While browsing videos on youtube recently, one of the youtubers I was watching at the time made a request if someone with vfx know-how could make a quick intro piece for them. So I figured while I’m still on the look out for paid work, why not take a break from ToT related material and give it a go!
Suffice to say, despite some rage moments with getting the camera inside After Effects to function on tight bends and angles like I wanted to, within 2.5D space, it turned out pretty alright. But I still look forward to when I can replace my current machine for one that works so I can get back to doing some real 3d! I might even redo this within Lightwave! It’d certainly be a lot smoother. Though I’d have to work out another method for transitioning the red stuff (known as Redstone dust in Minecraft) to fade on so it looks like there’s power flowing through it. So in that way, After Effects has a good advantage!
But enough of my rambling on, here’s the video. ^_^
Complete with some nice SFX obtained through Freesound.org , still the best source for SFX under a creative commons licence I’ve seen.
If you’re in to Minecraft, and perhaps want to learn some interesting circuit systems, feel free to dro by Redstone Magic’s youtube and show your support with a thumbs up if you like it. The owners also starting to do some Lets Play videos too.
Finally, I am making sure I keep to my word! The next chapter of UNTITLED is up, and the next shall follow next week! If I forget, you all have permission to spam this post telling me to hurry up! And I shall give you all a totally legitimate excuse about how I forgot because I was busy battling cyber-ninja-pirates in a galaxy far, far away… and then post the next chapter up immediately.
So it’s 2012 and there’s a fresh new year ahead to get right into the thick of it! With TAFE over and done it’s time to focus 100% on my design practices, which is exactly what I intend on doing, and this month should be a heavy one!
BETA Release of Tales of Thyilos is due this month along with my promised BETA Release of the Thyilosian Lore book, which is that complete narrative piece I mentioned in an earlier post last month and specified that I’d intended to make at least one hard-copy and auction it for charity!
Hopefully this month I will get my hands on anew computer. It’s been months since me and person I’m collaborating with did the tutorials. At first we paused new work to focus on study, then my laptops video card got fried, and though it still does work, 3d programs glitch-out and recording became impossible. But this’ll be solved when I obtain a new computer! Hopefully we’ll expand and release some tutorials for different applications as well.
With this luck holding, some older projects that needed clean ups will be finished, especially the Major Production I’d meant to complete! But we can’t always foresee a technological mishap, and without a 3d program working it can’t be finished, as about 80% of the entire project is 3d environments compiled with Live Action. But it’s something I plan on finally finalising sometime at the end of this month, and having up not too long into February.
I’ll leave off with the latest piece I’ve put up. This ones a part of a Product Photography assignment, where we had to design a scene and set up for a full on production shoot of our chosen product, which in my case was for coffee. I rather enjoyed this assignment, but it’s always easier to enjoy something when its with something you enjoy, or on a subject enjoy; in this case, for me, it was both of those!
And before I forget! I’ve added a new page with hotlinks right to any tutorials that are created with us. 🙂
For a quite a while now I’ve been slowly working on an Adventure Map in Minecraft (a sandbox based game you may or may not have heard of). Its taken a while, but I believe it’s ready for at least a public release. So if you have the game and are interested, here’s a link to the topic page I slipped it on. I might put this up over in the Games section of here, or perhaps Lucid Flame Dev in time.
If any of you Minecrafters do give it a try, please leave any feedback. 🙂 It’s the first Adv’ Map I’ve done so far, but it isn’t going to be the last. I’m also helping a friend design buildings and environments for his own Adventure Map. And there’s the intention of a new ma to follow the current one.
Much has been going on recently. Tales of Thyilos has been getting a bunch of new concept art popping up, along with some new features to make the game run more smoothly and more enjoyable. It’s going along just as I’d hoped, which means being able to stick to the deadline of releasing a demo sometime in January! 😀
ToT isn’t the only game popping up with new art though. The other members over at Lucid Flame are flipping the switch and are on the go. Seeds of Time has also reached the point of construction and the first screen shots are up. 🙂
Along with the game projects, some more commissions are slipping in through the cracks. There’s a SFX Project going for a web-game client. In honesty, the SFX part is going well, but making jingles are proving to be out of my range (as I tried to explain early when I was recruited), but, it’s something I’ll have to somewhat manage for now! It’s probably the toughest challenge yet that I’ve undertaken design wise.
Speaking of which, there’s been an awkward delay in finishing and posting up the major production from this year. It hasn’t been forgotten, just nudged aside to allow for current work to be taken care of. I’d hope it too would go up some time in January. I guess only time can tell how successful it is!
Lastly, It seems I’ve fallen behind on posting narrative updates again. So here’s my pitch instead of apologising for terribly delays.
By February, I will publicly release a BETA version of the Thyilosian Lore book, which will for now, be an e-book (free unless you want to donate to the respective designers who did the art and concepts that’ll appear in it), but in time I hope there’ll be enough work compiled to release it as a complete E-Book (which will probably be free as well), and if possible, a Book book. Like physical pages and stuff! 😀
But if only one print can be released, we’ll probably auction it, signed and stuff, and then the money can go to a worthy charity. 🙂
… yes I think that’d make up for my tardiness on novel updates. 😛
Alright, all that aside. Here’s a some quick links to weapon art I’d finished since the last time I posted some up. I’ve one more of these commissions to go, then I can try and move onto another commission! Hopefully done before Christmas like that SFX one :S
There’s the odd trouble that when you work in After Effects CS5 at one time, then have to go to CS4 later, that you’re stuck at the start again, since there is no backwards compatibility.
Technically, there still is no way, however, I stumbled upon a helpful way of half-doing it. There’s draw backs, but if you’re in a rut with your AE CS5 not going, and you need to finish some work now, you can save a little time by following this method.
Basically, what you’re doing is Exporting your file for Premier Pro.
Then when you open CS4, you just Import a Premier Pro file.
You’ll get a menu to choose what o import, but you’ll most likely be wanting the whole composition, so leave everything as default.
And hey presto, your works in CS4.
HOWEVER.
Doing this does not restore your key frames.
You will need to relocate your files without the help of the magical “After Effects has found X files that were missing” popup.
Naturally, any effects or plugins for CS5 and up that aren’t in CS4, wont be available.
Need to replace solids.
Masks vanish.
I found I needed to my effects back.
Now I did say there’s drawbacks, and looking at it from this point of view, if you had a large project with lots going on, you were better off starting again. But here are the time savers, and sometimes every second can count.
Maintain the placement of all items within a composition.
Comp settings will remain exact.
Retain all folders you may have stored items in.
Missing files will have “volume/(the directory your file was in)/ in their names, so if you’ve got large folder hierarchy of work, you can still locate it all.
That’s about it… it’s a sad list compared to the draw backs, but if you need to start again, but for whatever reason will be set back from CS5 to CS4, then this is just about the only way. All in all, the process takes a click of the finger to do, and once you sort out relocating files, you may have saved yourself half an hour (but it all completely depends on just how complex your Project management system is, and how complex the layout of say, cut footage sequences could be, since crop these down is unchanged though the transfer).
On my final note: If you’re even having to consider doing this to get work done, then I know your pain and feel sorry for you. So best of luck with meeting your deadline!
(ps: if you do test this, and discover something that I hadn’t noted, or perhaps something different occurred, please drop a comment here, and thanks in advance).
With more work out of the way now, I’m putting together my own showreel, which is both a requirement as part of the course, and something I figure I may as well do. Though I plan on highlighting on 7 of my better works, and since an earlier assignment “Class of 2011” got scrapped, I’ve taken my puzzle cube and will be using those pieces to highlight my work, instead of one piece for each person in the class.
In other updates; Our character artist has done some revamps of two characters in Tales of Thyilos. Jaden and Linda now look cooler, and they’ve been sent to our Pixel Artist, who is collaborating with our character (and monster) design artist by colouring in his work.
I’ll be uploading them for show when they’re finished.
Meanwhile I discuss the game, the deadline I’d set for releasing a BETA Demo to the public in December has been pushed to January. It’s the same unfortunate mess of too many other things getting in the way of work. I’d prefer not to push it, but I’d hate even more to release a poor Demo for people to try.
In other news… there’s two weeks of TAFE left. Everything must be done to a submittable standard, though we do keep getting told “it’s not whether you completely finish it, its the processes you put in the making.” So as long as I have plenty of concept art and such to show for the work I don’t finish, I can pass.
This also means I’ll upload a bunch of work to my page Youtube, and a couple will also be in StudioWisp’s youtube.
Finally, I still can’t do any tutorials, as though I’ve managed to solve some of the video/graphical issues I’m having on my basic desktop and folder, etc, by swtiching a Windows Basic Theme, it continues to glitch when an application runs, such as Lightwave, Photoshop, Firefox, etc.
Until this is fixed, I can’t do more tutorials, unless people really want to watch something the screen jumping about and warping.
Will post some more news when I next have videos to upload! Until then, will work frantically.
My house, and main base of operations, has taken on some heavy water during the weekened. Due to this, work has been drastically slowed. So certain things have been put on hold to make more time of what I do still have to work on projects I need done for client or TAFE.
So the following will find unfortuantly delays:
Tales of Thyilos (which I feel bad about because I did promise to have an Open Demo available in December. Hopefully it still will)
Full Release for the Movie I’m working on (the delay on this public release is actually both a result of dedicating work to multiple projects at the same time, and that the inability to have a working station has become very limited for the next week.
I think that’s it.
2 items? Not so bad. With determination, the work will be done when it’s meant to anyway. Honestly, the movie is meant to be completed within the next 4 weeks regardless since it’s part of my Major Production for this year, but I like to go over and refine things before I upload them. I’ll see how things go. But if I fall behind on ToT, then I’ll focus more on that, than refining work to upload, as ToT is a project involving a group of people and truthfully, I think it’s more important than passing all my courses this year. But, TAFE still has to come first.
Updates as soon as I can find internet again, which could be a while.
My computers bugging out, but it’s looking like it could be something that may be fixed by something as simple as a factory restore. Which I know people tend to look at and go “Oh, that’s not necessary, why are you doing that?”, but the truth is, I’ve been meaning to refresh my computer anyway, and with what it’s doing now, there’s no better time. I just hope it really does fix the problem, otherwise, it’s a hardware problem…
So all the work i was working on will be delayed since I’ll be prioritising what needs to be doe while I’m at TAFE. This will include having to push Tales of Thyilos’s Demo Release back as I’ll have to put full focus into said TAFE work.
But while I’m not at TAFE I can spend more time doing more conventional crafts like finishing my paintings.
I’m thinking of a new one which will be of a fire pace with a nice warm, roaring fire in it. Inside that fire, there shall be computers.
For an ironic take, I’m thinking of filming myself burning the painting of the computers burning in a fire. It may seem like a waste of time and effort, but I believe it’ll be quite therapeutic.
That’s all for now. Expect a very happy update if we can get a factory restore to work.
ps: my Cd/DVD Drive isn’t working either. This’ll be fun.
Stuff to eventually go up for display. Hopefully, a painting, maybe two of them. I’ve never been able to gauge well when I’ll finish a painting because they’re always things I just start on and eventually finish when I get around to it.
But, what I do know will hopefully be done within the coming week, is an old project that never quite got finalised and was put on the shelf for half a year. A re-visit of an old-city scape sequence I did last year (but never uploaded because there were many things I wished to improve on it), and there’s a few random selections I’ll be fiddling through in order to create a show reel for the end of the year.
With luck, the re-visits my teacher requires us to all look into, will hopefully be taken out of the way quickly. Then it’s smooth sailing on getting the end of the year production done, which at the moment, means getting a bunch of filming down, most of it just green screen. On the upside, almost one 3d environment, and I’m set for the entire movie. On the downside, have to re-shoot one of the scenes, and a matte painting.
Alright, so the point of highlighting all this is mainly to point out that updates will be more irregular (due to a busy schedule), but despite this, you can be glad to know that both Tales of Thyilos will be released on time mid-December, and a bunch of new videos will hopefully be uploaded, along with some new artwork.
Eight weeks left till my Advanced Diploma is done, then out there into the thick of it.
Anxious, but looking forward to it!
studiowisp.com 