I recently wrote a little post over at Game Informer detailing my thoughts about the recently announced Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game The Elder Scrolls Online which is being developed by ZeniMax, the parent company of Bethesda, the original creators of the The Elder Scrolls series. If this type of thing interests you, click the link.

The beginning stages of my vexel art featuring Lights and "Rita"

Motion graphics, and any art form really, is all about improving your skill set and trying new things. With that in mind, I’m really pushing to improve my vector art skills to help improve my illustrations and animations. I scoured the internet and found many great tutorials and articles, but a few that I found especially helpful were those by Chris Spooner and various tutorials on Vectortuts.

What I’m ultimately hoping for is the ability to get more realistic illustrations, but if all I end up with is a better workflow and a few tricks that I didn’t think about before, then that’s fine with me. Not only will these skills come in handy for my client projects, but they will also help me on a super secret project I’ve been working on that I hope to reveal later this year or early next year.

Here’s to hoping and to pushing yourself further!

* The whole Library of Congress thing isn’t a fact… I just made that up to sound cool, but I’m s

Recently, the LA Times ran an article from a long time VFX worker about these situations and it was met with a lot of criticism and rebuke. Step in Scott Squires, an industry expert and VFX legend with some excellent, real world, no-holds-barred answers to these criticisms.

You need to read this article: “What Happened” by Scott Squires.

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Check them out today and find out why Customercontactapps.com is truly improving customer experience.

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Designer / Animator: John Kostrzewski
Voice Over: Chad Kostrzewski
Music: “Happy Song” by No Game istockpho.to/xuzJaa

The problem was, after working perfectly fine through the Lion update (I’m on a Mac) and years of joyous use, my Wacom Intuos2 tablet suddenly started acting very sluggish. In my case you could still operate it, but each pull across the tablet only moved the mouse cursor across approximately 1/8th of the screen instead of the full width. This made it unusable. When I opened the Preferences, I was greeted with an error message telling me that the driver isn’t working properly and to restart the computer and, if that didn’t work, I was update the driver. I did what was mentioned but I was still given the same error. The key, as I found out from Wacom customer support, was to uninstall the previous driver. Simple and effective.

Here’s all the steps they sent me in an email and how to do them (if you don’t know):

1. Uninstall Old Driver – (on Mac) Open the Applications folder, locate any Tablet or Wacom folders, open Tablet Utility and choose “Remove” under “Tablet Software”.
2. Restart the Computer – Ummm…
3. Repair Disk Permissions – Once your computer restarts, open Disk Utility and click on Repair Disk Permissions.
4. Install New Driver – Once that’s finished, download the latest driver for your system (mine was here).
5. Make sure your tablet is directly connected to your computer (not through a hub) for best results.

That, my friends, solved the issue for me and now I have extended life on my Wacom Intuos2 tablet. I hope this helps you if you are having issues like I had.

The Omega Seamaster Project will incorporate both 3d (the Omega Seamaster watch) and 2 1/2D elements (basically everything else) into a short mock commercial for the watch company. It must go beyond just blending these two elements together, it must seamlessly blend them together. If I’m to truly create something that’s real, it must pass for a real watch.

My initial preparation for this project can be basically summed up into the following five items:

1. The Idea

The idea, as I’ve said, was planted when I realized my 3d modeling skills, though good, were not great. I lacked the knowledge to truly make my models look and feel realistic. While looking around for something I could model, my eyes fell upon my Omega Seamaster and, suddenly, a commercial appeared. Ok, only bits and pieces were thrust into my cortex at any given moment, but it was enough to get my creative juices flowing and onto step two.

2. Storyboarding

From that point I storyboarded a short sequence fleshing out my commercial realizing what programs and equipment I wanted to work with, I had available to me and that I actually needed to use. I became aware of what elements I was going to need in order to create both the watch and the 2 1/2D scene, and I took note of them. I also started feeling out for what style I wanted to take this project in terms of color, tone, etc.

3. Collect Elements

With a list of what I needed, I set off to collect my elements both from the internet (thank you, interwebz!) and from real life as I photographed my watch so I could import the photos into C4D to better help me get the dimensions more accurate.

4. Game Plan

Knowing what I was going to create and having the elements necessary to do so, I had to come up with a game plan–basically, an idea of how i was going to tackle what was ahead of me. It was sort of a production schedule, if you will, of when and how I was going to tackle the project set in front of me.

5. Get to Work

With that, I set myself to work on the project. As I’ve said, I’m doing this in between jobs, but every little bit helps to improve on what you already have. I hope that you join me on my journey of discovery and test yourself in unfamiliar ground as you make your way on the road you set in front of you.

Take care!

GoDaddy, my host, had three WordPress blogs set up, each of them GoDaddy told me were in need of updating. Two of them were connected to two old blogs that I never use anymore (under sub domains) and the third was connected to a different domain address but is being pointed to this website. Now, the only one it could have been would be the last one, but it was version 3.1 and I checked my WordPress blog and it was updated to 3.3.1. Perfectly fine. Delete them all.

Then the horror struck as I couldn’t log in to my website and got the stupid GoDaddy “Something cool will be here” screen when I typed the address in the bar. Oh well, after a quick bout of rage and a couple hours of quick work, the website is almost back up to normal. The only thing really missing at this point are the blog posts for the entire year of 2011 which was when I was at SquareSpace. I had previously downloaded them from SS and uploaded them to the website prior to deletion, but I can’t seem to find them anymore. Lots of good lost info, but hopefully I’ll fill that up soon enough with better info.

That said, the sites under construction. Please be patient.

Thanks.