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 the crew, 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...