Popup Movie

Well the tour is complete (for now). I need to add video and animations and of course, fix the shadow on the photographs, which didn't show before rendering.
At this moment, I'm waiting for my movie in AE to render. At this time (6pm on Sunday), it has rendered 446 frames out of 1755 and has taken 4 hours with an estimate of 10 hours and 24 minutes to go. Which means, it should be ready for me in the morning. However, with every frame that it completes, it tacks on another minute to the estimated time left.
I had to to keep fine tuning it, didn't I?

Update: At 4am still only 22 seconds of the 58 done. I put what I had to music and will finish it later.
Luckily all the time I did put in on the assignment paid off. I was able to put another one together in about an hour. This one rendered in 7 minutes.  whewww!

Lesson Review - or Brian-isms
Larger resolution-Longer Render Time
More Lights-Longer Render Time
More Shadows/Specularity-Longer Render Time

Galleria Screenshot

This is the screenshot of my photo gallery using Galleria. It was an easy process for me. I did try something different using CSS3 script. The navbar was a set of boxes the scrolled up/ A nice effect that worked in live view but not in I.E. or Firefox so I didn;t risk loading it. Had trouble with the black area on the right. I switch all widths to 950 px but to no avail. I sleep on it and see if it'll come to me.

3D Coat

This was suppose to be an easy and fun assignment. I bit off more than I could chew. My idea was to have my hippo hanging out of my train (both of which were made in Lightwave.

I ended up learning a bunch. How to prepare the objects for 3D Coat and what not to import without them being  properly made. I did get a cool looking train when imported though I couldn't paint most of it.
Even the hippo had some problems with the face and feet. That's why he's from Bizarro World.
Yes I know they have white skin, but my farmboy hippo has a "farmer's tan".

SLAM Cover

Designing a cover for SLAM
Magazine was another
challenging but enjoyable
assignment for me. I wanted
to do a play on words with
the magazine title,
so I tried two different
designs: one in Photoshop
and one in Lightwave.

Making Custom Brushes

I enjoyed making the two brushes in Illustrator and in Photoshop.The Art brush in Illustrator was a little tricky getting the results that I wanted but the Scatter brush and the PS brushes were pretty straight forward. Plus I'm more familiar with the PS brushes.
The Illustrator design started with the bees brush (and the Art line brush) and ... well one thing just lead to another.

I've been wanting to do an image like the one of the horse in Photoshop. I made the stars, squares and circles brushes and used them to add and subtract from the horse image. I also used some smoke brushes as well as splatter and horse's mane brushes.

Hope you enjoyed them.

Extreme Makeover

This is a video animating the steps used in a glamour airbrushing exercise.
Warning: Not responsible for resulting nightmares.

Using a Tablet in Illustrator

The following is an exercise on using the pressure sensitvity of the pen and tablet to do an illustration. I used Iluustrator, since a program on which I could use more time. Instead of using a sample of different types of brushes, I limited myself to the Astistic Watercolor brushes. I never use that set of brushes and some were pretty straight forward but some had unpredictable results when using different stroke/lines length.

Concept Art

After reading the synopsis to the book, Starphoenix, I needed to create two pieces of concept art with an option to include them in a book cover or movie poster. I decided to incorporate my concept in a book cover.
I enjoyed this challenge. It gave me a purpose to use my newly acquired skills with my old ones in a real life situation.
I created the mushroom shape buildings, the landscape and the space ship in Lightwave as well as the sword. I then brought them all into Photoshop. I manipulated the sword then added the fire. The finishing touch was adding the copy information.

A Vinyl Sign

I got to use a very convenient little program and printeron this project. When I usually make posters or vinyl signs, I print them directly on vinyl using my Epson printer.
I needed to design a three color sign in Illustrator and use a program to cut out each individual color on separate sheets of self-adhesive plastic then reassemble them.
The difficult part was coming up with a useful design. I decided to build it around the slogan, 'Imagine' from the Art of Design Logo. Once that was acheived  it turned to a logical path that plays on the phrase 'Think Outside the Box.'
This a facsimile of the vinyl sign.