Just a random, unprocessed frame from the bit I’m rendering right now for the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual trailer. This is from the second scene. Now that I’ve pretty well worked out the timing for the first minute, I’m going in and making the final versions of those shots.

I’m not sure when I’ll be uploading the finished trailer (heck, I’m not sure when it will be finished). I may not want to promote the site until I’m done with the first printed volume, and ready to get to work on Part II. But I have a good and mysterious reason for wanting to get it done early – I’m thinking about incorporating it into something else that needs to be ready before I start on Part II.

Anyway, this is pretty fun. It’s always nice to see what happens when I put a camera in Retropolis to see what’s moving around, and I don’t do that often (enough?) these days.

Update: the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site is now alive (alive, I tell you!) at thrilling-tales.webomator.com

Technorati Tags: thrilling tales of the downright unusual, retropolis, retro future, airship, zeppelin, dirigible, monoral, world of tomorrow

I’m in that last (ish) long haul here, and so I’m quiet; but I’ve got just four more illustrations to go for Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves. One or two are challenging ones, but heck… I’ll take what I can get in the not quite instant gratification area.

I’m actually going slower than I might because I’m splitting my time between these and an animated trailer for the Thrilling Tales web site. It’s weirdly relaxing to switch from working hard on one thing to working equally hard on something different. I can’t explain why that is, but like I said, I’ll take what I can get.

It’s been quite awhile since I dusted off Premiere and put together a piece of video with it (and why do we still call it video?) My old version of Premiere won’t install on my main computer (16 bit installers: gotta love ‘em) and on my second one it looked at the memory available – which was way more than its programmers had believed possible, I guess – and ran screaming into the other room. So I had to remove memory to make it work. Go figure.

But anyway, that’s working, I have some neat period music for the soundtrack from the public domain Prelinger archive, and that, like the story, is slowly coming together. Prrrrrrrrogress!

Update: the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site is now alive (alive, I tell you!) at thrilling-tales.webomator.com

Technorati Tags: thrilling tales of the downright unusual, retropolis, trailer, retro future, vintage, fiuturistic, rockets, the toaster with two brains, trapped in the tower of the brain thieves

Here’s a fantastic 360 degree panoramic view of a vintage power station control room from the Czech Republic. You can zoom way the heck in as you rotate the view. Really nice!

Lots of gauges, displays, switches and whatnot. They just don’t make ‘em like that any more . And here’s the link to the large, large original version.

Thanks to Boing Boing for the link. Now I must model furiously. No, wait, I’m doing something else. Egad!

Technorati Tags: vintage, retro, dieselpunk, steampunk, control panels, gauges, industrial, panorama, gadget, power station, czech republic, eastern europe

Seventy illustrations down, twelve to go!

Doctor Rognvald, like me, is pleased.

I do have one massive exterior set to rebuild for half of those pictures (I’m not happy with the version I made originally) so it’s not what you’d call a slam dunk. But still.

Then there are three remaining inventory images. That’s because – in adventure game style – characters may pick up and carry items around. You get to see a bit of information about those, hence the illustrations of the objects. Add about four or five redos for illustrations I think should be better… some global adjustments for brightness and contrast… and then the art for Part One of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS will be done. Incredible as that may seem. To me, anyhow.

The brightness and contrast adjustments are mainly necessary to sync the web and print versions together – printed art is always a bit dimmer than it seems onscreen – but I’m also fighting the gradual decay of my fine but aging monitor. Every few months I have to check it out and adjust its display. So I’ll make a final pass through all the art at the end to make sure it’s copacetic.

Once the art’s done I can go back to work on the web site. I need to disable or modify one feature that I haven’t used, add another feature that I thought up while working on the illustrations, and implement a couple of things (saving and restoring your place in the story) that I didn’t bother with until I had a story to save and load. Add in some supporting pages, season to taste, fix the couple of problems the site has in the Chrome browser… and there it’ll be.

I’m still hoping to launch the Thrilling Tales site by the end of March. We’ll see.

Update: the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site is now alive (alive, I tell you!) at thrilling-tales.webomator.com

Technorati Tags: thrilling tales of the downright unusual, retropolis, toaster with two brains, interactive story, pulp adventure, retro future, serial, dieselpunk, art, illustration

One of my very first posts here at the Web-O-Blog was about Alexis Van der Hague’s animation Stilt Walkers: an animated short that was rendered with 3D tools in such a way that it recalled the style of traditional paintings. That, and the lyrical style of the piece, impressed the heck out of me. Just lovely.

3D Total is hosting a "Making Of" article for a new image by Van der Hague. Here we see a portrait, within an 18th century landscape, of Papageno from Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

This time around we get not just the final product, which is sensational, but a breakdown of how Van der Hague has used 3D tools (ZBrush, Maya, and Mudbox) to build something that’s beautifully not photorealistic. That’s pretty close to a description of what I try to do. It’s just that the "not photorealistic" styles we’re each aiming for are pretty different.

This article’s a great example of how that can be done. Excellent work!

Technorati Tags: Alexis Van der Hague, papageno the bird catcher, art, illustration, maya, zbrush, mudbox, photoshop, stilt walkers, digital art