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Friday July 25, 2008
Hola! We're back again with more fun and hopefully fascinating stuff. The topic for tonight is comics in honor of the massive Comic-Con International in San Diego this weekend. I'm going to focus on some of my favorite titles that have been reprinted as trade paperbacks and are available at your local book shop. The first stop on our tour is the year 1986 when Frank Miller wrote and illustrated his remarkable graphic novel Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. The Batman of TDKR is an alternate future version of the familiar hero. The book succeeds at both celebrating and reinventing the superhero genre, by returning Batman to his origins as a tough, brooding, dark character. The next book to peruse on our virtual tour is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill. This series was notable for the inclusion of several notable fictitious figures from the era. The ill-fated 2003 film proved to be a dud that failed to capture the steampunk vibe of the book. The last recommended read for the evening is Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. The original series was written by Gaiman and drawn by several different artists and is now recognized as one of the high points for illustrated fiction. Gaiman's work on Sandman was a departure from the norm and helped boost DC's fledgling Vertigo imprint. These days I don't buy individual comics anymore but wait for the reprints in book form. Give them a try and see if your eyes and your mind don't open a bit for it.
The picture of the week was created using Project Dogwaffle.
Click on the image for a full-sized view
The loops of the week are some stylish rhythm synth parts.
The PC game of the week was Future Pinball once again. Thank goodness this game doesn't eat quarters like the classic pinball games it is based on.
Send your comments and feedback and I’ll read it all and respond to some of it.
Bye for now!
Friday July 18, 2008
Good evening and welcome back! It another humid Friday night here and the topic of the moment is web design. This week I took a bit of time to revisit NVU and complete the rewrite of my web page. NVU is a very nice open-source, WYSIWYG HTML editor. It's suitable for beginning to advanced web designers and I gave it lots of bonus points for being user friendly and easy. Those qualities made it possible for me to devote time to creating appealing graphics and to think more about the design rather than wrestling with the raw HTML tags. I went for a rather spartan, no-frills design this time out with a few visual accents. Special care was taken with regard to colors, to make the text more legible and to give each section a unified look. If you're looking to put together a web page quickly, I can recommend NVU without hesitation. You can check out my newly revised page from the links over on the right hand side of this blog or by clicking above. What I'd like to do next is to further refine my page using CSS and PHP. Stay tuned for more updates and changes as I grow and try to grow my web presence with me.
The picture of the week was created using Project Dogwaffle.
Click on the image for a full-sized view
The loops of the week are some systematic bass parts.
The PC game of the week was Future Pinball again.
Send your comments and feedback and I’ll read it all and respond to some of it.
Bye for now!
Friday July 11, 2008
Welcome and a most jolly July to all! It's Friday once more and the topic is text as a visual art. A very early example of combining text and graphics into a single artistic statement is the art of illuminated manuscripts. The handwritten letters were embellished with beautiful patterns and decorations that blended illustration with calligraphy. Concrete Poetry is a form in which the placement of the words on the printed page is used to convey and accentuate the poetic content. Concrete poetry evolved into (and overlaps) a form known as Visual Poetry in which the text may form an image, further reinforcing the intent. A modern web-page is an example of how content and style interact and combine. The idea is to emphasize the words by selecting their placement, font, size/weight, color and other attributes. The good news for those wanting to create their own visual/concrete poetic masterpiece is that it takes little more than a PC and a decent word processing or publishing program. Try composing an ode to nature in the shape of a tree or a minimalist sonnet that forms a neat triangle or square of text.
The picture of the week was created using Project Dogwaffle.
Click on the image for a full-sized view
The loops of the week are a set of drum/percussion parts.
Send your comments and feedback and I’ll read it all and respond to some of it. Bye for now!
Friday July 4, 2008
Greeting and Happy Independence Day! It's a hot summer evening and I'm back with more stuff of interest to computer geeks and artists of all types. The topic for tonight is music and I'm going to discuss recording and using your own simple samples. For this exercise I used a cheap headset microphone, a small plastic soda bottle and the excellent Audacity open-source sound editing program. If you're trying this on your own PC make sure the mic is plugged into your PCs sound card before you begin. I started up Audacity, got the mic positioned and pressed the “record” button from the row of icons near the top. To make the a sound to record I simply blew over the mouth of the bottle to make a nice hollow note. Press the stop button to end the recording and you've got a raw sound file. I was able to trim the sample, tune and adjust the pitch and save it as a WAV file within Audacity. I repeated the process a couple more time with varying amounts of water added to the bottle to produce a higher pitched note. Once I had 3 samples, I was able to import the WAV files into the Orion sampler. The sampler will automatically detect and map your samples to a range of notes. Finally, we're ready to play the samples as an instrument either with a MIDI controller or through step-editing. It's fairly easy, and very fun and you can get some unique and highly usable sounds from this technique. If you haven't done it yet, give it a try.
The picture of the week was created using Bryce.
Click on the image for a full-sized view
The loops of the week were created from the previously mentioned bottle samples.
The book of the week was “3D Toons” by Steve and Raf Anzovin. It isn't a detailed guide to creating toons but it has some excellent and varied examples from different artists. This book was also my bargain of the week, cause I got it at the local 99 Cents Only Store for the princely sum of $0.99!
Send your comments and feedback and I’ll read it all and respond to some of it.
Bye for now!
Friday June 27, 2008
Hello Again! It's another lovely warm summer night here in the old gray cat's loft, and I'm here with more stuff to share. The topic for this session is Graphics and the focus will be on a very useful 3D technique. I've been working on a project in Anim8or that required some facial animation. I decided to make use of morph targets to move the characters mouth, eyelids and eyebrows in a convincing manner. To use morph targets you define the start and ending positions for the points (vertexes) of a 3D object. The rendering software can then fill in the intermediate in-between positions, creating a smooth animated sequence. It's just the thing for lip-syncing recorded speech to an animated mouth. One of the drawbacks to this technique is that it becomes unwieldy when dealing with more than a few points. A partial solution is to define your object as a subdivision or spline surface, reducing the number of points to translate. Try it for yourself the next time you need add a bit of expression to your animation.
The picture of the week was created using Anim8or.
Click on the image for a full-sized view
The loops of the week are a set of synthesized samples.
The PC game of the week was Travian once more. I've been recruited into an alliance and now stand a significantly better chance of survival.
The Movie/DVD of the week was “Hellboy”
The diversion of the week was Sudoku.
Send your comments and feedback and I’ll read it all and respond to some of it.
Bye for now!
Friday June 20, 2008
Greetings! We're on the verge of summer and the topic for this hot evening is games. I'm going to focus on a couple of free/open source clones of classic turn-based strategy games. I'll start the session with FreeCiv, a very faithful reproduction of Sid Meier's classic Civilization II. I like the tough AI, wide range of options and depth in FreeCiv. I don't like the long time it takes to play but that's common of most good 4X strategy games. The graphics are clear, but 2D and a bit understated. You really don't need 3D gob-smacking graphics to enjoy Freeciv, just a good brain and lots of time and patience. The other freebie find of the week is Empire Allegro Advance; A Windows clone of the popular Game Boy Advance title Advance Wars. I like the cartoony graphics, the low system requirements, and the fact that it comes with a map editor and source code. I don't like the slightly cheesy vibe of the project and the fact that it is too easy to beat the computer opponents. I'll have more of my favorites on display here in later posts. In the meantime, give them a try and have some fun!
The picture of the week was created using Project Dogwaffle.
Click on the image for a full-sized view
The loops of the week are some more beat-sliced drum loops.
The PC game of the week is still Future Pinball. My favorite table is the recreation of Bally's Wizard from 1975. The last electro-mechanical tables from the mid 70s were the best IMHO.
The movie/DVD of the moment is “Juno”.
Send your comments and feedback and I’ll read it all and respond to some of it.
Bye for now!
Friday June 13, 2008
Hello and Happy Friday the 13th! Tonight's timely topic is music and I've an interesting technique to share. In past blog entries I've described the use of looping in music to create pieces from short instrument or synthesized samples. Beat slicing is a related electronic music technique, in which a loop or sample is divided into separate beats, usually some even increment such as 1/16. Each subdivision can now be played independently of the other so that you can now play the entire phrase at a different tempo with little of the distortion associated with time stretching. You can also reorder the segments (slices) to get a completely different musical loop. Beat slicing is most often used on drum patterns, but you can also use other instruments or vocal loops for different effects. The first and most famous beat slicing tool is ReCycle, but you can use a number of different music applications and plug-ins to get the job done. My advice to the uninitiated is, as always, to try it and see if you like it.
The picture of the week was created using Bryce
Click on the image for a full-sized view
The loops of the week are some beat-sliced drum loops.
The PC game of the week is Future Pinball. Future Pinball is a both a detailed emulation of a real pinball table and a flexible construction set. The coolest thing is that it's a free program. The 2nd coolest thing is that there are a lot of user-designed recreations of classic tables available for download.
The book of the moment is The Art of Computer Programming volume 1 by Donald Knuth.
Send your comments and feedback and I’ll read it all and respond to some of it.
Bye for now!
