Merry (belated) Christmas and happy (almost) new year, everyone! My second of two posts fact checking predictions for 2020 and further is up on Zoom Times! This one focuses mainly on transportation and space, though it also has a segment on VR; please check it out here !

As part of my final college year, I took a course exclusively focused on the program that started it all, even before my Blender work: Photoshop!  My first assignment was to create a superhero or science fiction movie poster. I decided to go wild with this (in part because I was actually making a movie at the time), and the result is possibly the most references since a college self-portrait 6 years ago . Here we go:  The cast noted is based on the proposed cast of Superman Lives (I was originally going to make a fan poster for that, but my concept had to be original) The title, "Incursion Point," is a reference to ABYDOS: Incursion Not sure why I chose Paramount or Spyglass as the producers; maybe the latter was a nod to Sixth Sense , or maybe it wasn't "Valtapaz Videos" is Turbulence's "company" Kenji Kawai is a reference to the Ultraman works he fantastically scored, including Ultraman Nexus and Ultraman Zero: The Movie Nathan Furst is the com...

As a kid, one of my favorite childhood educational books was DK Publishing's "Future" , with many of its predictions focused on a specific year: 2020. It was quite a long wait, but we're here in The Future and it's time to see what the writers got right and what they didn't! This was a pretty cool research project, and my early interest in technology was a huge part of what propelled me to get into digital art and eventually VFX! The full post is up as a guest post on my family's blog, Zoom Times ; please check it out !

Here it is! I'm really thankful to my siblings Klenda, Zorg and Leena for all the acting, improv-ing, re-voicing and consulting; each of them brought new things to the table that vastly improved the script and execution thereof. This has propelled my abilities incredibly far even through the span of the movie's production, and it's marked my first time working with several features and tactics, including inverse kinematics, luma-based sky replacement, (successful) in-Blender 3D tracking and more! I also decided to push myself as a filmmaker rather than solely as a VFX artist, especially concerning editing and screenwriting; while I wasn't going for film- level masterpiece (which, to borrow from a college-related book, would probably work about as well as attempting Flight of the Bumblebee after learning my first chords), I decided to go a bit more advanced with story structure, theme and motif this time as a step forward. Hope you like it!  Not sure if I'll keep...

2020 isn't the year of the impossible, just the basically unthinkable--like ABYDOS II getting released! Seriously, though, I'm pleased to announce that ABYDOS: Incursion will land on Friday, October 23rd, 2020!  Thanks to a lot of help and support from Klenda , Zorg and Leena , I have the final file rendered, backed up just in case and ready to launch! I'm looking forward to the release! Ignore the lights.

 Okay, let's hop right to it! I'll straight-up admit that I don't recall the details on this class as well as I do some others, so apologies in advance for a bit of vagueness ahead. My first assignment was to build a diagram; I decided to go with a more detailed version of the web server explanation I'd made earlier. There was quite a bit of copy-pasting here, but it does feel more straightforward than my previous attempt.       I developed this logo for Turbulence, the universe in which ABYDOS and its sequel take place. I decided to go for a reasonably straightforward approach--the letter T and (turbulent) wind. The drop shadow and other elements may be dated, but it's also designed to work in more minimalistic forms. My college project for this concerned sticking a logo on presets for business papers, calling cards, and so on.  Finally, my next assignment was perspective-based; I discovered quite a few interesting tools by this point, so I decided to take the ...

This is also what's known as the Obligatory Computer Post. Okay, so this isn't actually a obligatory for this blog, as I've posted this kind of thing before . More than once . Like, really, is this a pattern ? In any case, though, one more probably won't hurt. First of all: I've gotten a major hardware overhaul! As part of a joint birthday present, the redoubtable Bill (yup--the same Mr. Bill who built my previous computer ) has given me another upgrade, with a much faster CPU, vastly increased storage space and several other bells and whistles! This is excellent news, and given that this post is also called the Obligatory Computer Post, you may be wondering why it's all good news instead of being about something breaking.  Well. From what Bill and I could tell, the motherboard stopped sending or receiving any information some time in, and since all the computer's other parts plug into the motherboard, that meant the computer could power on and wasn't to...

And just like that, I think I've done more BIONICLE posts on this blog than I have on any given college semester. So inspired by a realistic take on the Master of Ice that my sisters Klenda and Leena made, I decided to recreate Kopaka's 2015 weapon in Blender; my main goal here was balancing a faithfulness to the toy's aesthetic with a naturalistic practicality--in short, what would the spear look like if it could be used as a practical weapon? I'd made this some time back, but decided to post it in time for BIONICLE's unofficial fandom celebration day, August 10th.  Here are the original weapon and my recreation side by side: The creation process started with the spearhead, building the model from Internet-derived reference pictures before manually moving the model's vertices to better match the set (shout out to my main reference for this, an obscure 2003 video showcasing the same piece). For the daggerlike object below it, however (which I interpret...

When we last checked up on my college work , I'd submitted my final project for a graphic design class, a poster on the only-more-relevant issue of police brutality. With that said, a lot of my later work hasn't really been discussed here, and while some of that's because my junior year focused more on fine art than digital art, I still have a number of digital-related classes I haven't gotten to, among them a program I've only touched on once before on the blog! I found myself going back to the layout-focused InDesign . One of the more fun tools here was the Feather Gradient, which enables one to seamlessly overlay two images (one can technically do the same thing with Photoshop by copy/pasting a black-and-white gradient as a mask for one layer, but the Feather Gradient was definitely a more convenient alternative).  For my first project, I was required to make a flier for a dance party of our choice; while my knowledge of InDesign was certainly put to the tes...

So a little while back , I tried out Blender's Node Editor for the first time, and I realized I was able to composite footage of myself onto an image of the same shot's background (which, as it turns out, would be the same base technique at the heart of the superhuman leaping/falling distances in Clash of the Jedi and ABYDOS ). I decided to try it out using the Keying node, and while it looked pretty cool, it wasn't quite what I had in mind… So, over half a decade later (during my hiatus from the blog in 2019, in fact), I realized I could probably do a better job by now, so I decided to redo the same test. No problem: just fire up After Effects, drop Keylight onto the footage and throw on an adjustment layer to color correct the remaining yellow-green tint… but then I realized an issue. I didn't even have After Effects in 2013; of course I'd be able to do a better job in a more compositing-oriented program! Instead, I decided to go back to Blender. First o...

I'm pleased to announce... well, the title gave it away, but I may as well note that I've finished effects work on ABYDOS II, also known as “ABYDOS: Incursion!” Barring finalized credit text, both the Blender and After Effects sides of the project are now done, so everything else that's left are a good chunk of the sound work (including a custom soundtrack!) and the final editing! It's been a little over half a year since my last Incursion (or anything else)-related post, so it feels fair to mention what's been happening during my personal life through that time. First of all, I've graduated college and have just held my commencement! That was an amazing ride and quite a helpful one, with a film appreciation class giving me a more solid understanding of editing in particular. Secondly, I've been taking on a couple of freelance jobs while looking into entrepreneuring and full-time employment options; while these haven't been directly applicable to AB...