Victoria Nece

Peeling Gold Leaf Effect

Thursday, 03. 4. 2010  –  Category: Graphics

So I’ve been experimenting with BCC Reptilian. It’s normally used to make lizard skin-style textures, but I discovered some other interesting things to do with it, and this was the most realistic effect I managed:

It’s a nice look if you need to create some peeling gilded text on the base of an old statue. It’s also great for a faux antique gravestone or building ruin. And the type is still fully editable so, I dunno, evil posessed statues can come to life and write things? Some archaeologist could unearth something demonic? Okay, I admit it. I actually have utterly no idea what to use this for, but it’s pretty cool looking so I thought I’d post it anyway. And all you have to do is change the typeface and it looks like an artifact from a completely different era, so it might actually have some practical application after all.

The basic setup is a mix of BCC Reptilian, Fractal Noise, Bevel Alpha, two instances of Roughen Edges and a lot of hue-sat tweaking. There’s also a Gaussian Blur adjustment layer with a Fractal Noise solid as its luma matte. And then there’s a vignette. Because there’s always a vignette.

If anyone’s interested it I can make this into a preset or upload the project file.

“Snowbot” — New Animated Short

Monday, 03. 1. 2010  –  Category: News

One of the Android blogs I follow had a video contest, so I put this little film together in an evening. It’s all After Effects + Illustrator, and done on my teeny tiny S10 netbook. Animating an HD film on a 10″ screen is probably insane, but at least it saved me a trip to the office!

Alas, much of the evening was spent dealing with render errors (lesson: overflow volume settings are REALLY IMPORTANT on a netbook), so I only managed to upload the rough version before the contest’s midnight deadline. Oh well, maybe an extra couple hours is ok?

People are clearly pretty intense over their entries though… within seconds — seconds! — of posting the rought cut I had a flurry of one-star votes and comments like “GARBAGE.” Oh YouTube. At least no one’s claiming that my film is an Obama conspiracy yet. But seriously, if you’re that into winning a Nexus One, just go buy the thing. It’s a phone, not fifty grand.

The snowed-in robot idea was suggested by Chris Needles (thanks Chris!). I simplified it into something I could animate in a couple of hours, storyboarded it out, then found an .ai of the Android logo (which is Creative Commons licensed! Hooray open source!) from which to build my puppets.

The sledbearing penguin is just the robot colored black and white, with the addition of pointier arms and a beak. And he’s not an intentional Linux reference, although I’ll take the free geek points. He’s actually there because my stuffed Android tends to hang out with a penguin-shaped pillow, and they make a cute pair.

Rigging the two puppets was unbelievably easy… no knees or elbows or hands or feet …