Some beautiful 3d typography from Budapest – and conveniently letterpress has just been described as a current design trend…
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Archive for January, 2009
January 23rd, 2009
3dsMax Texture Baking and Papervision
3d is really exciting us at the moment. Papervision is great but so far we’ve only used primitive shapes within Papervision to do all our work. Chris, our newest arrival in the Public development pit has been amazing us with his 3dsMax skills and of course prompted us to get up with the play and start exporting from Max into flash.
It’s also prompted me, having no 3dsMax experience but plenty of Papervision experience to start having a play. After many hours at work and home coming up to speed with the basics of modelling, lightning and materials and learning how to texture bake and deal with UV maps I think I’ve got a handle on what this is all about.
Here’s the first test. Nothing amazing but the speakers are fully UVW unwrapped in 3dsMax and the textures are baked on.
Next up will be testing animation exported from 3dsMax and some more detailed modeling.
Click image to open:
January 19th, 2009
Microphone + SoundMixer.computeSpectrum = :(
After much frustration and searching high and low how to use the mega cool computeSpectrum method with Microphone input I’ve found it’s not possible. I actually found that out that this probably wasn’t going to be possible quite early in my search but didn’t want to accept this was the case… how could Adobe deny us the possibilities that this would open up!?
This article on Adobe live docs gave me the official bad news.
The closest I found to someone actually pulling this off was the flashliveaudiocontroller but as far as I can tell you can only run this on your local machine, not deployed across the web. Still, it’s kinda cool playing pong using your voice.
January 16th, 2009
Tilt-Shift and Lomography Photoshop actions
Tilt-Shift photography and Lomography have for years had their own obsessive enthusiasts, but both have enjoyed a recent surge into the relative mainstream; Lomography over the course of the past few years and Tilt-Shift photography over the past few months. Both essentially represent a conscious regression in photograph quality at odds with rocketing mega pixel values in contemporary digital SLRs, in favour of more a more fun and stylised photographic approach.
Lomography, best illustrated at the Lomo fan website lomography.com, uses cameras based on very cheap Russian cameras from the 80’s to produce over-saturated colours, off-kilter exposure and out of focus shots. Lomo cameras will set you back at least £40 however, so I developed an action for Photoshop CS3 and above which will mimic the style of the Holga Lomo camera which you can grab from here. The above photo is an example of the kind of effect you can get from using the action, and for further excellent actual Lomo photos visit this Flickr photostream (it’s not mine.).
Tilt-Shift Photography has been around since the 1970s but until recently was primarily used in architectural photography to control perspective, and in landscape photography to get an entire scene sharp. Recently however it has experienced a resurgence among photographers due to its ability to make a normal photo or video look like a miniature model. The cost of a tilt-shift lens is wildly prohibitive for most though, and people have taken to faking tilt-shift photos, see this Flickr group for some fairly good examples. I put together a Photoshop action to imitate the Tilt-Shift style which you can get here (CS3+ only), it works best on landscape orientated images between 600-2000 px, any bigger and you’ll probably have to crop it slightly; you can see the result of the action in the photo above. Also check out some great Tilt-Shift videos here and here.
Ps. for instructions on how to install and use a Photoshop action go here.
January 14th, 2009
The Beginning
Welcome to the Public Lab!
This is a new innovation for us, something that we have been meaning to do for a long time. For too long we have sat in the shadows taking advantage of the amazing talent of the many people and companies our there on the web who share their expertise and their time inspiring us and becoming involved with the new media community.
We would like to have a voice our there too, we would like to contribute, become involved, share what we learn and find useful and maybe even inspire some of you.
Our hope is that this lab will be our playground, the place where we being the ideas in our heads to reality and where we experiment with new technology available to us. But most of all we hope it is where we get feedback from people like you!