William Thorup

Illustrator, Motion Graphics Designer, Animator, and VFX Artist

Category: All

Article | The Music of Final Fantasy

Click HERE to start reading an article I put together as tribute to some of the great music in Final Fantasy.

This article was written for a contest at 1up.com, HERE. Check it out, there are some other really good posts there, definitely worth reading. It’s great to see how many people this music inspires.

When I started writting the article, I knew I would want to do a few illustrations for it as well. Seeing that this blog and portfolio was created to represent my art. Here are a few things that I learned during this process.

I should have set some better goals. I though about the music allot, and what I wanted to talk about, but I sacrificed not setting goals with the illustrations. When I was done with my first draft, I tried to go through the article and think of what scenes or characters would best represent that part of the article. The problem with this thinking was, I had no idea how many illustrations I wanted to do. In turn, I had no idea how long it would take to get them finished, and what style I should do them in.

So I rushed the last couple days, finding out that I do better work when I am rushed, at least. And I ended up settling on two different styles for the illustrations. A vector monochromatic and full color pencil mediums. I won’t post the vector illustrations here, but you can see them on page one, by clicking HERE. Overall I though that they came out good, and do contribute to the article overall.

These three color pencil pieces were done in Gimp, I was surprised at how close I could get it to look like the real medium. I looks like color pencil but enhanced by the pure colors brought by digital.

Overall, the experience was good, and I am planning on doing some other project articles with illustrations in the future. Anyone here like Myst?

Again, enjoy the article, and let me know what you think.

January 15, 2013
Petra Draco | Illustrated Wallpaper

The holidays hit and time was placed elsewhere for about a week. My brother and I have kept busy with “Josh the Whale”, and are making good progress on that front. We are looking at a release date around January 15th. Been having fun modeling, texturing, and animating whales, but I am looking forward to finishing it, and moving on to another project.

Speaking of which. We are working with a talented story teller, Ryan Thatcher, and getting a RPG/Action Adventure game together. We have developed some good ideas for story, and for game play mechanics, and are very excited to get more involved in that project.

But in my free time, I have been looking at other planned projects, both personal and work related, in search of some room to develop concepts or just produce some art for those ideas. That is where this illustration came from. This a project that Thor Media has put on stand still for the moment, but still in the concept stage. I can’t talk too much about the project, since allot of the details aren’t concrete yet, but sharing a little of that development, visually, can’t hurt. Sorry, no video this time around, but If you haven’t taken the time to see some of my other time lapse videos, I encourage you to watch and comment on my YouTube Channel.

December 27, 2012
Blender | “Sample Keyframes” Tutorial

Josh the Whale is still moving along, and while we have been journeying down this path, we are picking up on a few things.

One of these things is how to handle assets between Blender and Shiva 3D, our current game engine. And one particular asset of interest is animation.

When you import animation into Shiva 3D it automatically interpolates the IPO curves as linear. This is a problem because you lose all of your ease-ins and ease-outs. Making any animation you do feel very robotic.

One way you can avoid this is by key framing the nice curves (bezier curves), in Blender, to every frame of your animation. This would obviously be close to impossible to do manually for every frame, but Blender has a very nice option for this. It is an option called “Sample Key frames” under the “Key” menu in the IPO curve editor.

This short video will demonstrate my current method, using this option, to preserve beautiful motion, between Blender and Shiva 3D.

December 17, 2012
Krita | Character Sketch

I have been seeing allot of stuff done in Krita lately. Also, I have been reading allot about over at David Revoy’s blog. And I finally took the time to get into it and learn some things. And my initial impressions are good.

The brush engine is fantastic. It’s fun to just go in and play around with the variety of brushes and different effects.

One of the things I liked the most about Krita was the little sketch pad they have in the “Edit Brush Settings” dialog. With the wide variety of tools, it’s good to have something that you throw a line down on, to see how it will look on your canvas, without having to actually put it on your canvas.

Plus, this is almost a necessity with this program, because this dialog takes up a good portion of the screen, and to go in and out of this dialog would take allot of time if you could only test tools on the canvas. This also feels great for those who work with real mediums, as artists will often test a stroke, color, or tool on a separate scrap piece before painting or drawing on the actual artwork.

Shift+left-mouse-buton dragging for brush size is invaluable, and saves allot of time in the long run. I wish the Gimp had functionality like this. But I understand why it doesn’t. This also reduces the interface.

Another leg-up that Krita has over Gimp is multiple color depths. Most concept artists, or illustrators will never use over 16 bit, but since I get into the film and 3D stuff every once in a while, it’s comforting to know that I will be able to work with 32 bit images on an open source platform. Gimp will be getting this functionality soon enough, but for now Krita is the only user friendly way of handling 32 bit images on the open source platform right now.

The last thing that really stuck out was the right-mouse-button menu. This brings up a color wheel and color history. Also, you can save preset brushes to this menu, making it faster to get to the brushes you will be using often on a given piece of art.

I have only scratched the surface of what this program can do for the concept artist or illustrator. But I see myself using this program, along with the Gimp, to do my illustration work in the future.

November 26, 2012
Josh the Whale | Level Design and Creation

Josh the Whale is moving along nicely. Bryce is figuring out the new engine and we have already put together some proof of concept work. While he’s figuring out how to get this all put together in an application, I am trudging forward, getting other areas of the game designed and finished.

This is a time lapse video of the cave entrance where a few pages if the book will take place. This video is especially long because all the interface movement would be too distracting if I compressed it down to 4 minutes. So, if you don’t want to spend 20 minutes watching this video, watch for about 1 minute and then skip ahead 5 minutes, this will give you a good feel for the whole process.

As you can see, the difference between the concept art and the finished result is dramatic. And I predict that there will be more changes in the future, as we test on different platforms. This is partly because of my lack of planning, but also because plans change as you continue to consider your market and what ideas you wish to express visually within the story.

And there are also limits with polygon count amount other things. I try to avoid thinking that way when doing this kind of work, because even with restrictions you can usually get what you want out of it, if not stubble upon a few good things you wouldn’t have seen without the restrictions.

The processes that I go through to hash out these designs are simple:

Brainstorm and Sketches (What colors, what environments, visual style)

Concept art (Hardest part, because you are trying to develop a visual style and language that best fits the idea)

3D’ize the Ideas (Modeling, Texturing, Rigging, Animating, and other asset creation)

Troubleshooting (testing to make sure that the colors are sending the right visually messages, the main character sticks out enough, etc. Often the longest part of the job)

It’s allot of work, and can be very daunting when you first approach it. But as the artwork comes, the assets get animated, and those assets are placed into an interactive state, it can be very exciting and encouraging.

I will continue posting about this app, since it looks like we are still a good month away from a final product. But I do have other things lined up.

I am currently putting together a personal project video series, that should carry on for a few months. I got a few ideas in mind on things I might be able to contribute from my limited experience. And placing some of that experience into a fun video series will help keep me motivated in my work, and hopefully motivate some of you as well.

November 23, 2012
Sea Fire | Personal Illustration

Another illustration. Inspired by all of the underwater stuff that I have been doing lately. Plus, I have been thinking of these colors quite a bit lately, since it is similar to the color scheme of my website.

For anyone that might be interested in what I use to record my desktop, and how I go about editing. I use a simple bash script with ffmpeg to record. Nothing too fancy. The script records at 24 frames a second into an h.264 codec, keeping the file size small. But whats special about this script is that it records for 7 minutes, saves that file, and then starts recording again to a different file. It names the files acording to the date and time they were created. Here is the script.

while :

do

ffmpeg -f x11grab -r 12 -s 1920x1080 -i :0.0 -vcodec libx264 -vpre lossless_slower -threads 2 -vframes 5000 /media/Wills\ External\ Hardrive/Desktop\ Recording/output_`date +'%Y%m%d_%H%M%S'`.avi

sleep .25

done

The problem with recording to video is that if you are recording for an hour or two, and ffmpeg crashes, you lose that entire recording. And there usually isn’t anyway to recover that data. This is a problem I ran into several times, and it ruined a few paintings because I would just get frustrated from losing all that recorded work. Making a consistent time lapse video impossible.

But, if you record in shorter segments, for example 7 minutes, then you can never lose more than 7 minutes of work. This takes my mind off of worrying about my recording so I can just focus on painting.

Right now the script is setup for Linux, but I believe it can be easily adapted for Windows.

November 10, 2012
Josh the Whale | Character Concept

Thor Media LLC is swinging into full production on their first interactive children’s book app, “Josh the Whale”. Bryce has picked the engine we will be using, Shiva, and is loving it so far. And I am jumping into some character and level design, along with adapting the original story to fit the interactive medium.

Our original client fell through, but, because we were interested in doing an interactive book app, we decided to do our own instead.

The story that we chose is actually something my brother Aaron wrote when he was in the third grade. It is a simple story about a whale learning his worth in the world. We are obviously changing the original version. Polishing it up, and adding some things to give it more depth. But the original story will stay intact, and should fit children from 5 to 8 years old.

The interactive book thing is interesting for a few reasons. One reason is that an interactive book really isn’t much different from a simple game. Our story will have several different game types involved, that will help children with reasoning, and exploration skills.
The other exciting thing about this project is, it will help us adjust to the new engine, and give us the experience to tackle a larger project. Like our up coming game.

I will keep posting about this project in the future, and hopefully some more videos. I am thinking about recording some of my work in Blender, to add to the portfolio, and show how we go about modeling, texturing, and animating our assets.

November 8, 2012
New Website | The Creator’s Cave

The new site is officially functional, for the most part, and I have another piece to post.

I was watching a tutorial video by Feng Zhu School of Design, Here, and I was inspired to get a feel for how I handle the chaos to control thing. I really like these tutorials. He trie to make them as short as he can, without making it ambiguos, and stick to key ideas in his process. He also points out things to focus on during a similar process, and he repeats those points. He’s a good teacher, and I have enjoyed allot of his tutorials, both on YouTube and idrawgirls.com .

We have been waiting for this children’s book application job to come through, so I thought that, before things get busy, I should move my website to my domain and to a WordPress format. I like WordPress, because there is allot more you can do with it when it comes to coding and plugins. Blogspot is nice, but visually and functionally, it feels a bit dated. Plus, I like to be able to ftp right into my site to modify things.

So, if you haven’t already, you will need to change your book mark, or make note of the different address. http://williamthorup.com/ . Right now I am still migrating images from the blogspot blog to this one, so I can’t shut the old blog down yet. But if you still use williamthorup.blogspot.com or www.williamthorup.com, you will automatically be redirected to this site.

Please check out the portfolio. It is much more interactive than my previous one, and easier to look at specific categories.

November 3, 2012
Flowering Vine | Live Wallpaper

Thor Media has just released their latest app. Flowering Vine live wallpaper. This one has be a long time in the making, but it has been worth the effort and time. There truly isn’t anything on the market like this.

Let me give you some of the details.

The big thing that really sets this live wallpaper apart is the random vine generator. The vines are completely random. In fact, the only structure that the vines have is the way the branches grow, and sprout flowers. We decided that we wanted them to do a curling shape, which adds to how attractive it is. An artistic choice. Other than that, the vines are free to roam your device’s screen.

The other huge thing that sets this live wallpaper apart from others of its kind, is the way that the options are set up. The end user can modify just about any aspect of it. All the colors and opacity of the vines, butterflies, and flowers can all be changed. There are a slew of background textures along with the ability to change the background color. Not to mention a vignette option that you can adjust the color and opacity of. There are a few more options that I won’t mention here, because I want you to find out for your self.But because there are so many things that can be manipulated in this wallpaper, we ran into a problem. Live wallpapers are kind of a novelty and people like to look at them, not mess around with a bunch of options. So, me, Bryce, and Eric discussed the possibility of having a theme option. At the top of the options list there is a “Theme” select option, which lists 40 plus predefined themes to choose from. It guarantees a good look. I want to thank Julie, Jacob, Eric and Kathleen, for helping us get those themes together. They really do look great.

In the future, we hope to add the ability to save your own themes to the list, along with a bunch of other options in relation to how the vines look and grow.

We have high hopes for Flowering Vine live wallpaper, and I encourage you, if you have an Android device, to download and try it out. There isn’t a free version this time. But remember, if you don’t like it, for whatever reason, you can get a full refund within 15 minutes of the purchase. Try the full version out for a few minutes then decide, I know you will like it. And don’t forget to rate and review the app in the store, every review/rating makes a huge difference in how our app sells. Thank you!

My involvement included art direction, asset creation, and graphic design. Bryce was our programmer behind this, and he did an amazing job. Check out his site to see what he says about our work.

October 28, 2012
Desert Tower | Concept Art

I am really enjoying this concept art thing. I have been able to produce allot of really effective concept art and it has put me in a mode that lets me draw with ease. I am feeling better about character design and environment design. I am feeling up to the task. And, thank goodness, it is going to be a huge task.I will definitely post some more stuff. Including character designs and fonts.

But a little news on things to come. We are picking up an outside app project, and interactive children s book. I won’t be able to say much more, but I wanted everyone know that blog posts may be a little scarce for the coming month. But again they may not. I might plan ahead a little bit on my posts to fill the famine.

October 25, 2012