The Blog of Glen Moyes

I'm a long-time Adobe customer. I've been in a good position to use Adobe's software throughout my education and career. It's been a good experience for me, but only because I was a student when the Adobe software had perpetual licenses. You pay for the software once, and you own it forever. For a lot of the designers and content creators I associate with, they are not as content with Adobe as I am. Working with more students has opened my eyes to experiences that seem to be the norm, and those experiences are far from my own. The root of this seems to be Adobe's current subscription business model. I'm lucky that I graduated when I did, because if I graduated today, there's a greater chance that I wouldn't be a designer. Perpetual licenses saved me after college. I purchased Adobe Creative Suite Design Premium when I was a college student. The student version wasn't that expensive, and I was able to purchase every new version of the Creative Suite w...

Did you know that Klok has a beta program ? Neither did I until today. Sure you can download a beta version but it's not the current version of the software. Thank goodness because I've been using the public beta for a year and with no software updates I was worried that the project was dead. Luckily I found frequent and recent posts about Klok on their Twitter page and blog . You can be a part of the beta program my making a donation (anything greater than $0). I of course donated because as you might have read on my original post on Klok last year, Klok is totally worth using!

I recently reinstalled Windows onto my computer, a ritual that I have done for years to keep my operating system running nicely thanks to Windows bit rot. I usually do it about once a year, in this case it's been two so it really needed a fresh install. The problems with regularly reinstalling Windows are downloading and installing all of the updates, which takes forever since my original Windows XP Pro disc is Service Pack 1. Luckily there's software that makes the process easier. nLite I wish I knew about this program earlier. nLite is an easy to use application that allows you to make a backup copy of your Windows install disc, slipstream the service pack and updates into the Windows install (google for the Windows XP Service Pack 3 Network Installation Package for IT Professionals and Developers; it's an EXE file that nLite will ask for to do that), install drivers such as my SATA drivers that I needed to install Windows on something other than my old soon-to-fail IDE ...

Celtx 2.0 was released this past week. For going from 1.0 to 2.0, Celtx doesn't have a whole lot of new features . The two big changes are Celtx Studio, which is their $50 yearly subscription version of Project Central with a free beta until March 24, and the ability to add Extensions/Add-Ons to Celtx, which I'm really excited about.

[EDIT] Scruss provide some information on how to do this under Cygwin (and Linux I'm sure) at http://scruss.com/blog/2010/05/09/creating-a-truetype-font-from-your-handwriting-with-your-scanner-your-printer-and-fontforge/ I haven't tried it out yet, (when I do I'll post it here) but this could very well come in handy. Thanks for the tip! Many of the designers I know are typophiles. We live and breath type and will search for hours trying to find the right typeface, and when we are not doing that we'll spend weeks trying to create one. Here's a couple of font tools that I've used in the past: YourFonts.com automatically creates a TrueType font from a scan of your handwriting, and FontForge allows you to create fonts from scratch and of course edit existing ones. YourFonts.com [EDIT] YourFoints is not free anymore. It now costs $12.50 + $6.00 if you upload both template pages. For years I've wanted to create a font of my own handwriting. Originally my m...

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...

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'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...

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...

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.

Before I turned to graphic arts my studies and hobbies were in music composition. Like everyone else in the demomusic scene I released music for free and competed in contests like MC6 and 30 minute compos on #trax. I don't compose much anymore but I still have a great love of music and the people who have the craft to do it well. I've been very passionate about independent music over the past couple of years since understanding more about the current state of the record industry. I'm not going to rant too much about this, and I don't think I need to because a lot of people would agree that the situation in the industry, for both artists and fans, is pretty abysmal. This doesn't have as much to do with the RIAA, it's about what artists under a record label have to go through; the record industry doesn't try to make music as much as they try to make celebrities. This is why I've become so passionate about the independent music scene. I still consider myse...

I've been making video tutorials for Blender since August 2004, and in those years I've found TechSmith's Camtasia Studio to be the best solution, simply because of the quality of the TechSmith Capture Codec (TSCC). The other alternative is CamStudio, an open source app that works really well, but the CamStudio Codec is not as fast as TSCC. On my new system I get 22 fps with CamStudio in a 1024x576 region, whereas with TSCC I can get a solid 30 fps, and it's easier to get the audio and video to sync up properly. After using their 30-day trial, experiencing the performance boost was enough to convince myself to buy Camtasia Studio, until I realized it cost US$300. To my joy, I read today that TechSmith is doing a promotion where you can download their old Camtasia 3, get a software key for free, and later upgrade to Camtasia 5 for US$150 (this is for a limited time). Just download the software: http://download.techsmith.com/camtasiastudio/enu/312/camtasiaf.exe Then fill...