The Blog of Glen Moyes

I just barely finished my first video for The Guerrilla CG Project on Subdivision Surfaces. Guerrilla CG: Subdivision Surfaces from Glen Moyes on Vimeo . This video was quite unlike any other project I've done before. All but one animated sequence in this video was rendered by playblasting in Blender. I had to do some tricks like forcing Blender to use anti-aliasing in my graphics driver settings, and using chroma key to remove the background from each render so I could composite other elements together, which is something I usually never have to worry about. Anyway, the results turned out very well. I used After Effects for compositing and editing. It took me about 3 days to put the video together. The next video I'll be doing do will be on topology.

Guerrilla CG is finally online. It hosts amazing videos that explain the fundamentals of computer graphics in a fun and easy to understand way. The videos are not software specific either, so you can watch them and take that knowledge to your 3D application of choice. During college I taught Blender workshops for two years, and prior to that I did video tutorials for Blender. I learned that in order to teach people how to use the software I needed to spend quite a bit of time teaching the fundamentals first. So in my later workshops more than half the workshop concisted of myself doing a PowerPoint presentation. It turned out to be more effective, but we only had two hours of class a week, so I continued making video tutorials as part of the class so they could watch them at home. I put those videos on ShowMeDo so other people can watch them as well. I was later contacted by Andrew Silke about a project he was working on called GuerrillaCG. He saw the stuff I did on ShowMeDo and want...

A week ago I had 4 games on my wish list: Far Cry 2, Mirrors Edge, Left 4 Dead, and StarCraft 2. No one has any idea when StarCraft2 is going to be released, but the other three games are all coming out weeks apart from each other. I can't recall a time when 3 games I've been committed to buying for being so creative, well produced, and all-out awesome have all come out within a matter of weeks. There's one less game on my wish list because I'm now a happy owner of one of them, and the holiday season for gaming is looking bright. Far Cry 2 I'm so happy I got this game. After my not so pleasant experience with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (read below) I was really hoping for another open world first person shooter. I usually wait until after the game is released before I buy it, but I've read good previews about Far Cry 2, and I wanted to save $5, so I went ahead and preordered it on Steam. I'm glad I did because the game rocks. Visually the game is superb. The art directi...

NOTE TO CS5 USERS: I've gotten reports that in CS5 (and maybe CS4 but I haven't heard anything yet) that the minimum width of the Swatches panel in the default workspace is 17 instead of 16. The Swatches panel must be 16 swatches wide, otherwise the circular swatch pattern becomes slanted. The culprit is the Layers panel which can't be as small as the Swatches panel, so if the Swatches panel and the Layers panel are put on the same column the Swatches panel will be wider to fit. The fix is to undock the swatches panel, at which point you can dock other panels below it that aren't wide. Edit: I've created a new swatch set with shades instead of tints. In the past I've used the VisiBone2 swatches in Photoshop, and I've been meaning to make an improved set of swatches for some time now, one that's organized like an actual color wheel. So I did. Here it is. The special thing about this swatch layout is that the color wheel is actually ac...

I've waited for a while to talk about this on my blog; I finished this project four months ago, and if you've looked at my Vimeo page within the past two months you may have noticed a new video on there called Aesop's Fables. That video only showed the completed animation with the background overlay and not actual footage of the gallery installation in action. Well, today I finally uploaded a video that does this project justice, and I went ahead and updated the older video by adding the same music by Kevin MacLeod that I included in today's video. >> Watch Aesop's Fables streamed in HD (720p) >> Watch Aesop's Fables: Complete Animation streamed in HD (720p) Aesop's Fables is my first 2D animated project. And by "2D animated" I don't mean animated with After Effects or Flash, I mean actually animating a character frame by frame. I loved it. It was a lot of work, but I loved it. This project was an experimental motion desi...

A friend of mine pointed me to this today, and this is something that I definitely want to make an announcement of. Come to think of it, I've been doing a lot of announcing and not a lot of creating. Anyway, it's show written by Joss Whedon—yes, the same guy that did Buffy and Firefly—called Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog . I've watched the first part and it's hilarious. It's an experimental project that Joss wrote during the Writers Guild Strike to show what can be done with very little, released on the web, and get compensated handsomely for it—hopefully anyway, but that's part of the experiment. So check it out. Watch all the episodes as they come out throughout the week; Act 2 comes out Thursday, Act 3 comes out Saturday, and after the 20th it won't be available for free anymore. [Edit: You can now watch it for free on their website. However the video will have a few ads.] If you want to support what they are trying to do—and you should—go buy their...

Celtx 1.0 finally got released today. Go check it out at celtx.com .

I have a habit when it comes to playing newly purchased games. It's basically a planned splurge of my free time. For about three days, or how ever long it takes me to beat the game, I'll use all my free time to play it until I've completed it, at which point I'll move on with the rest of life. For this reason I usually buy games on a Friday and then play it through the weekend. If it's a really good game I'll play through it twice to relive all the good moments or to find/unlock things I've missed. If it's an exceptional game I'll play it often for a few months or even years. This doesn't happen very often, and I can only recall doing it with Descent and Unreal Tournament 2004. This habit lets me play plenty of games and gives me a pretty uninterrupted experience of the entire thing. I've also found that I can get through games faster this way since I don't have to remember what it was I was supposed to do when I left off. Thanks to Steam...

Adobe Gamma is one of those massively useful programs that many people already have installed but don't actually use. If you've installed Photoshop, it's running on your computer right now. If you haven't actually calibrated your monitor with it, you should do it right away. At one of the places I used the work at, we used the Spyder2 colorimeter to calibrate all of our monitors to have a perfect white point and gamma. Having a calibrated monitor makes a huge difference. The colors on the screen looked more vibrant, the contrast was perfect so you could see all the colors without them being clipped to white or black, the blue tint was gone, and the colors on the screen actually matched the colors that were printed. It was such an improvement that I decided that there's no point in buying an expensive screen if you are not going to callibrate it using a Spyder or something similar. Even our inexpensive LCDs looked like high-end $800 monitors once calibrated. Unfortun...

Like most people, the first time you need to use a macro program it's for something completely immature and nonconstructive. For me, I needed something like AutoHotkey to quickly generate my 3-line Cute Bunny Giving You the Bird ASCII graphic into the game chat before someone realized what was going on—which was usually around the "( ._.) ..!." line—and then they assault it by quickly sending something like "asdf" which decapitates my bunny! I wasn't going to take that kind of treatment anymore, and no bunny deserves to be decapitated, so I used AutoHotkey to create a macro that creates the bunny immediately without having to type it in by hand. No one could stop it and no more bunnies ever died again. Well, that's not entirely true. There were a couple of stray lines of text that killed a few Cute Bunnies Giving You the Bird, but the mortality rate was much lower. Of course macros are useful for constructive things too. This neat little open source Wi...

I never intended on revisited any of my school work, but since Vimeo's HD service is so good I was strongly compelled to re-render my motion design work in 720p. It also helped that I have a trial version of After Effects installed, so this will be the only chance I'll have to do this for a while, now that I'm away from school and don't have access to the Mac Lab. So here it is: all three projects from my motion design class, including one which you haven't seen before, in HD. Wonder This is the first project that I revisited earlier this week. I had to determine what version of Blender I used to make it because it wouldn't render properly with the newest version. Instead of rendering at the original 1024x576 resolution with no anti-aliasing , I re-rendered it at 1280x720 with 8x anti-aliasing. It took 2 days, but it's oh so pretty! Of course only after rendering did I noticed a couple of mistakes with the petals in the background. One would snap to a differ...

You might have noticed that I started using a different service to host my videos on this blog. I've been looking for something better than Google Video and YouTube to host my videos. So I did some research, compared the services, and found a service that I really like. I uploaded the same video to test each of these services, and here are the results. Google Video YouTube quality. This is what I've been using previously. The bitrate is low and the frame size is small. Blip.tv I've heard that these are the best guys to go through for high-quality video hosting. And they are not bad. The quality per frame is the highest out of any of these services that I've tested, and they also change the aspect ratio of the movie player so there's no letter boxing for my widescreen videos. The big problem is they dropped the frame rate to reduce bandwidth. That's a big bummer, and is why I decided not to use their service. You can enable advertising (which is off be default), ...

This was the final assignment for my motion design class (the same class that I did Wonder for). The assignment was to create a title sequence for a movie, preferably one that didn't already have an elaborate title sequence. So I chose one of my favorite movies: Sneakers . >> Watch this video streamed in HD (720p) I wanted the first part of the title sequence to look like the good old days of the BBS and ANSI art . The only way to do that was to animate the text frame by frame. In After Effects you can change the content of a text layer at any time, so it was just a matter of filling a text box full of white space (using a mono space font), and then edit the text for each frame as if you were using a text editor. The funny thing is that this crude bit of animation is the strongest part of the motion piece. I used to be an ANSI artist, so animating text in this way felt pretty comfortable to me even after all these years. It was a nice departure from all the key-framed anima...

I've been using this nifty little program for a while. If you've ever used Quicksilver on the Mac and wished something like that existed for Windows, Launchy is it. The way it works is you press a keyboard shortcut (Alt-Space by default) and start typing the name of the program. It has a memory of everything in your start menu and browser bookmarks, so as you type the name it'll show what it thinks you are referring to. For example, all I have to do to launch Adobe Illustrator is press Alt-Space, type "illu" (for Illustrator) and press enter. I don't have to use the mouse to launch the program. I used to have a really organized Start Menu becuase that was my primary method of running programs, but now I don't have to. In fact I don't use my start menu anymore. Even things like the Control Panel are perfectly accessible from Launchy. It's open source and apparently written in Qt, which means that there could be a Linux release soon. Yes, I know the...

Apophysis is an open source program that creates flame fractals. The only thing I can say about this program that contains any amount of profound insight is this: the fractals look awesome! Seriously, tinker around with the program. It comes with plenty of presets and all kinds of ways to manipulate them. I'll probably do a series of sketches based on the designs of these fractal patterns at some point because they look so cool. I'm also planning on using Apophysis to create animated magic/sci-fi effects for use with 3D animations. And I can finally make some cool dual screen backgrounds too. Anyway, lots of potential applications for these images and people will wonder how you did it. Expect more blabbing about Apophysis-generated content in the future.

I decided that I'll start sharing software that I've discovered to be massively useful or just really cool. I'm not talking about popular software, I'm talking about obscure or open source programs that people don't really know about but has lots of value. So let's start. When it comes to recording ideas and collaborating on stories and other projects, our team has used our private wiki for the past few years. Wikis are great because they're accessible online and you can edit any page you want. But that's pretty much all I find them useful for. I have some issues with using wikis: I have to wait for a page to load, tree-like organization of sub-articles is a big pain in the neck for large projects in that you have to click and load a new page to go to the next sub-article, unless you manually create a table of contents, and when you finally get to the page you want you have to go into edit mode to make changes. That's a lot of clicking links and wait...

Following up on my previous post about AudioSurf , the game was officially released on Steam a couple of days ago. It's $10, and a free demo is available. So, go check it out .

I came across a really good article today called Better Than Free written by Kevin Kelly . The article is about how something that may be free and infinitely abundant—referring to digital media—can still be valuable enough that people will pay for it, even though the law of supply and demand states that if something is in infinite supply it will cost nothing. This made me think about how the ability to make perfect copies of digital media will affect the kind of work that I want to do. Every media industry that I can think of is complaining about piracy and how it's hurting their business: music, movies, video games, books, software, the list goes on and on. If it's so easy to get copies for free then why would anybody pay for it? I've been thinking about this topic a lot over the past few years because our studio's primary form of distribution will be internet downloads. Trying to create the best possible product and cultivate a high level of trust with customers, wh...

Riven Phoenix's The Structure of Man series, which I've evangelized ever since I received my copy of the DVD set, has to be the best and most affordable (US$45) way to learn how to draw people from memory. Since leaving Rexburg I've had more time to continue watching the series--finally; I've owned it for about 9 months with not enough time to watch it until recently. When I initially started The Structure of Man series I went through the first 19 videos with pencil and paper rather quickly, but then I realized that my final sketches didn't show much of the process of how I got to the final. All the important stuff that the video series is teaching, like the simplified angles and proportions that make up the human body were gone when I started rendering. I could watch the video over and over again until I memorized the formulas, but all I needed was some kind of primer that had all the formulas down on paper as a quick and complete reference. That gave me the idea ...