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Showing posts from February, 2008

AudioSurf Released

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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 .

Better Than Free: Piracy vs. Legitimacy.

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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

The Structure of Man Primer

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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

Humor Sketch 0001: OLPC Jolly Roger

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Pentagram , I apologize in advance. Is it just me or does the OLPC logo look like an abstracted and friendlier version of the Skull and Crossbones ? I just noticed that the other day, and the thought of seeing it used as a Jolly Roger was funny enough that it needed a sketch. We've been putting more work into making fast 2D games for the OLPC . Right now we don't have direct access to the XO-1's hardware; we'd have to write some drivers to do that. For now we are going to try and see what we can do without hacking the thing. We might consider writing the driver if we feel it's going to be worth the trouble and research. As for me, I'm just glad that I'm the art guy. Anyway, enjoy the image. It's at a decent resolution this time.

Wonder and Style Boards

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Here's an a assignment from my motion design class. The goal was to take an emotion and create a motion piece that included text from the dictionary definition. Blender was used for animation while After Effects where used for compositing and bloom effects. The song used is Illusion of Love (bipolar remix) by Darkhalo. >> Watch this video streamed in HD (720p) The main purpose of this motion design assignment was to create and use style boards. The process of creating a motion piece--after the design brief and writing is done--is to create the storyboards, key art, style boards, and then go into production. The storyboards are rough sketches showing the action of the animation, the approved concept art is refined into key art, and from there you create what are called style boards. These are still images that show what the final shot should look like. Style boards don't need as many panels as storyboarding does, but in the case of this assignment we did to get practic

Touch the Table Video

I decided to go ahead and start posting some of my video files from previous projects. I'll start with this one from my BFA final project called Touch the Table. It's an interactive gallery exhibit where you are encouraged to touch the art. The art interacts with your hand by projecting 6 different effects onto it. For more detailed information about it, here's the temporary Touch the Table page hosted on the temporary Lumaglyph web site. Yup, that's the name of our studio.