Archive

IF: Twist

Published
by
Ben
on July 1, 2007
in FTO xpost and draw
. 0 Comments

twist.gif

This is my first entry into the very cool Illustration Friday contest. I dont really hope to garner any notice from it, but i think that the idea behind IF is to force you to draw. And that is what i did. I drew so many little whorls and loops and ‘twists’ not to mention there are faces, at least one Cthulu, lots of spiders, a panda, a bunny, a cat, a bunch of DNA and many many other micro-sketches.

I did this on my brand-spanink-new Wacom intuos 3, which is pretty badass. I have been the king of the mouse-drive pen-tool in illustrator for years now, and i would never have done a piece like this one without the wacom. it took me a long time, but the i think that the diversity of the shape and width that i got automatically from the wacom really helped make the doodles look nice as a background texture. Had i used the mouse and the pen (or brush even) like i normally used to do all my illustrator work, it would have taken me ten times as long, and looked worse because all the lines would be the same width.

anyhoo, yay! wacom intuos 3!

Can I touch your iPhone?

Published
by
brent
on June 25, 2007
in FTO xpost
. 0 Comments

This is what I'll be saying come Saturday. I don't think I'm buying one (yet). Even if I wanted to, check out these guys. Sheesh. With that kind of competition, why bother. It kills me that I'll be *that guy* asking to play with your new baby, but you should probably expect it for awhile.

I've been a bleeding-edge buyer of a 1st gen Power Mac G4, iPod, 17" PowerBook G4, and MacBook Pro. While they were all insanely great products, I was left insanely jealous when the next rev came out. Given the kind of early-adopters Apple has, the 1st gen products are always just enough to make a splash, but the 2nd gen is when the speed bumps, price drops, capacity increases, bugs get fixes we don't even hear about (see MacBook Pro motherboard revs).

I'm really fine with the speed things change in the computer world. Planned obsolescence is hardly malicious anymore, things can change faster now besides the realities to keeping the marketplace interested. But when it comes to 1st gen iPhone, I'm counting to ten as I sit this one out. :(

iTunes Store “Complete My Album” amnesty expires June 26

Published
by
Brent
on June 15, 2007
in music and rants
. 0 Comments

(Cross-posted from FatLab Music)

An big deadline is approaching for customers of the iTunes Store. This past March, Apple introduced “Complete My Album”, which gives you a credit against albums purchased within 180 days of buying an individual track.

But what about singles you bought long ago? Well, Apple set June 26, 2007 as the date “Complete My Album” expires for tracks purchased before December 28, 2006. (FAQ link)

That’s less than two weeks away, so go to iTunes and see what you can buy and for how much:

(all affiliate proceeds help me feed my dogs)
Apple iTunes

But before you get too excited, there are gobs of exceptions. Hidden in the FAQ is one catch 22 where you can be penalized for, get this, having purchased too many individual tracks. Case in point: I spent $7.92 to buy an album from my youth, Use Your Illusion II by Guns N’ Roses. I bought all eight tracks of the “partial album only” which Apple was offering, so kudos to them for letting me upgrade now to the full album, right? Nope.

The CMA FAQ says:

…if you previously acquired so many single tracks from the same album that the price would be less than the current price of a single song…, you will not be able to purchase the remaining tracks.

Since “Use Your Illusion II” now costs only $6.99, if I had bought less — only 6 of the 8 tracks — I could have upgraded for $1.05. Instead it will now cost me $14.91 total after I repurchase the full album and with it tracks I already own, in a DRM’d low-res format no less. It’s a stoopid policy which punishes individual track purchasing, and worse, it was Apple (or GnR’s label) who restricted me from buying the full album in the first place.

I like the convenience of the iTunes Store and all, but if Apple does enough of this, CDs on Amazon are looking pretty good again.

free time

Published
by
Ben
on May 26, 2007
in development, geeky, reviews and tools of my trade
. 0 Comments

In the slices of time between working on feature films, doing illustrations and other things that provide income, I am also trying to teach myself the ins and outs of game design. Why? well, mostly cuz i enjoy gaming, always have. I started writing simple games way back in 6th grade when i first learned BASIC and Logo, and i have been toying with them ever since. Now i find myself with some free time and all the tools and knowledge to build my own game and no excuse not to. Plus, i think it would be fun, career-wise to move sort of laterally from the development i do in the film industry to a similar role in the gaming/interactive industry.

Since i am a programmer first and a writer and artist second (or tenth, or seventeenth), i am approaching the game design field from the technical end. All of the websites out there that offer advice as to becoming a game developer suggest you write a version of tetris first, then some platformer like mario bros. or a tile-based game like zelda. After that, start to think about your own simple game that may or may not involve the more complicated game structures. This is basically what i did. Being already fairly familiar with real-time interactive systems form my camera-control software, i started with some simple game-engine like applications that werent actually games, but more like exercises in game design. Once i felt confident that i understood the basics (which are, in fact fairly basic) i moved up to a ‘Gauntlet’ style arcade tile based game. using the stuff i had written previously, this was pretty easy to do and in a few weeks of spare time i had covered all the ground i wanted to cover with that. (i never actually finished it, but i built a map-making tool and a map importer, and had some AI bits, and learned a great deal about what works and what doesn’t and why you need things like the A* (a-star) pathfinder algorithm, and what a scene-graph is used for.
The fact of the matter is that, even though i am a programmer, i am really not that interested in re-inventing the wheel and writing my own ground-up game engine. however, i do want to know enough about the parts of a game-engine so that i can expand on the ready-made ones and understand why things do what they do.
So, at this point i was ready to start thinking about my own game. I have some ideas, and i want to start very simple. I think i will start with a 2d tile-based game, arcade style but with RPG elements. Like zelda or gauntlet. I am not trying to bust open the cutting edge of graphic performance or even make a hugely popular game, i am just at the point that i want to build the entire thing from start to finish and have more than just some coding exercises under my belt. So i went in search of some pre-built game engines to build my simple game.

i started at Garage Games. Their stuff is quite nice, especially if you are a coder. You can purchase the entire game engine codebase and modify it to your heart’s content. Their codebase (at least the 3d engine) has a nice client/server design so that it is fairly easy to build collabarative/multiplayer games. They also have a great 2D game builder, which you can also get the code for. However, even if you dont want to code, the 2d builder is quite advanced and you can build some pretty decent arcade style 2d games with little effort and write very little code.

i also looked at the Unity game engine. Since i am a fully Mac work environment, this tool looked really good. And, it is really good. If you like to work in a visual IDE style environment, and dont mind scripting your objects in C# or Javascript, it is a great tool. I downloaded the 30 day trial and gave it a try. One thing i noticed (which is the same with the GG engines above as well) is that the Unity engine is very very dense. this is not a bad thing, but the interface can be daunting. also, it is primarily a 3d engine, and while you can definitely do 2d with it (or mock-2d in any case) the thing that bothered me the most was my inability to alter the source. (mostly to make things like dynamic content generation a bit easier. Not to say it isnt possible with the scripting tools they provide, but i did feel a bit penned in with unity.) That said, unity is a great tool and when i get around to doing some 3d games i will most likely come back to it.

The last tool i looked at is Flash. Flash isnt a game engine per se, but it has all the bits that a game engine really requires (which should be obvious, see as there are so many flash games out there). The downside of flash, is that flash games tend to be, how do i put this?.. shitty. Dont get me wrong, there are lots of fun flash games, but they are jsut that, fun flash games, not fun games. Flash makes it fairly easy to build games, and so everyone does. and as a result most of them are crap. Anyhow, i think that flash can be a good development platform and solves many of the compatibility issues that tend to come up. Plus it is a good skill to have if you are a software consultant-type looking for work. So i have decided to go with flash for the first simple tile-based game i am writing.

pigs, wings

Published
by
Ben
on May 21, 2007
in FTO xpost and draw
. 0 Comments

So, i find myself doing more illustration lately. mostly it has been for application icons. like those little buttons on the toolbar that look like arrows point various different directions, or a little house, or whatever. For those i mostly use Illustrator.

pig doodles
However, recently i have had some people ask for some more sketchy-drawie type stuff. Now, back in the day (way back in the day) i used to be quite a decent illustrator (or cartoonist depending on who you asked) back before the web was king (in high school and college for me) I used to doodle and draw all sorts of things from realistic still-life scenes, to portraits, to silly cartoony bits. Anyone who has done this kind of art (and i suspect other types of creative things as well) knows that the more you do it, the better you get. but the converse is also true, the less you do it the more your pencil muscles atrophy and die.

This is where i was last week when someone offered to pay me some cold hard cash to draw some illustrations for them. I decided to take on the very modest project and work overtime to get my draw muscles back in shape, at least enough to draw a few nice things for my ‘client’. It was kinda frightening really, since i havent done any real pencil-to-paper sketching in a loooonng time. Anyhow, the whole point of this post was supposed to about my creative process when designing a sketch character, but it has turned into more of a history of my drawing skill.. so…

What i meant to write here before i got off on a ramble, was about how i design a new character (or picture, or whatever) i do this with my icons too, tho the process is usually much shorter with them because of the size and simplicity. When i was younger i had all those drawing how-to books where they start with a few circles and ovals and flesh it out into spiderman or some anime character. That is all well and good, my final products bear some resemblance to that method, ie light pencil shapes, darker pencil details, then finally a nice 4B or 5B final hit, then the ink. But how to you get to the final product? The picture here is a few steps in that process for one of the characters i am doing, which was simply a request for ‘a pig with wings’. the bottom pig is near to what the ‘final’ sketch will look like (presuming the client picks that one). I did about a half dozen different shapes and styles, (and even more wing types, astute readers will notice the wings are both slightly different styles) so we will see which one they like.

After they pick one or two they like, i will finalize the sketch, and then move it into illustrator to put the final touches on it and make it a vector art piece.

(note: thie is cross posted on FTO)

welcome to findtheothers.com

Published
by
Brent
on May 19, 2007
in meta
. 0 Comments

Our goal in starting this blog was to get some content going while we looked for a domain name suitable for the grand scheme for world domination we’re cooking up. We spent a long long time bouncing very webby names back and forth, and I can tell you there are very few names not registered. It’s staggering. After actively avoiding duplicating vowels or verbing a noun or ‘r’-ing a verb or bre.ak.ing words into international TLDs, there’s not much left. But we’ve had our eye on this gem for awhile, and when it’s previous owner let it lapse (thank you!), we were ready to snatch it up.

No details yet to tell about what exactly findtheothers is going to be, but we think the things we have been and will be writing about in this blog will feel right at home, with the many “others” we find to chime in and join us.

web = smallify the world

Published
by
Ben
on May 7, 2007
in tools of my trade
. 0 Comments

If i may use the term ’smallify’.

Joey sent me this link: rantsfromgod.com last night. Looks like someone we bought a 5400 from was interested in how we are gonna use it. So here goes:

Well, Rantsfromgod, first, thanks for the camera, we go through those things like tissue paper it seems. You see, Homewrecker provides the technology that powers Industrial Time Lapse’s digital time lapse system. Each setup consists of a digital camera of some flavor, (depending on how long the time lapse event is going for) a digital intervalometer, storage hardware, data transmission hardware, and the technological glue to make it all run together. It turns out that those nikon coolpix camera’s in the 5000 range do a great job for longer-term time lapse jobs (ie one picture every 10 seconds kind of thing, which we usually do for jobs measured in days and weeks instead of hours or minutes). Unfortunately, on any given long term time lapse job, each camera will take 20,000 - 50,000 images over the course of a few weeks, running constantly. It turns out that a consumer level camera, while very well suited (quality and capability wise) are not really designed for that kind of constant abuse. After around 40,000 images on average the ccd starts to give up and you get artifacts in the images. Which is where ebay comes in, since even the most enterprising shutterbug probably wont put more than a few thousand images of use on any given camera, any used cam bought on ebay for under $200 is effectively new as far as we are concerned. (and, given the budgets of a single, long-term time lapse gig, $200 is the equivalent of about 12 hours of equipment rental, and since all the other components of the camera system are not prone to wear and tear nearly as badly, makes a single $200 expense for each camera per job look like peanuts) we tend to keep a handful of them around to swap out at any time, and at $200 a pop, it is almost not worth the time to pay someone to deal with packing them up and sending them back to nikon.
So, Rantsfromgod, while i dont know which camera is yours specifically, (it got tossed into the pile of about 8 or 10 extra ones we currently have) i can assure you that it will live up to it’s full potential, and spend the remainder of its days mounted in some high, remote place, taking shot after shot of some slow-moving event, until it finally cant take any more pictures and has to be retired to the great nikon junk bin in the sky :-)

Nice colors, no?

Published
by
Brent
on May 3, 2007
in geeky
. 0 Comments
   
   
   
   
   
   

Too bad the AACS owns them.

PHP Snippet to convert frames to film timecode

Published
by
Brent
on May 2, 2007
in code snippets, development, geeky, independent film, php and tips
. 0 Comments

Here is a PHP code snippet I wrote that converts frames to an hour:minute:second.frames timecode string, given (I think) any framerate in FPS. I use it to log start times of MPEG clips I join together. With each joined clip, I increment a counter then convert that counter to timecode and log it.

PHP [Show Plain Code]:
function convert_frames_to_timecode($frames, $fps) {

    $sec = floor($frames / $fps);
    if ($sec) $remainder = $frames % $fps;

    $min = floor($sec / 60);
    if ($min) $sec = $sec % 60;

    $hr = floor($min / 60);
    if ($hr) $min = $min % 60;

    $remainder = str_pad($remainder, 2, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT);
    $sec = str_pad($sec, 2, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT);
    $min = str_pad($min, 2, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT);
    $hr = str_pad($hr, 2, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT);

    return "$hr:$min:$sec.$remainder";
}

Input integers for $frames and $fps. Returns a string formatted like “01:23:45.01″. Example:

PHP [Show Plain Code]:
$framecnt = 12345;
$smptelog = "";

$smptelog .= convert_frames_to_timecode($framecnt, 30) . "\n";

Returns "00:06:51.15".

DISCLAIMER: It works for me at 30fps and 60fps, I don’t know about fractional framerates. Test away and comment here with improvements.

A WordPress fix for broken curly quotes in Magpie RSS titles

Published
by
Brent
on April 25, 2007
in development, geeky, meta, tips and tools of my trade
. 1 Comment

Over on my FatLab Music homepage, I list the five most recent blog entries from our blog, Roll Over. WordPress makes this very simple with the wp_rss() function, available on any page in your site by including path_to_blog/wp-includes/rss.php. But I also wanted to parse an iPhoto photocast feed for some Lightbox JS magic. Since wp_rss() only pulls from your local blog, I installed a copy of Magpie RSS, the codebase WordPress uses for wp_rss(), independent of my blog install. In addition, because wp_rss() is actually a wrapper for Magpie RSS, you get a PHP error when Magpie’s rss_fetch.inc attempts to redeclare functions already declared in WordPress’s rss.php on the same page.

So now, I have achieved both my last five Roll Over posts and the Frankie Photocast — loaded (and cached!) by the stand-alone install of Magpie, not by WordPress.

Unfortunately, WordPress does this fancy quotes thing, converting straight quotes (") into curly quotes (“ and ”), among an array of other characters. Magpie RSS completely horked on the non-standard-ASCII quotes and output weird substitutions in their place. I didn’t end up finding the final cause, but I suspect either Magpie just can’t handle the extended character set (doubtful), or there was an encoding mismatch along the way (more likely).

I learned from this article that wptexturize() in wp-includes/formatting.php does the fancy quote translation, and the article goes on to show the line of code to comment out which disables this feature.

Rather than edit the WP codebase (which I see has been updated again) and have to remember which files to repatch with each update, I found the Unfancy Quote Plugin from Semilogic. Download, install, and enable and you’re good! Feeds and everything get passed thru this plugin and fancy quotes are un-curlied back to feed-friendly straight quotes.