OutPost

Concept sketch for a friend's post-apocalyptic zombie story:

More Artwork

I'm trying to practice doing more environment designs. This began as just some doodling in Painter, but I kind of like the moodiness of it. The buildings ended up reminding me a bit of certain parts of the game Riven--which I used to love to play, so i guess its resurfacing here some how. Anyhow, it wasn't intentional.



Welcome to Turnip Town!

Corel Painter X

I've been a fan of Painter for awhile now. I bought Painter 8 for a freelance job almost five years ago (my first job actually...an ill fated affair to say the least), and I haven't felt the need to keep it particularly up to date. It served a lot of needs for drawing and painting digitally. But I just this evening broke down and upgraded to version ten, and I gotta say, most of the improvements are subtle, but noticeable. Brushes seem a bit more fluid. I'm impressed. Painter, to me, always seemed just a bit more direct than Photoshop, when it comes to using the program to draw. Of course, this is only natural. Photoshop wasn't really intended for painting. And this only solidifies my impression. So, here without any further adieu is some art by EEK using Painter X:

A Little More Soft Body Dynamics

So, the next episode of Brine, involves a fire breathing dragon, with wings. I'm working on creating a fluid dynamics animation for a different part, and that was the previous post, but this here is a test of linkages for the wings on our creature. Interesting, no?

Soft Body Dynamics

I am trying to learn how soft body dynamics work in 3D apps, and I'm using Blender to do it. Blender is a free, open source animation program that can be downloaded from the web, and there are a bunch of Wikibooks out there for tutorials. I'm hoping to incorporate some of this into the next episode of BRINE, and so far, I have a convincing liquid going, although its still not quite right viscosity-wise. (The following video, I should mention, took almost 2 days to render on a hyperthreading Pentium 4 proc. Next time, I'm using the damn G5).

Coming Up

I want to use this blog to keep people updated on the projects we're undertaking, get feedback on some of our unfinished stuff and overall show off our stuff. I tried some of this on YouTube earlier, but I think YouTube tends to be a lot of over-inflated waffle, and this is more of a direct approach. The Brine Series had to take a bit of a hiatus--writer's block, getting married and mastering some software all had to fall into place first, but I think that will resume very shortly, and I actually have some test animation to post in relation to that, that will go up probably in the next day or two. I think this could be really cool as a way to do this, if we can actually attract viewers, which is harder than you might think. Promotional ideas, anyone? I was thinking maybe Brine logos on some cafe press shirts or something.

Brine #2: A Boy & His Trilobite

This was the second episode in our series. It's substantially longer, more ambitious and contains some really good voice acting. Again, EEK's still learning to use the programs here, but overall it came out pretty well. The next episode is currently in the works, but will be a bit longer to produce because of some of its scope. (Aspirations of a third dimension on that one).

Brine: #1 A Dark and Stormy Knight

This was our first attempt at an animated series using Apple Final Cut Studio (mostly Motion and FCP) and a program called Anime Studio Pro. It's a bit rough around the edges but I think for home grown animation it has a certain style that's lacking from a lot of web animation you see out there. 

Inaugural Post

This is a post just to test if everything is working.