SUMMARY: The point of being more productive is making stuff, right? I recently was able to overcome my procrastination tendencies on a long back-burnered scooter club card project, and produced something that feels real. Result: I’m feeling productive! Second result: by writing about it, I can see some of the patterns that helped get me through the project.
Bonus: lots of pictures.
I stumbled upon Indigo Kelleigh's fantastic Tarot cards some time ago. Based on the popular Rider-Waite deck that's in widespread use, Kelleigh's deck is faithfully illustrated using an 8-bit retro computer graphic style. If you grew up with computer games in the 80s and 90s, you know what I'm talking about. Before we had millions of colors and photographic imagery on the desktop, computer artists basically had to work with what amounted to a digital Lite-Brite, hand-picking each pixel and color to create cartoony imagery. It is not unlike creating a mosaic out of tiles, with a very limited color set. People of my generation, however, remember this era of computer gaming fondly because quality games had to rely on good game play and story--or so we game snobs like to believe.
Anyway, Kelleigh's 8-bit Tarot covers all 78 cards in the Rider-Waite, using the same 256 colors that used to be the standard system palette on the Macintosh. That may sound like a lot of colors, but when you consider that realistic shading can take dozens of colors for each hue, you quickly exhaust your color budget. Experienced computer graphic artists dither colors to create the illusion of intermediate shades of colors; this works well if the resolution of the screen is high enough with photographic imagery. The technique creates a stippled effect that makes connoisseurs of aged computer graphics nod with heartfelt appreciation.
But I've prattled on enough...just take my word that these are really cool. The complete set became available recently for sale, and I jumped to snag a couple for my collection of esoterica. Have a look!
They're not very large cards, slightly smaller than a standard playing card. However, the printing is quite good and is on a nice coated cardstock. The cards also come in a very cool brown box decorated with blocky 8-bit illustrations done in a Victorian (?) style. The mixing of retro 8-bit graphics with retro package design is very cool.
I suspect they will also work just fine as any Rider-Waite deck for Tarot purposes, as Kelleigh's digital creations are based on the thematic elements that are in Pamela Colman Smith's original illustrations. You can see the entire card set at Kelleigh's site. If you've got US$30 burning a hole in your pocket, head on over to the lunarbistro store and send the artist some bucks.
Occasionally I have to size browser windows quickly to see if a design will really work on smaller computer screens. In times of such need, I use this desktop background:
It's just a 1600x1200 24-bit PNG file that has the standard 4:3 ratio screen sizes on them. I suppose I should also add the widescreen aspect ratios to them too for completeness. My work is never done...sigh. The grid size is 25 pixels; this is good enough to estimate sizes without literring the entire screen with tiny boxes.
Anyway, people sometimes ask me for this file, so I'm putting it here for future generations of new media designers to enjoy. It's a mere 63K too, which pleases my inherent cheapness when it comes to using memory, though technically speaking---oh, never mind...these days memory usage practically doesn't matter anymore.
» Download Desktop PNG File
You will want to right-click and choose "Save Link As" to your desktop. Then do whatever you need to do to set it as your new "desktop background." Make sure you do not use scaling, otherwise the sizes of the boxes will be completely wrong.
Someone left a nice comment on my old spaceship drawing post, and this prompted me to pull down my old archive and flip through it. I ended up posting a photos of them to Flickr, with commentary.
If you're interested in reliving my childhood, check out the new photo set! Here are some samples, from earliest to most recent :-)
I'm going to be buzzing around SIGGRAPH 2006, the big computer graphics show, at the Boston Exhibition Center this morning. Not sure what to expect, other than to be inspired and wish I had a lot more money :-)0
Yep, SIGGRAPH, the gigantic computer graphics conference, is in Boston again this year. The last SIGGRAPH I was at, I think, was in 1998. A lot has happened since then, and I think I need myself a bit of inspiration. I got myself a free exhibition pass, didn't spring for the "Exhibits Plus" pass though (I may change my mind).
SIGGRAPH runs from Sunday, July 30 to Thursday, August 3, down at the Boston Exhibition & Convention Center. It should be a real pain in the butt to get to with the various problems with the Big Dig tunnels; I'll probably end up driving to an outlying station and taking the T in from Alewife to South Station. Whee!
I hope I see some cool stuff...I could use a summer boost!
I was trying to find my very first website, which would probably date back to 1995 or so, but alas...I can't find a backup dating back from that time. If I have them, they're probably still on QIC-80 tape or ZIP disks...ugh! I still have a couple 20MB SyQuest disks somewhere too, moldering away next to a pile of single-sided double-density 5.25" Apple II diskettes. There are some old Apple II files I'm trying to get off those machines, but I'm too lazy to set up the null-modem serial transfer.
Anyway, my personal website's original files were hosted on an SGI Indy running out of our Somerville, MA office back in 1994, if I recall correctly, served off our dedicated 128kbps DSL line. Speeeedy!
I did find the 1997 and 2000 versions of the sites that predated this one, though:
After Qualia disbanded, I made a website to stick some of my artwork online as I went hunting for jobs. This was the site for a while...check out all the table-based design! I think there are a bunch of spacer GIFs in there too, back when David Siegel was in vogue.
I still have this site online actually, because it has an old portfolio that I occassionally enjoy looking at. I don't show it much anymore because I don't really do the game graphics anymore. But heck, if I met the right people, maybe I would take up DeluxePaint II again. There are actually some 2d sprites I'd like to incorporate into a game...I should just dump 'em into a Flash shell.
For a while, some friends of mine and I ran a completely silly website called Slap The Bunny. My page had a bunch of odd anonymous drawings...the idea was that we should loosen up and have a good time with graphics again. It never did happen, but I still have this weird screen.
As I started shifting from game design and production, I was thinking of upgrading my service offerings to be more, um, "professional". This design never quite got off the ground, and I ended up just using placeholder screens for years without any content until September 2004, when I switched to using WordPress.
I guess I'm in a nostalgic mood, particularly as I contemplate the wisdom of doing a site redesign. It's interesting to see the transition from the old graphics to what I'm doing now. In some ways, the graphics are quite similar in proportion and blockiness. What's recent is the more refined sense of typography and color (though it's still not that great). So what else is new? :-)
I recently had the realization that PowerPoint is possibly the standard graphics tool of the modern office, at least for non-graphics professionals. So, I've been keeping my eyes open for interesting uses of it; it could be a great selling point to be able to tell prospective clients, "yep, I can make all that cool flashy stuff, and it will work with PowerPoint". On the other hand, the prospect of using PowerPoint makes me a little ill.
There's a new product in particular that promises to take some of the "ick" out of of PowerPoint, Ovation from Serious Magic. They're known for making another cool product called DVRack, which allows you to use a PC laptop as a high-quality video monitor for your DV camcorder, "replacing $10,000 of studio gear" with a piece of software. You could call it the video equivalent of Reason, the kick-ass virtual music production studio. But I digress.
From what I could tell from the video demo, Ovation takes your boring PowerPoint files as input, parses them, and then enables you to apply motion graphics effects and video backgrounds in real-time. It comes with pre-built templates, but they actually look pretty cool. Visually, they reminded me of slick DVD menus.
Ovation does more than convert your PPT, it actually includes a presentation system that turns your laptop into a teleprompter. The program sends your presentation full-screen out through the secondary video port, and the laptop screen is used as your prompter. Very cool! You can download the beta at the Serious Magic website. I haven't had a chance to install it yet, but it sounded cool enough to try.
On a side note, I like the way Serious Magic integrates their videos into their website. It's nice to see video that actually shows and communicates the value of a product.
Serious Magic seem to have a lot of other cool products, like Ultra (a video keying program) and Visual Communicator (some kind of non-technical video presentation creator). I like what they seem to be doing, but the software experience may be something else altogether. Will it have the robust yet refined feel of Google's Picasa 2, or will it be cursed with the same confusion and sluggishness that plagues Adobe's Photoshop Elements 3? I'm very curious.
If you're looking for the PDF, scroll down to the bottom of this post
About a year and a half ago, I was in California for the bachelor party of one of my very best friends. He decided (after consultation from the missus-to-be) against the usual stripper-assisted drunken revelry, and thought that we'd all have a good time bonding instead at the nearby shooting range. After blowing through $200 in ammunition, I was hooked, and resolved to learn more about shooting as soon as I got back to New Hampshire, though the prospect of learning how was rather intimidating.
Since then I've learned how to operate a handgun, and I've been introducing my friends to shooting as well. I recommend taking a certified course, but I find the personal introduction helps people get over their initial misconceptions and fears about firearms, which means they have fun a lot sooner. Knowledge is power!
And as it so happens, I've been playing around with InDesign CS2, so I created a reference for next time I'm introducing people to shooting. You can download a PDF at the end of this post. After the story.
Shooting is something I am self-conscious about because of my Chinese ethnicity; walking into a gun store filled with scowling white hunters can be an intimidating experience :-) As it turns out, they just scowl at everyone until you become a known quantity-it helps to be polite and serious about conducting business, and once they realize you're there for the same reason they are things lighten up--but that's a story for another day.
A second barrier: my family background is strongly entrenched in the Church, and didn't offer guidance regarding firearms that (I suspect) American families with a strong attachment to the "Old West" would have--you know, like Dad grew up playing Cowboys and Indians, or Grandma was a sharpshooter in Montana. Anyway, Mom and Dad thought it best to prohibit me from owning war-related toys; I still remember the sting of disappointment when, at age 7, I was given my first squirt gun. It was shaped like the head of "Tom" from "Tom and Jerry", had terrible range, didn't shoot straight, and looked absolutely ridiculous. To add further insult to injury, my sister's squirt gun ("Jerry") shot farther and straighter, annoying me to no end. When I was 10, a friend of mine took pity on me and gave me a cap gun he didn't want; this was promptly confiscated. I got a lecture on the evil of guns ("Guns are bad!"), and I never saw it again.
Denied war toys, I drew them instead--planes, ships, tanks...and lots of guns. I studied diagrams of the venerable Model 1911--one of the seminal American handguns of the 20th century--from our 1976 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia. In the 10th grade, I started reading gun magazines smuggled into Taiwan from the Phillippines--then under martial law--by the very same friend who threw his shooting range bachelor party years later. In addition to soaking up a lot of "forbidden" knowledge, I read about the exploits of real-life Texas Border Patrolman Skeeter Skelton. I later wrote a story influenced by this guy in High School and won an award from the English Department. I think my teachers were struck by my depiction of a dystopian world gone awry...but just between you and me, it was just an excuse to draw the gun (shown right) and write about its many interesting design features :-)
I kept up on my reading after college--as I worked in the video game industry, it sort of counted as background research . My first contact with a real gun was in Florida, when I took a 4-hour Concealed Carry License (CCL) course with a bunch of fellow video game developers and artists from work. The first thing that the instructor asked me during the class was whether I was Samoan, which he used as the lead into a story about the mighty .45ACP cartridge, because the standard-issue .38s were just not stopping them fast enough. Although I am not Samoan, this anecdote didn't exactly put me at ease. Though I suppose for a brief instant I helped the instructor visualize just what the U.S. Marines were up against in the South Pacific, back in the 1800s...yay.
After the written test, we got to shot about 20 rounds into a target about 10 feet away from us, thus earning the right to apply for a concealed carry license. I shot very well; apparently, all those years of using computer mice pay off big when it comes to accurate hand control when shooting. I never did get my Florida CCL because I moved back to New England soon afterwards. I didn't shoot again until that bachelor party in California.
Despite how you may personally feel about guns and violence, I think a rational person should know something about how they actually work. The media and television have fostered a distorted view of how to actually handle a gun, and this ignorance could get you hurt. For example, you might find one somewhere and need to transport it to somewhere safe. Or you may be in the vicinity of someone who is handling one, and with a few cues you will be able to tell whether or not that person is "safe" or a threat. Or--and hopefully this never happens--you may actually need to use one when the shit hits the fan.
And of course shooting is fun, as NPR/BoingBoing media sprite Xeni Jardin discovered a few months ago with the help of an experienced shooter. Lacking an experienced shooter for my own guidance, I retook the recommended courses (finding a far better instructor here in New Hampshire) and joined a group that meets at my local range that I found out about during the lessons. I was fortunate to have a public shooting range nearby that allowed me to find the right instructor and start learning the right way to do things. If you're starting from scratch, just finding people who shoot is a challenge, because the serious groups tend to be low key. Once you find them, they are the nicest people you'll meet...patient, grounded, and motivated to learn.
The Fundamental Rules of Gun Safety, the NRA Safety Rules are pretty much the standard; states that require licensing will test you on these very rules!
When I'm introducing gun safety to people, I focus on the first two rules:
ALWAYS keep the gun pointed in a safe direction.
ALWAYS keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot.
If you follow these rules to the letter, you will be 100% safe. You absolutely should have an experienced shooting buddy with you to watch what you're doing; this will help develop conscious safety at all times. Ultimately, you want to be unconsciously safe, which is when you are safe without even thinking about it. But before you get there, you might do one of the following gaffes:
Looking at the side of the gun, inadvertently pointing it to your side instead of keeping it safely pointed downrange. The solution is to turn your body, not the gun.
Putting your finger on the trigger when you pick up the gun, because that's what you think you're supposed to do. No! You do that only when it's time to shoot.
Conversely, not taking your finger off the trigger when you're done shooting, because you'll tend to look at the target to see how you did. Oops...forgot to be safe.
Treating a gun as "safe to point around" because "the safety is on" or "the gun is already unloaded". No! Treat the gun loaded all the time, because it really might be. Plus, the people around you will feel a lot better not having a gun pointed at them, accidentally or not.
You should, of course, know and understand all the safety rules. However, these rules presume some knowledge about operating a gun (like, how to unload one), or how you'll be using a gun (the "keep gun unloaded" rule, for example, makes no sense if you are carrying one for personal defense). So I focus first on the two big rules to establish the safety mindset right away using a toy gun as a prop. The other rules make more sense when we start talking about how to operate (or "administrate") a gun, and can practice with the real thing.
There are a lot of good books on shooting and safety, but I haven't yet come across a basic diagram that looks nice and fits on a single page. This first PDF is about the two main rules of firearms safety. The layout is a little cramped, but it's nice because a big photo reinforces the text. I think new shooters will find it informative. I'm planning on creating sheets that introduce the other rules and how to operate a pistol; if there's anything I like more than shooting guns, it's taking pictures of them :-)
» Download Shooting Guide 01: Safety PDF
If you are having trouble printing the PDF--I'm an Acrobat noob, so I might have messed up the CMYK profile--here's a big JPEG version:
» Download Shooting Guide 01: Safety JPG
My Dad, who's been visiting for the past couple months, commented:
At the time, we thought that by not exposing you to these kinds of things you would lose interest in them. Well, that didn't work.
However, having gone through the process of rediscovering my childhood passion as an adult, my perspective now has made it a much more serious and reflective experience. Don't get me wrong...it's also just a lot of fun, but I am glad that I didn't get a lot of stupid ideas in my head as a kid that I would now have unlearn. Being informed and experienced is the way to go, I think, no matter what your age.
I've been enjoying the portfolio at The Skins Factory, a company that does a lot of high-profile GUI work. Very very slick and shiny! According to this interview, they're a virtual company that uses graphic design talent from the skinning scene worldwide. You can get a rawer inside-look from this chat transcript.
The Skin Factory's work is a heady combination of industrial design, rendering chops, and the ability to really illustrate the tactile details of real objects. It's really pretty cool to see scenesters make money at what they love doing.
I thought I knew something about making pretty GUIs, but this is quite a leap over what I've done in the past. Time to get cracking!
In addition to The Skin Factory's overall command of design, I'm quite impressed by their technique:
The reflections. Very nicely done overall. I'm pretty sure that the major reflections (like the glass) are drawn in and faded by hand. The curved reflections around the edges (they are pretty subtle) might have been rendered in a 3D program and dropped in. Reflection maps are funny things...you almost never use the actual surrounding 3D geometry because it will look like crap Instead, you want something that has high contrast and is organic without being too recognizeable. I remember when this phenomenal 3D artist at EA, Greg Jobes, who showed me his favorite reflection map for rendering shiny metal surfaces. I was surprised that it had absolutely nothing to do with football...hey, if it works, use it!
The use of scale. I'm not sure what this is called by professionals, but there is a consistency of scale that helps create a convincing rendering. Say you're depicting a wrist watch up-close: you expect that there will be fine details like small knurled knobs, etched lettering, maybe some subtle abrasion or scratches. I think of this as "microdetail". Every object has it when you get close enough. However, when you're looking at a car from some distance away, you expect the details to be larger and "robust". You also expect that these details are "sized appropriately" according to the kind of material used and the purpose intended. In other words, there is an appropriate and expected scale of detail. If you put a large clunky knob on the finely-detailed watch, that knob will look ungainly. If you put a tiny knob on the door of a car, it will look like it will snap off, which is not car-like at all. These mistakes DO happen in real life; we call that bad design :-)
Beginning 3D texture artists tend to be unaware of scale...they're just thinking "I need to put something on the walls, here's a wall texture, let's slap it on". The texture is magnified by a factor of 100, and since our perception of dimension is determined by relative scale, that wall will now look "out of scale" compared to other things in the room. It will feel wrong, though you may not immediately know why.
There is excellent scale awareness in all of the Skin Factory's public portfolio, and therefore as objects they seem entirely credible. They also seem hyper-real because they are so clean and slick, but that's a different issue.
The color shading. Really sweet. As the electroluminiscent colors go from lighter to darker tones, there is a slight hue shift. A lot of beginning artists will just darken and lighten a hue by using the brightness slider in Photoshop. Or worse: they'll add white or black on top. The results are pretty drab. If you look closely at the Skin Factory work, you can see how the reds are actually along a red-orange scale, and the blues go from a kind of blue-hot to a slightly purply cool blue. Likewise with the greens...there's just a touch of yellow added to the brighter colors. It looks more vibrant. Just adding pure black and white is a sure way to make an ugly color palette. If you look at real-world shadows and colors, you'll see that they always have some kind of tint. It's this kind of careful modulation that makes things interesting; it works in lighting, in music, and in any time-based visual media.
On a side note, using color burn seems to impart a color shifting to some degree. Try using that to make darker shadows, compared to painting black.
On yet another side note: the slickness of the work reminds me a bit of the grandmaster of chrome Sorayama. He did all those "Sexy Robot" illustrations back in the 80s. Check out his official website. Warning! Probably not safe for work!
Since I've actually got to do some slick GUI work over the next week, I'm looking at the following pieces of software to help ease some of the rendering workflow:
I'm thinking of using a set of Photoshop plugins I've had my eye on for a long time: AutoFX's DreamSuite Series 1. It appears to have a 3d engine that can help establish the base lighting effects, without having to go through 3DS Max 4.2 (yeah, I haven't upgraded in a while). I'm not convinced that this will be the way to go, but the DreamSuite will probably come in handy for future jobs. I'm hoping to get back into actually making cool graphics as a hobby. I tend to flip-flop on my hobbies...when I'm doing more coding, I tend to like to take more photos and draw more pictures. Conversely, when I'm doing more graphics, I feel like I should be hitting the programming harder. Sigh.
I'm not sure if the DreamSuite package is powerful enough; modeling things like subtly-rounded 3d objects are probably beyond its capabilities, so additional Photoshop post production will be necessary. Or, I'll have to use a 3D program. Or, I'll have to render it by hand in Illustrator or Photoshop, which would take way too long.
Another interesting contender is Pixologic's ZBrush 2. I've had my eye on this program for quite a long time, though I wasn't aware of the newest version until just about an hour ago. I never quite understood what it was until recently; the website does not really explain what it is, but there is plenty of artwork to browse (once you actually find the gallery link, that is). I did just download their practical guide, which required registration on their forum, which was annoying. Do they not want people to find out about the program too easily?
From what I can tell, ZBrush is hybrid 2d illustration / 3d modeling program that allows you to paint with "pixols". Imagine that the pixels you were painting with in Photoshop actually had real physical thickness, and everytime you used the paint brush the pixels built up like layers of clay. Now imagine that you can take other images and use that to "spray on" surface detail. That seems to be what the program is capable of doing...there's a demo available and a quicktime movie that will make its place in the 3d world clearer. Maybe.
UPDATE: There actually are some excellent tutorials in the ZBrush Classroom. It's given me a better idea of the program and how it works. It's funky and cool.
Anyway, based on that quicktime movie, I'm thinking that ZBrush might be quite useful for building more complex forms with drawn-on detail. It would beat the hell out of learning NURBS...I never got past polygonal modeling in Max anyway, so maybe it's time to switch. At around $400 $500 bucks, ZBrush 2 is much more affordable than a $1200 $1500 Max upgrade.
This sword picture by "Stumph" gave indication that ZBrush 2 might fit into my workflow. ZBrush is clearly capable of more; for example, the characters in Doom 3 were apparently created with this package. Definitely check out the gallery for more cool imagery. I'm not sure what kind of renderer it has; this might be a sticking point.
Now all I need to do is come up with a cool-looking design. Should be fun...my first one came out a little stiff and predicatable, but I'm getting limbered up. Booyah!
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