Tag Archives: animation

Work, work, work!

So the last week so far, I’d taken upon something a little more different than normal. Some readers may remember I’ve been looking for work for quite some time now, both in the industry I’d trained in during my Diploma’s at TAFE. but also in other fields as a source of stable income. I may still be living at home, but I do need to pay board, and pitch in on things when possible.

So this week I was able to get a chance to try out working as an apprentice Pastry Chef. It felt natural to take on something involving food, since the only real work I’d done prior was also in a hospitality environment. I’ve gotta say, after my trial run, it’s tough work (which was what I’d expected), and I did enjoy the things I’d learned during my time there. But, the apprenticeship needs someone who has the drive and dedication to see into their future and say, “I want to do this as a career!” So though I did enjoy my time, I could not see myself still with a desire for the industry 3 years onward. So I’ve left that job, and hopefully the next person they take on for a trial run will take up the offer.

On an upside, it’s good to do some work. I’m not talking about the odd commissions or projects I’ve taken on personally, but getting out into something more physical. Even though it was a short time, I’m feeling rather invigorated, and my motivation to seek work has gone right up. I’m even a little less nervous towards other hospitality fields. (my first job working as a hand in a kitchen rather ruined it all for me).

So that’s that for this week now gone by. I’d have hoped that when I did post an update on here, that I’d have had something a bit more related to design, but I’m thinking from the perspective now that any post is a good post, and if I can get into a routine once more, then I’ll be making at least one post per week.
While I am thinking on it though, I’m intending to go back to some old VFX projects that I’d attempted to create during my old laptops “dead-graphics-card” phase. One in particular I did for Red Stone Magic, I’d wished to create a complex 3d animation of pistons and circuits, but was left constructing it all in After Effects with OpenGL rendering turned off so it wouldn’t crash as soon as I tried to manipulate something in 3d space.
It’d be a good opportunity to get back to using Lightwave once more now I’ve obtained LW 10.1; not much on an upgrade from 9.6, but I’ve been told there’s a couple nice changes which I’ll hopefully pick up on. If not, there’s always Google.

So that’s all for today,and hopefully I will adhere to routine and post once again in the coming week!
Have a good weekend. 😀


Back in action!

After a not so much to plan 3 months, I’ve finally gotten a hold of a tasty new computer! It put up a bit of a struggle when there were some hiccups with getting it installed and configured right, but its now going at full power and ready to take on all the bits and pieces of work I’ve had on hold for way too long!

That said, I’ve still got another day before I can actually jump into any major work, because it’s still taking a good day to transfer over files from my external that were recovered from my ex-laptop; along with getting necessary programs and such installed and updated, etc.

I am jumping back into working of Legends of Thyilos, a game which was meant to have a Beta Demo 6.2 released, quite coincidentally, the night after my laptop ceased all function. The 3 month over-due patch release will hopefully go up tomorrow night (Friday), and then with all major bugs having been taken care of, I can set sail for the Full Demo release sometime later. My estimate was July 31st, but I’m not all too confident I can make that date due to other projects; ie Within 10 Minutes tutorials and getting back into a routine of making animations in After Effects and the like.
So the Demo will probably go up in two months from the Beta 6.2. Enough time for myself to tackle it head-on and get some major features fully implemented! I’m pretty ecstatic about it!

There’s some bits of work I’ll be scanning onto the computer in the coming days, and then finishing them up in Illustrator and Photoshop. I might stick up the sketches on here, but since they’re all game project related, I might slip them onto the Lucid Flame site instead; but I’ll be sure to link back here.

As for my novels, I’ll be trying to get back to them. I never did manage to get anything done on them, both to a lack of motivation, looking for work, and constant house-work and renovations going on. But its something I will not let slip into back of my folders. Eventually I’ll return to working on UNTITLED, and I’ll also pop out the lost final chapter for Samurai 2020.

While I’m rambling about novels though, I’ve concluded that the Thyilosian Lore book I was working on is not going to work out, as the knowledge specified would not fit into the current time and perspective. So the book will be broken into a series of different books. The current Thyilosian Lore will be a collective knowledge of the world so far, excluding any knowledge about the “Shroud”, a impassible barrier which is meant to have a whole kingdom within it.
The next will be inside the Shroud, and be a collection of knowledge from that, and I’ll work on this when the games relating to within the Shroud commence.
The third is a Biography of Rein; an evil tyrant who caused the utter damnation of part of the Kingdom of Zanzibar, and launch a genocidal campaign. The bio will give a look into the region he reigns over both before and after, and also shed light into the mad mans min.
The last book, will be like a lost tome written by the Ancient Immortals when they still existed. it’ll contain their own personal history and be more like a log book of key events and such. It’ll go as far as up to the Calamity, when the Immortals disappeared.

It'[s going to be a lot of work to get these done, but thankfully I have good friend willing to proof read and tell me where I screw up so that each book works!

I’ll be going back to regular postings soon, and I might put up my new computers specs later just for a random post. It should be able to tackle some intense 3d, but my real test is going to be going into Minecraft, a Java-based mining/exploration.adventure/sandbox/building game you may or may not have heard of. And seeing how big a cubeic stack of TNT I can detonate at once before the game completely crashes. A friend of mine could manage 100×100, and he has a pretty powerful laptop. I’m hoping my machine can hit 200×200!

Wish me luck with that little “stress test”, and a warm hello to all of you. its great to finally be back to routine. 🙂

~Shea


First Update of the new year

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. 🙂

Till next time! 😀
~Shea


Collaboration! Ochame Kinou

After a long 24 hours, I’ve managed to pump out a new collaboration, and something that can fit onto the Studio Wisp youtube as well. It’s not a tutorial video (as we still can’t do them, yet), but at least its a new video on the page!

This collab was produced by one of my fellow members over at Lucid Flame Dev. She did the frames for her character, whom is the main character, Rose, in her game, Keepers of Time; and I did the fun part of finding a way to sync up the mouth movements. Which for some bizarre reason, I did the entire thing at 20 FPS, because the 25FPS animation was a tad too slow compared to the exemplars I was following from (even thought they were at 25FPS). But, I did intend to move it into Flash after I was done in After Effects, so there was some logic there.
But my word of advice, is if you have an animation and it’s not running at 25 or 30FPS (depends on your region), then do what I only thought of in the morning after syncing it all, and render out the animation with the music at 25FPS_<

Anyway, enough of my ramblings, here's the video. I hope you enjoy.

~ accreditations ~
Character Art by Rose Reveries; using the FukkiretaPlz Meme base.
Original Ochame Kinou composed by Kasune Teto; this version’s vocals done by Lon.
Animation and background art by me. (at least that part was fun and not so tedious xP )

More things to come, but possibly not till after Christmas.

~Shea