skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Friday August 8, 2008
Hello Again and TGIF on this lovely and hopefully lucky 8/8/8. The topic for tonight is graphics and the focus is on tutorials for my favorite free/open-source applications. First off there is a very comprehensive set of lessons on using the POV-Ray 3D/Ray-tracing program at the Online POV-Ray Tutorial page. Users of Project Dogwaffle and the various descendants and variations thereof can try a wide range of tutorials that cover the gamut from starting out to mastery. The last of my suggested sites for the week is a very cool selection of tutorials on Jonatan Bijls' Anim8or site. Jonatan has included lots of links to other Anim8or tutorials in addition to his own. No matter what your skill level is, it's good to learn something new, and these tutorials will give you a lot of info for just a small investment of time and effort. Give them a try and send me a comment if you have any other free graphics tutorials or applications to plug.
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 simple piano loops.
The PC game of the week was Unreal Tournament 3.
The DVD/Movie of the week was Batman: Mask of the Phantasm.
Send your comments and feedback and I’ll read it all and respond to some of it.
Bye for now!
Friday August 1, 2008
Greetings! It's another warm Friday night and I'm back with more stuff to share. The topic for tonight is music and the focus will be on squeezing the best string sounds you can out of your sequencer or studio software. My choice of instruments and samples has customarily been limited by budget constraints, though a lack of bucks shouldn't be too much of an impediment to the resourceful computer musician. I generally start by using a good GM string patch. These won't convince anyone that they're real strings, but they're good enough to add a bit of character to a piece. More lifelike results can be obtained from a sampler and a few choice orchestral string samples. You can find some good quality samples in soundfont format at homemusician.net. Samples can be very convincing when applied with a bit of subtlety and a touch of effects. The remaining option for producing string sounds in your music tracks is to use either a specialized or generalized synthesizer. Big Tick software makes Cheese Machine, A good free VST string synthesizer. These strings will definitely sound artificial, but they have a certain charm of their own and are sometimes just what your composition needs to fill in the empty spaces. Try all three methods either singly or in combination and see what some string sounds can add to your music.
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 airy string parts.
The PC game of the week was Roller Coaster Tycoon 3.
Speakling of Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, some twisted types have used the game to orchestrate the most diabolical crashes imaginable and have posted the results on YouTube. (There's more here)
Send your comments and feedback and I’ll read it all and respond to some of it.
Bye for now!
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!
