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Coming
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- Full Manga pages! These are taking rather longer than expected, but there should be some better example pages soon.
- The Movie. More scenes are being prepared. This is now more likely to be a short film of about 25 minutes: maybe a first episode of an OVA.
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January 2007: |
- Revised the whole site: removed the visitor counter, removed all email references to try and prevent spam, and made many other updates.
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December 2006:  |
- This year's Card is deliberately very simple: a santa hat. (Or is that a Sanuta hat?)
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December 2005:  |
- Four Sanuta Fairy variations in a square, with the MC&HNY greeting.
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December 2004:  |
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December 2003:  |
- Sanuta-derived fairies again this year!
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December 2002:  |
- Three fairies with more than a little derivation from Sanuta!
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. . . |
- The dark times started: pressure of other projects kept Betsubetsu on hold.
- Cards should still be added every December...
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January 2002: |
- Monthly Updates were abandoned in January 2002. They may re-appear one day...
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December 2001:  |
- The first card of the 21st Century is just a snowflake or two. Plus some mirrors...
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November 2001: |
- Notable for exceeding 10 thousand visitors for the first (and only) time. Thanks to all. Hope you found it interesting.
- Unfortunately a major project stole most of November away.
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October 2001: |
- The Hash Animation: Master CD looks like a film reel, and so this formed the basis of my 'off camera' mascot idea...
- One of these days, it will get through that telling a story and irony are just not good contest winning strategies:
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September 2001: |
- There can be few of us who were not dismayed and distracted by world events this month.
- A contest subject like 'Toys' seemed to cry out for a bit of science fiction, so here's a still from a future toy fair:
- As you can see, this probably isn't a contest winner. There's too much story, no focus on a specific object (just lots of intriguing toys), and it just looks like an exercise in rendering.
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August 2001: |
- The Deep Rez Tutorial continues to take more time than seems possible...
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July 2001: |
- Linux for the PS2 in Japan. Entered survey prompting for a US and UK release.
- The Deep Rez Tutorial just isn't getting finished quickly...
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June 2001: |
- Added the Space Development Kit pages, and these were announced early by a beta tester - thus becoming visible rather earlier than intended. Tutorial on the Deep-Rez materials is coming soon.
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May 2001: |
- Spent ages doing a 3D stereogram for the Hash Stereo contest, but the final render took lots longer than the smaller test renders: gave up after three days of rendering when the quarter-size tests were completing in an hour or so...
- So now you know what never made it to the contest!
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April 2001: |
- Two weeks in Japan! Wonderful.
- More than 6000 visitors to this site!
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March 2001: |
- With various internal deadlines looming, the effort expended on this entry was much reduced. This 'quick and dirty' render might bear a passing resemblance to another well-known image within the Animation: Master community...
- Of course, it got nowhere. When the image competition restarts after the summer hiatus, the entries will be absolutely straight-froward, literal interpretations of the topic.
- The winner, by the way, was an absolutely stunning rendition of a pair of stereo headphones. Superb!
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February 2001: |
- This was getting very serious. The topic 'Comic Books' was analysed carefully, and somehow a pun won, against all resonableness. Hence this entry:
- Two books that do a stand-up comedy routine: thus, they are comic books... get it?
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January 2001: |
- The start of the 21st Century!
- ...and a topic that is perfect for Betsubetsu! Two renders later:
- The winning entries were all much better, of course. Especially the Belldandy!
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December 2000:  |
- The last Christmas and New Year of the 20th Century, and so the card reflects the coming of the 21st Century!
- The Betsubetsu Greetings Card... does this look familiar?
- Back in contest-land, production troubles and email delays meant that this entry arrived too late to be entered in the contest:
- The full-size picture represents almost 30 hours of rendering!
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November 2000: |
- The monthly Hash contest is now the month's most important event. Way too much time is being spent trying to outwit the other competitors, when what happens is that the only entry which gets outwitted is:
- Being emailed by the winner, who said that they really liked this card, was the high point of the month. Actually, theirs was much better!
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October 2000: |
- The subject for the October 2000 Hash contest was 'Scary'. After the rousing non-success last time, you would have supposed that we might have learned a lesson...
- But as you can see, faced with the chance to make a scary image, instead there's another attempt to try and tell a story in a picture. A pretty scary story, perhaps, but apparently too subtle a concept.
- The result? You're probably one step ahead here. Yep, not even 4th place. Next time, instead of creating the world's nastiest monster's hand nudging a truly awful cocktail ornament, the whole monstrous entity will be in shot...
- The other rejected approach was to model one of Richard Scarry's children's book characters, because someone said that it was pronounced 'Ska rhee', not 'Skeh rhee'.
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September 2000: |
- You can be too clever. After having rejected lots of ideas for time machines of various flavours and lineage, the final decision was to go for something which was the opposite of an anacronism: a picture from the future.
- Okay, so the splash screen for the two years hence version of Animation: Master was a little bit cheecky, but at least it wasn't yet another time machine!
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August 2000: |
- Entered a picture in the August Hash contest on the theme: 'Fantasy'. After getting fourth place last time, this time the result was nothing. Zero, Nada. Nowt. Not a lot...
- If you look, you should be able to see several sets of reflections in a scene where a photographer is trying to put together a 'Bryce'-type fantasy landscape for real. Unfortunately, whilst in 3D programs the camera is invisible, in reality, the camera is often all too visible... and visible cameras do not mix well with mirrored ellipses!
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July 2000: |
- First decent programs running on the PS2 (that's a spare Apple G3 USB keyboard, by the way, which works just fine with the Sony PS2).
 (Figuring out what is what here is less than obvious!)
- There's a lot of distractions coming up...
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June 2000: |
- Added the new introduction pages with an animated GIF and a 'Skip Intro' link. Looks like Flash, but isn't.
- Updated the history pages with new image links and Hash Contest details.
- Commissioned the Macintosh upgrades. Faster processors, more RAM, more hard disk capacity.
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May 2000: |
- Entered a picture in the May Hash contest on the theme: 'History'. Got 4th place, a plaque and a M.A.S.H.-influenced t-shirt. Wow!
- A side project distracts attention from Betsubetsu for much longer than was intended.
- More than 4000 visitors have been to this site. Thanks for visiting!
- Got a PlayStation 2 on import. Cool!
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April 2000: |
- Entered a picture in the April Hash contest. The theme this time was 'Kung Fu', which seemed to cry out for an anime treatment. Unfortunately the entry turned wierd in the course of development and came out rather more menacing and realistic than the original intention. The specular reflections in those eyes are not easily forgotten. The wierd effects with the light coming through the screens are intriguing rendering artefacts - the two curved lines are particularly interesting.
- Missed the launch of the PlayStation 2 in Tokyo because of financial problems.
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March 2000: |
- Nearly entered a picture in the March Hash contest - but missed the closing date by one day due to bad memory. If the picture on 'The Race is On' is ever finished, it will be posted here, of course.
- Production problems prevent the manga being released. Delay may be a year or more. Meanwhile, here's a little example...
- Can't recommend Alsoft's Disk Warrior enough. Even though it didn't recover all of the files from the dead hard drive, it did a far better job than anything else!
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Febuary 2000: |
- Entered three pictures in the February Hash contest on the theme 'Valentine's Day'. Two pictures were accepted, and the assumption is that three entries was just one too many. For completeness, here are the two existing entires, plus the unseen until now third entry:
- And as a special treat, here's the centre of the Anime Valentine as a separate picture:
- Some other things happened too.
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January 2000: |
- We enter the final year of the 20th Century. Only ten more centuries to go before Betsubetsu time!
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December 1999:  |
- Greetings card for 1999 added. This one includes a heavily compressed movie featuring my anime 'Sanuta'. All artwork on the card this year uses Hash Animation Master - the use of Bryce here diminishes more and more.
- Started work on the 'BB Shipyards". These are intended as a free 'okay for non-commercial use' repository of all the AM models and other ephemera that aren't directly related to Betsubetsu.
- Entered a picture in the December Hash contest on the theme 'Comic Book Characters'. The interpretation of the theme is a play on words.
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November 1999: |
- Entered a picture in the November Hash contest on the theme 'The Incredible Machine'.
- Corrected an ongoing error in the alternate site forwarding mechanism. If you've had strange error messages that didn't seem to mean anything sensible, then you've encoutered the problem. From now on, you may find that there's more to this site than you might think!
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October 1999: |
- Added the 'Short' movie. See the Movies page.
- Added shot lists for the Showreel and Short.
- Corrected a problem with the Showreel (Thanks to Steve Sappington for finding the problem.)
- Added a new picture to the Gallery.
- Sent the new picture to Hash for their 'Users' area. A link to this site was subsequently added to the Hash site by Hash.
- Entered a picture in the October Hash contest on the theme 'Anime'. It didn't win! You might recognise some of the characters...
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September 1999: |
- Joined the 3D Ring. See the Rings & Links page.
- Minor tweaks to 'Rings & Links' presentation style
- More than 2000 visitors!
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August 1999: |
- Invited to submit material to the first Seoul Cyber Film Festival.
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July 1999: |
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June 1999: |
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May 1999: |
- Added additional 'alternative' pages for the Prix Ars Electronica '99 competition entry.
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April 1999: |
- Added Animation, Showreel and Manga sections to the Movie page.
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March 1999: |
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February 1999: |
- Additional 3D buttons and graphics for this site were prepared.
- The redesign of the site for release in April was planned.
- The animations for the video trailer/showreel were rendered. About 150 hours total processing time.
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January 1999: |
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December 1998: |
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November 1998 |
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3rd place in the November 2004 Hash image contest! 
2002 CD Mascot 
Toys 
Stereo (Red/Green glasses, please)
Music
Comic Books? 
Laces and anime sillyness
...and a posed model with stand...
Mechanical 
Hash Inc's Greetings Card... 
Scary 
Time Travel 
Fantasy 
History 
Kung Fu
Anime Valentine
All Hearts
Broken Heart
Anime Valentine centrepiece
