Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Stairway to Heaven


Hi,
This weekend I was at a Unity Game Camp in Copenhagen Denmark together with my colleague Chester. We were going to try out the Unity Iphone Engine together with a bunch of other game developers. I had an idea for a game before I went there, and the goal was to finish off an Iphone game within 2 days.

So, it was decided that Joachim Ante (CTO of Unity) was going to program my game idea.
It was an intense 2 day working period with latenight work, but we actually pulled it off and the game became quite fun.


My idea was to make a devil jumping inwards/upwards on clouds, trying to get to heaven. But, since we had to make generated gameplay, he will never get there. Once in a while you get to pick up wings so that you can fly some extra meters. Once you fall you fall down, you get back to an earlier stage and if you are really good and get far, the clouds gets really tiny and far apart. Just a simple small game, but it turned out very fun. So, just a couple of extra tweaks now and some good sounds and the game is ready for Appstore.

-So if you have an Iphone, make sure to look for Stairway to Heaven on Appstore in a few weeks!

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Sharing my Photoshop Brushes

Hi,
I remember a couple of years ago I shared my brush setup on my site. I´ve met a few lately who have asked if I could share them again. So here they are. But this time I though I should write a few lines about why I have these brushes and what I use them for. I´ve also removed all my circled brushes, since those are default for everyone...even though I actually use them the most :) But, apart form them, here´s the brushes I use the most, that matters to me...
So to explain a bit closer:

1. This brush is not made by me, but I really like it, because its a nice way of adding a bit/or a lot of hatches to you image. I recently used this one combined with some filters, for a job, and the brush helped me doing something I thought would have been really difficult in Photoshop.

2. These are some flat brushes that moves accordingly to your first brush direction, it can be helpful when sketching and image so you get better brush strokes and edges. I think that´s very important and you can save time if you plan your strokes.

3. I didn´t make this one, just the behavior of it. But I like this one because it can work as a soft hairy brush, or as glowing lines.

4. Different kind of oily brushes, from opaque and dry ones to wet. Too bad Photoshop doesn´t have the ability to make height map like ArtRage.

5. Different kind of Charcoal brushes. I use these a LOT, they are a good combination with the spherical default brushes, to loosen up an image.

6. Airbrush in photoshop and digital painting programs always have super smooth airbrush. But, in reality airbrush is tiny drops that gives the soft gradient. So I made a brush that was that, tons of small dots. This combined with a soft brush or just this gives a lot more authentic airbrush feeling. It can also be useful when making water particles in the air and such...

7.my splatter brushes :) they can be used for many things, like blood, coffee stains on an image, etc....

8. this brush is very simple but very useful for making tiny shiny dots, like water sparkles far away or sketching shiny stuff quickly. This is the image were I made this brush (see how it helps the scale and sharpness of the image), and I have used it a lot ever since.

9. Just a simple grass brush, but it can be very helpful - as long as you don´t just rely on the brush alone when making grass.

10. Rock brushes, these are very useful to bring textures, when painting, but don´t forget none of these works well straight away, you have to use them with caution and combine it with painting the regular way.

11. My smoke brush. This one works great! But again, it´s easy to abuse it, so it has to be used with other brushes and planned out.
And finally my signature, it´s a nice way to store your signature for when you are done painting. Though I haven´t updated mine since 2006, because I hardly sign my images anymore.

And you can download my brushes here!


Hope someone appreciates them :)
Joa

Monday, October 6, 2008

Tatanka - web update


Hi, I just wanted to write some extra words about my latest update. This was made more than a year ago, for a project from Qvisten Animation. Qvisten is a norwegian based, well known company (in our country atleast), for doing great commersials, videos and short movies with animation. You can check out their Official Tatanka site to see some animated storyboards and read more about the project. I was not involved with this after I did the concepts, and I can also see from the main page of their site that they have modified my sketch of the kid bear, probably they didn't want to go for the bear-suit style....They also added some environments to some of my concepts. Anyway, just thought I would write a few lines about it :)