I get to set things on fire for my job

I need to figure out how to spray fire at things. Anyone got any good online resources?

I'll make another ACTUAL post next week about how things are going (I've been pretty darn busy) next week when I finally have some time off!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMajO0VctD4



I got back at midnight and my brain wanted to try a quick animation test :I

random pictures + amateur food porn

life's been busy, yadda yadda, have some random pictures.


Candy Calzone: First attempt









You could really only eat little bits of it at a time because it was so freakin' rich.



fusion short ribs with jalapenos



baked chicken with ramen (and bacon)






not food porn. They did have fried dough at the Franklin County Fair in Greenfield though!










I love the concerned looking crowd behind the bike







I'll admit that last one was pretty creepy

Dr. Sketchy's Northampton

Aww yiss.


Awesome time last night at Dr. Sketchy's anti-art school in Northampton!

I should mention that I got FIRST PLACE (YEAHHHHHH) in the "best sketch of the night" with this one (selected by the lovely models, of course):




I definitely have room for improvement, but this isn't bad for a 10 minute drawing in the dark :3

Other drawings:




















And yeah, I won this awesome poster (drawn by Carly Monardo, Kate Beaton, and Meredith Gran)



Awesome night. I even got to hang out with the models afterwards! Definitely going back to the next one :D





And some random shots of Rhode Island last saturday before the hurricane. The waves were maybe 10 feet fall before the storm hit




PART OF YOUR WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRLLLLLLLDDDDDDDDDDD



[fwooosh]

Lack of updates, ARCELIA NOW LIVE!

Whew!

Again, sorry for the lack of updates. I've been busy trying to do TOFA reviews, wrap up production on games, make new games, attempt to coordinate a vfx team, life, etc.


guh. being an adult is HARD.

Anyways, BIG NEWS!

The game I worked on is now LIVE!



heck yeah! It's THE SECRET OF ARCELIA ISLAND!
(it's a hidden object game. Think Mist)



http://www.bigfishgames.com/download-games/13956/the-secrets-of-arcelia-island/index.html

I dunno, I spent the past 8 months animating effects for this thing. I think it looks pretty snazzy, and the artists I worked with are godly amazing at painting (and the programmers and designers do magical stuff that's amazing)

So yeah, try the demo! see my animations! I'm proud of it! :D

A TRUE AMERICAN

I spent July 4th eating sushi and drawing the french chef.




yeah yeah it's pretty bad, I know. I'm teaching myself to draw again. Also yeah, it's Julia CHILD :|

TOFA round 1 entries

http://tofa.munchymedia.com/round1.html

and you can read my official-critique-judge-walls-of-text here: http://tofa.munchymedia.com/round1-reviews.html

Blunderland Studios (i.e. my new bedroom)

dirty laundry never looked so cool B]

As far as the squiggly blue lines go- I havent' decided what shape I'm going to put that in. I might leave it, I might turn it into the bat signal logo for all I know. I'm currently taking suggestions.

Pixar trolling me from beyond their studio

Go ahead and remind me every day that you're there but I'll never actually be able to use you for anything. Way to go Pixar. Way to remind me that I'll never be special enough to use that format ;____;


....seriously though, I think I saw this back in Photoshop 6 as well and I don't think I've figured out why I would ever use it. Is there something special about the .pxr format?

bitten by the animation bug

So this is the first time in months that I've been really inspired to do something animationy on my own, which is awesome. Unfortunately, that awesomeness is offset by the fact that this is timed to an awful ke$sha song.

☼_☼

I suppose it can't be all bad though. At least this will help keep me (sort of) sharp, as far as character animation goes

After I figure out how to lengthen this to 16 seconds of dancing I'll neaten up this rough pass

Also, anyone who actually knows how to dance (unlike myself) is free to give suggestions

An actual post!

Wow, I haven't written an actual post in a while!

I have a good excuse! Actually, a couple good excuses. Okay, maybe one good excuse and one lame excuse.

Work is ramping up at Hitpoint. My job description says "animator" but the past couple of weeks I've been a programmer (I do suck at programming.) and now I'm getting into game design. A few weeks ago I was asked to come up with some mockups for a football game (WITH A TWIST!). I'll see if I can get permission to post those up here.

One of the cons of getting to work from home is that I pretty much am working all the time. For working at a game studio, I really don't have that much time to play games (besides the odd play-testing every once in a while, but even then I'm a bit busy for that).

So yeah, time is an issue. I haven't actually drawn for myself in a while. Not to say that this is bad because I really like my work, but my own personal work has taken a backseat to what I do for the studio (on the plus side, it almost sounds like I know a thing or two about game design. I blame reading internet blogs)



Okay, so that was the actual excuse. The lame excuse is that I've lost my ability to draw in what used to be my own style.

The thing about my "style" is that, like acting, I need to be able to FEEL what I'm drawing. Each line I drew had a certain quality of energy to it because I felt that energy as I drew it. Unfortunately, due to certain events in my life (I'll leave it at "no word in the English language does justice to how vile this person is"), I've completely lost that energy. It's kind of weird, actually.

Exactly one year ago, the defining quality I'd say that described me would be "Dreamer."
Today, I have no idea what that quality would be. Doesn't mean I still can't push myself really hard to make good work, I know I'm just lacking the same energy as before, like I'm stuck in reality. Maybe it's part of growing up.





Wait a minute, does this mean I'm old?

Gun Bros

http://apps.facebook.com/gun-bros/

You should totally play this game because the studio I work for maintains this on Facebook B]

(also it's fun! None of that farmville crap!)

Mighty Dog Adventures - now online!

Hey so I did the character animation for this game

http://www.mightydogadventures.com/

animating dogs is hard :P

Zoo photos

Roger Williams Zoo, 18 March 2011. A huge thanks to Christine, Audrey, and Katie for coming out there with me!

the zoo.

I went to the zoo today

more pics/sketches coming up soon!

this is a legitimate way to design a roller coaster.

Okay so I took the rough track design I had for the THEM! coaster I sketched and tried to (sort of) re-create it using Roller Coaster Tycoon.

So I'm already hitting some design problems. I'm not quite sure of what the acceptable number of lateral Gs is, but as far as vertical Gs go, I'm pretty sure astronauts take 4 Gs during liftoff and I'm skirting dangerously close to that number.

The lateral Gs mostly come into play in the turns right after the first drop and are a bit more intense than I thought they'd be. The whole idea of the first drop was that, at the end of the lift hill a giant ant animatronic would come out and "attack" the cart, causing the driver to slam the gas pedal to the floor and kind of careening off into a dark passage.

Then the "convoy" falls out of the incomplete onramp in an "oh shi--" sort of moment and you plummet into the ant hive, where you kind of careen about avoiding more giant ants

The problem here is that the first drop works great (like I expected it to), but then it builds up a lot of speed. The ant hive bit is supposed to have a lot of tight turns to kind of add that frantic feeling that you're in a really bad place.

-BUT-

Tight turns with high speeds means high G-forces. From a story perspective, the ant colony HAS to come right after "Here we are heading to the rescue oh crap" bit, but from a design perspective, it might be a little too intense.

the RCT way of doing things would mean that I just add brakes to the bottom of the first hill, but if this thing were to actually be made, that would make no sense at all. So it might be that the underground ant hive I originally envisioned will have to be indoor and above ground in a kind of sound stage, which means I'll have to re-think the opening "oh here we are going to the rescue oh crap" bit.


I think otherwise, this just looks sloppy, now that I see it laid out.



...wait a minute I just used a video game to be productive WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME


oh also it's my birthday today! Woo!

Unwarranted Feedback

Being that I am the "critique judge" (i.e. I am going to write walls of texts for entrants in an attempt to try and help them improve their skills) for the upcoming Tournament of Flash Artists being hosted on Newgrounds, I started writing some stuff for Adam Witt/Nitwitt, the tournament's manager(?)


http://munchymedia.com/feedback/

The name of the column(?) is "Unwarranted Feedback" because that's what I feel like I'm doing, giving artists unwarranted, completely subjective feedback on how to improve their work. We'll see how things go, but I have a feeling that a lot of these guys are going to be way better than me.

:3

It was then that he got on one knee, looked her in the eye, and said the magic words:






...well, most of them

(LOL REFERENCE HUMOR)

My beef with Flash cs5

I have to say, some of the UI design decisions made for Flash cs5 are pretty frickin' dumb. For example:



In order to work fast, I need fast access to adjusting the tools. Again, I usually work with lines from .5 to 10, so I really do appreciate the ability to go extra fine. And while it's cool that I can make a line 200 px (or whatever their measurement) is thick, I really don't need the slider to go all the way up like that. In fact, if I want to make a line 2 px (or whatever.) thick, it either takes me forever to pinpoint the spot on the slider or I need to type it in, which takes a lot longer than adjusting the slider (especially if I need to constantly transition from holding a stylus to typing).



Oh and by the way, the default way to select colors is by the red value. Yes, you can switch it and it's dandy that you can do that, but it makes no frickin' sense as to why it's on by default (really, can you make any sense of this color picker?)



I can rant and rave about how much this UI is terrible, and yes, some of it can be attributed to me not being used to the layout, but a lot of it is just bad design decisions, as if they're trying to make Flash look like something it's not, which in turn makes my work flow slower

Draw a Dinosaur Day

I just found out that today was draw a dinosaur day
http://drawadinosaurday.com

take a break and paint something, pt. 2

I don't know why I keep on going to the "enter a dark room" shot but I like it

that darned cat

I'm supposed to be animating a dog (._. )

Elliot splash page

Did you know I was writing a crime noir?

Okay it's more like a father/son story set in a crime noir


in a circus.

Anyways, I'm planning on painting "splash pages" for the characters, sort of like movie posters. This is how far I've gotten with the main character, Elliot (definitely not finished yet)

minecraft rocketeer skin

Someone asked me to upload the rocketeer skin I made for minecraft, so here it is!
(you can see how low res it is. Each pixel REALLY has to count)

I need a text trail to follow this character around that goes WOOOOOSH

alternatively, this song: