala loves music.I made her playing flute.

     

    ----Bababarbright

    Blue Bababarbright is a little scientist. he is interested in Biology, Chemistry and Physics. He is holding a telescope on his hands.

      

 
    ----Bababelle

    Purple Bababelle is a beautiful girl with long eye lashes. She loves dressing up, so she takes a mirror along with her all the time.

           

    ----Bababeau

    Black Babaeau is an artist. Different from other children, he has fluffy hair covered his body. He likes drawing. 

    Celebrate 3 years old birthday of this blog. Say good bye to Babapapa and hopefully I will have more time to create interesting things next year.

  Wish everyone has a beautiful family like Babapapa

Love Test: Who you will marry with?

Hi guys, long time no see. I tried to squeeze more time to create new works and update my blog. Here is another interesting love test.

Instructions: Click "Black board" on the right upper corner to open/close story when doing the test in case you forget it

Different from all other Flash works before, this time I used ActionScript 3.0 and all actions are code driven. Probably because I become more and more a coder than a designer. The good news is, all browser except safari will still support Flash in future.

When I was watching co-workers around me, they are young, middle age or old. I am always thinking how I will be when I am at their age. The ideal image in my mind is an elegant woman with short hair, has good manners when talking, smiling, walking, etc. She is knowledgeable by reading a lot of books. She is able to play some music, makes some interesting art works. She has several acquainted friends in art or literature fields with similar interests. She has her own career that can be proud of.

I love my job, but just can not see any connection between current mine and the elegant lady in my mind.

Piano play "Always with me" from Spirited Away

    It has been long time since my last post. One reason is I was so tired after work everyday, second is I started to play piano again. Last year December, I upgraded my music instrument to Yamaha p-85, which has high quality sound and weighted keyboard just like real piano. I feel music, especially to play music yourself can real bring you into a beautiful world. I post three songs I practices recently:
    "Always with me", from Japanese Animation "Spirited Away" directed by Hayao Miyazaki。 It is really a beautiful animation movie with amazing imagination, which touched me deeply.

    Bandari's music can always bring me peace. I listen to it often when programming at day time. "The first snowflakes", Bandari. The last picture was took from the front of my home, ducks were eating bread on the ice.

 

    "Childhood Memory", Bandari, The playground picture was took from my middle school. The last picture was took in one travel to Wu Xi, China during my undergraduate college.

    New knitting work, and animation hopefully will come next month. Wish every Chinese happy new year!

Knitting Alpaca (horse/sheep/camel）

    First, I want to say "Thanks" for all the people who follow and visited my blog, which gave me great encouragement to continue to create beautiful and useful things. Sorry didn't update my blog for 3 months. It is really hard to have much spare time to create new things, not only because of the busy work, but also there are so many things I want to do. 

    

Alpaca - front

    I expected to finish this knitting work at the end of 2012, but I made it earlier. Anyway, it will definitely be the last knitting work for this year. It might look familiar if you have seen my previous work "Knitting poodle dog". It is true, I used the same knitting woolen，similar size and posture. But they are completely different kind of animal, just have fur with similar color.

  

 
    So it is necessary to introduce a little bit about this creature - Alpaca, though I have to admit the Alpaca I knitted is not so look like the real Alpaca. My co-worker even thought it is a teddy bear. If you are Chinese, I don't want to explain, but in case you misunderstand me, I would like to say I am absolutely a good person. The reason I chose it is that this creature has a cute look.

    The most difficult part is the shape of the body, I believe I redo it for more than 10 times and try to make a long neck, but failed. I guess next time, I should combine the crochet skill and needle skill.
  

Alpaca - side

    I use this paragraph talk a little bit about my current life. My new career life is great, I am doing a job I like very much, I can develop all my hobbies during my spare time. There are so many excellent people around so that I can learn from them not only the technical skills, but their way of life. I wish I can find more like-minded friends to discuss the meaning of life，talk about the past and present, talk about art and literature, etc. Then, it will be perfect!

    I plan to continue my "Technique animation". Probably a flash game and some topics related to music. Please feel free to email me cxychenxueyan@gmail.com tell me which "computer programming" animation you expect to watch.

Technique: Merge Sort Animation

    Step by step animation. For the programming beginners to get a better understanding of merge sort.
    It is not easy to illustrate recursive using animation. The entire code flow in the animation is following its actual execution in the compiler, which might be a little different from the logic we usually mentioned in merge sort. I strongly recommend you test the code in your compiler to figure out how the recursive works.
    By clicking the snail, the animation starts, and by clicking it again, it goes back to the beginning.By clicking ">>" fast forward button, it can skip some stops. Probably, I will add a scroll bar later. The steps are kind of subtle, if there is any suggestion, please leave message to me and I will improve it.
 

 Cost: O(nlogn)
 Worst case: O(nlogn)
 Best case: O(nlogn) 
 Space cost: 2 * size of the element array
 Advantages: stable cost

Merge sort code in C++:

void Merge(int left, int mid, int right, int a[])

{

     int temp[50];                   

     int i = left;

     int j = mid+1;

     int index = 0;                                

     //merges the left part and the right part elements into a sorted list

     while (i <=mid && j <= right) {

              if (a[i] <= a[j]) {

                   temp[index] = a[i];

                   i++;

              }

              else {

                   temp[index] = a[j];

                   j++;

              }

              index++;

     }

     //copy the rest elements into temp array

     while (i <= mid) {

         temp[index] = a[i];

         i++;

         index++;

     }

     while (j <= right) {

         temp[index] = a[j];

         j++;

         index++;

     }

     //copy the sorted list back to original array

     for (int k = 0; k < index; k++) {

         a[k + left] = temp[k];

     }

}

void MergeSort(int left, int right, int a[])

{

     int mid;

     if(left<right)

     {

          mid = ((left + right) / 2);

          MergeSort(left, mid, a);

          MergeSort(mid+1, right, a);

          Merge(left, mid, right, a);

     }

}

 int main()

{

int a[]={25,49,8,25,21,16,32};

MergeSort(0,6,a);

}

More technique animations:

Quick Sort
Binary Search
Heap Sort 
Bubble Sort 
Selection Sort 

Knitting Toy Totoro

      

    When asked what is the favorate character in Hayao Miyazaki's animation movie, many people will say Totoro. Not only because it is cute, but it represents lucky and blessing. I had this characters in mind four months ago, and it took me one and half month to finish. I thought it should be easy because it was the first time I knit an existing cartoon character, but it wasn't. I changed the color of yarn for three times. Teared down, and did it over again for more than five times just can not find the best shape and proportion, which always made me crazy. It is still not perfect, the belly is smaller than it should be, so let's just call it Tororo in Sherry's version.
    Every work of mine is unique and has its own meanings. Totoro brings people the best wishes, and this knitting work turns out to be the gift for my best friend.

Totoro under sunshine with leaf hat

Totoro front without leaf hat

     

   Totoro side photos

    I hope I can make another character by the end of this year, but not sure. Always feel time is not enough to do all the things I want. Hope you like this one :-)

Technique: Build Heap and Heap Sort Animation

   Step by step animation. For the programming beginners to get a better understanding of heap and heap sort.
   In the animation, the heap in tree structure just let you know how it works. The entire coding is using array rather than binary tree. (Click snail button to start animation and click it again to go back to the first page)
   For an element with index i in the array 
   Its parent index is:  (i-1)/2
   Its left child index is: 2*i+1
   Its right child index is: 2*i+2





 Cost: O(nlogn)
 Worst case: O(nlogn)
 Best case: O(nlogn)

Heap sort code in C++:

void swap(int i, int j,int a[])

  {

         int temp;

         temp=a[i];

         a[i]=a[j];

         a[j]=temp;

  }

void heapify(int i,int a[],int heapSize)

{

       int temp=i;

       while(i*2+1<=heapSize-1)

       {

           if(i*2+2<=heapSize-1&&a[i*2+2]>a[i*2+1])

           {

               i=i*2+2;

           }

           else i=i*2+1;

           if(a[i]>a[temp])

           {

              swap(i,temp,a);

              temp=i;

           }

           else break;

       }

}

void BuildMaxHeap(int a[],int heapSize)

{

         int i=(heapSize-1)/2;

        while(i>=0)

        {    

          heapify(i,a,heapSize);

          i--;

        }

}

void heapSort(int a[],int heapSize)

{

     for(int i=heapSize;i>0;i--)

     {

         swap(0,heapSize-1,a);

         heapSize--;

         heapify(0,a,heapSize);

     }

}

int main()

{

int heapSize=7;

int a[]={25,49,8,25,21,16,32};

BuildMaxHeap(a,heapSize);

heapSort(a,heapSize);

}


More technique animations:

Quick Sort
Binary Search 
Merge Sort 
Bubble Sort 
Selection Sort

Virtuoso play "Castle in the sky"

    Today's topic is a little different, no animation, no knitting works, no programming techniques, but music. It is true that I learned piano for 5 years during my childhood, but I forgot all of them after I stopped taking courses, which is one of the regrets in my life. So I dare not to say I can play piano. I played with Virtuoso app in iPad just for fun, and this music is to commemorate my graduation, and May in 2012.
    18 years of school life finally ended. After long period of busy life, the sudden leisure makes me feel uncomfortable and sad. I always believe as long as you work hard, you can finally reach your goals and get the things you want. This belief supports me even though I have experienced many frustrations. But recently, I realized you can never get the things that not belong to you. I don't know why, once I find something I want, I just can not see other choices.
    Happiness is so powerful beyond my imagination. I always believe life is pain and happiness is just decoration. Thanks for all the people who gave me happiness even if it only lasts one second.

   
    Hayao Miyazaki's animation movies are amazing. The theme song of "Castle in the sky" is one of my favorite song, which can bring the peace to my heart. I used Virtuoso 2nd version. Since the keyboard is too short, I cut the part I slid it off when making the video. Though there are several breaking points in between, hope you enjoy it.

Knitting cartoon snail

    I designed this character 4 years ago for a multimedia work competition, and it becomes the logo of my works since then. Now I made it an entity in real world. I would like to say Flash animation and knitting works connect the 2D and 3D world in my mind. 

    I am a perfectionist to my works, and have to say it did not fully reached my expectation.I tried to add yellow stripes on its shell but not looks good.

     Some of my friends misunderstood me after saw my works. They said "hey Sherry, you are a handy girl, and you definitely will become a good wife." I have to say it is so NOT true. I do know how to knit scarves,wool hat or even sweater, but they are not my interests. I am not a fashion designer and 0% possibility to be a housewife. I only knit toys which are not for the practical use, but bring people visual enjoyment. In my eyes it is Art. A good design is more important than technical skills.

    Each of my work is unique and has its own meanings.I hope one day, I can have a shelf or even a room to store all my works, and I can sit there and watch them when I get old.

    Went to purchase new wool yarns today. Every time I stand in front of that shelf, I want to purchase all of them. The next character is already in my mind, will finish within 2 months.

    Little snail: Please work harder, harder and harder!!!