A small gift to the men and women who serve for the cause of our liberties, rights, and freedoms. I also would like to thank all those around the world who fight for these causes, whether you fight for the United States or not. Every human being deserves these blessings in their lives, and today, we remember the price that must sometimes be paid for those blessings.
This painting took about 4 hours to complete. The entire painting was done in Krita.
I focused on the color pallet for this painting. I wanted something a bit abstract, but not so abstract as to distract the viewer of the story being told. I wanted a sad and somber tone to the image, so, I stuck to cool colors. Primarily blue, greens, and grays. Red and white were my highlight colors. Then, I controlled my satruation in specific areas, in order to bring focus to the parts of the painting I wanted the viewer to see first. I feel overall the composition is good, maybe a bit crowded, but still attractive.
My brother and I have been working hard on the Atari Jaguar stuff, and new ideas, art, writting, and code, trickles into each and every project everyday. Flappy Mcfur is the first fruits of our efforts.
Obviously a Flappy Bird clone for the Atari Jaguar, this program really was just a training ground for me in C programming. It was fun getting the basic assets together, and code the various aspects of game. From menus, to score keeping, and movement of Flappy McFur. Speaking of movement, it is very rudementary, and the next version will have movement more akin to Flappy Bird.
The box art and CD art were both put together in Inkscape, with screenshots from the actual game. Currently we are not sure if we will actually be making and selling physical versions of the game, but I though it might be nice to give people who download it, the opportunity to put together something nice for it if they wish.
The Pre-Release trailer was a blast to put together. I wanted something that would build up, and then let the viewer drop, realizing it isn’t anything too amazing. I really like the way the fly around with the console came out. I haven’t used lattices in 3D animation for a long time, and they poved really effective for bending the flowing text around the various contours of the Jaguar console and controller. The footage of gameplay was captured using the Virtual Jagauar emulator, and it plays almost exactly how it does on the actual Jaguar hardware. It’s such a simple game, why wouldn’t it? Also, this video, and the next one, were both completely done in Blender, with 2D assets in the Gimp.
On another small note, Bryce noticed that out YouTube subscription counter, on the JagCorner channel, was almost to 64, and he came up with the idea for a little video to celebrate the 64th subscriber and the 64-bit glory of the Atari Jaguar. Check it out, and subscribe to our channel to keep up with other video content we will be producing in the future.
Another JagCorner video to talk about. We have kind of been all over the place with the kind of YouTube videos we would like to do. We know we will continue to do the BitJag Development Journals, and we are pretty sure we are going to keep doing the JagVirgin episodes as well.
I guess the reason why we are jumping all over the place is because we are trying to counteract all the negative coverage of the Atari Jaguar. Lets just say, this console doesn’t get the highest score on most gamer’s Hi-Score lists, but it’s unfortunate that there is so much negative for a system that has so much positive. I guess one of my personal goals with doing these JagCorner videos is to promote the great things about the system.
Moving on, what I really wanted to talk about was the opening skit for this review video. I am taking these videos as an opportunity to build a portfolio and push my visual effects skills, and I was glad to see that this shows well in this video.
Jacob and Bryce helped me come up with and execute the concept and it came together almost flawlessly. Everything was done in Blender. Modeling, Texturing, Rigging, Animation, Camera Tracking, Compositing, Editing, and Rendering of the entire video included. I love the Blender tool set, and it never seems to fail me.
The hardest part about this video was the camera tracking. There were no purposely place tracking points in the shot, and the one section I had trouble with was when I stepped out of TV Specialists back door and then the camera swings to the left, revealing the Iron Soldier. I had to manually track 20 or so frames to get the camera swing, simply because all the information in the show was too blurred to track. Other than that, the track was fairly easy, with just a few minor slides and jitters in the final result, almost noticeable. At the end of the day, the entire production was 30 man hours. I wanted to spend more time, but we set a goal to have it released by Thanksgiving.
The end card is a bit special. To achieve a more nastalgic feel, I rendered it out at 320×180 (a 16:9 resolution) and then scaled it up to 1920×1080 with no filter. This maintains the jagged edges on the polygons making it still feel like a low resolution, up-scaled to a high resolution.
Overall, the result was almost exactly how we imagined it, and I love it when that happens.
Sorry about no weekly sketch reviews. I have been doing allot of sketching, just haven’t taken the time to put some posts together. Maybe Friday or Saturday perhaps.
Been busy with things, looking to get Josh the Whale released, other video production projects, etc. In my free time though, I have been doing written and visual concept for mine and Bryce’s Jag game. The visual stuff is easy, it’s the writing part that is kicking me in the butt.
I would never confess to having any real skill in writing. I am hoping that these side projects, along with company projects, will give me the practice I need to change that.
So to give you a bit of an introduction to this piece, without diving into undeveloped ideas. This character is one of 6 gods that govern the world and it’s time. She is the very essence of the absence of time. The opposite of existence.
That is the idea that drove this painting, and that is all that I have so far. Maybe I will post more about these characters in future paintings. Yet again, maybe not. This is just a side project, so we will see how far it goes.
My brother Bryce and I are putting together a game for the Atari Jaguar, and I have been working on character design, game assets, and getting a story together for the project.
This piece was spontaneous, coming out a sketch session. It was also very fun to work on. I want to thank my a few of my friends, Ethan, Micheal, and April for the critique. Your help is needed and always appreciated.
One part a really enjoyed was additional programs, on top of the Gimp, to get to the final piece. You will notice that in the video, I just out to Krita and Blender. I used Krita’s mirror functions to come up with a concept for the weapons spinning around the character, and I used Blender to model, place, and light the weapon. I have used similar processes in the past, although this time felt like it was really good decision making on my part. It sped up the overall process of the painting, and I think I achieved a better result than if I had done it all in the Gimp.
There will definitely be more of about this game in the future. I have already put together some turn based battle mock-ups with sprites, and Bryce has been putting some of these assets to use with actual programs on the Jaguar. It’s awesome to see this stuff actually turn into a playable form.
This has been a long one in the making. I guess I shouldn’t put it that way, though. It took only a week or so to actually finish the work. I have just been waiting for the release of the actual short film, to get permission to post about it.
Over the last year and a half, I have had allot of opportunity to work with the Blendercompositor, and it has given me the chance to learn, in detail some of the things needed, to pull off some simple effects. One of these projects was “Spaceman“. A short film by producer Holly Tuckett and writer/director Jaron Kent Hermansen. Their short film required some visual effects work, and they asked Thor Media to step in and do the job. Here is a short breakdown video of a few of the shots that I worked with.
Here are some of the compositing trees. It looks allot more complicated than it actually is. And to put in new backgrounds only takes a few steps.
First thing is to track the footage, whether the camera is moving or not. The camera is always moving, whether its the wind blowing, or the heartbeat of the camera man, the image will always move. Next is keying the green screen, and creating any masks that are needed to maintain what you want out of the original footage. And attaching those masks to the camera tracking data.
After which you build your background and attach it to your camera tracking data, and adjust to make the movement look good. Then comes any color correction, adding other effects like glows or motion blur, adding film grain, and then the final composite.
The hard part is getting the new, digitally created elements to look good with the real stuff, speaking of style and lighting. This takes allot of patience, critique from other people, and just playing around with the options that are at your disposal.
This was especially hard with this project, because most of the visual effects take place in the boy’s dream, and are meant to be exaggerated a bit. But at the same time, I had to get a look that fit with the mood and style of the story, without making it feel like the visual effects were making light of the situation.
Overall it was a very fun project to work on. Jaron and Holly at Flying Hat Productions, are great people to work with, and gave me good feedback and direction on the project. And, also, my brothers Jacob and Bryce gave great feedback and critique. I hope there are similar job like this in the future for Thor Media. Free, fun and creative.
The short film hasn’t had an official release yet, but they have trailers and all sorts of content on the film’s blog. Click on this link, http://spacemanthemovie.blogspot.com/, to learn more about the short film and it’s creators. They did a great job putting it together, and would love to see your support.
