Industrial Design in Today's World
A short documentary from Frog Design about the digital technology advancements and how it impacts the modern world industrial designer. Feels like I should have done more with the physical space when I was still in undergrad... possible future goal?
http://vimeo.com/69897436
Testing Substance Designer 3.5
I found out recently that my Digital Tutors account from the ETC is still active, so I decided to do some tutorials on Unity3D and 3dsMax while I'm sitting here at home. It's going pretty well. Nothing to really show yet on Unity or 3dsMax, but I stumbled upon the Substance Designer software when I was browsing the tutorial list and decided to check it out. Substance Designer is a texturing tool which allows you to create high quality textures using nodes. It comes with a bunch patterns and filters and the software allows you to pack all your texture maps (diffuse, normal, specular etc.) into a single Substance texture file. On top of that you can connect the Substance textures with Unity3D or UDK and dynamically change parameters of your texture within the game engine. The software is really awesome so far. I can't wait to get more proficient with modeling, so can create kick ass textures for them :D
Below you can see a quick test using Substance Designer. I made a brick texture within Substance Designer with a normal and specular map and added a sketch of mine on top of everything.
SpritePlane: Converting GIFs to Sprite Sheets
SpritePlane is a great plugin for Photoshop to convert .GIF files into sprite sheets with just a few clicks!
It converts GIFs like 
to 
You can find all the information, instructions and download link on the SpritePlane GitHub page.
Illustrator: Free Transform Tool
One thing that was always confusing in online tutorials was how to move an object in perspective using the Free Transform Tool. The Free Transform Tool (E) is located somewhere in the middle of the toolbar (see picture).
It's weird to control the free transform tool and it's not very intuitive. The way to do it is to CLICK and then press CTRL. The sequence is very important. The free perspective transform won't work if you switch it around; ctrl + click, it will result in a regular transform.
So remember the sequence "CLICK + CTRL" to transform in free perspective using the Free Transform Tool (E).
Space Invaders 8x8 LED Matrix
Finally uploaded the video of my Space Invaders game on an 8x8 LED Matrix using an Arduino Nano.
For more info check out my portfolio page Space Invaders - 8x8 LED Matrix
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8C3GZfQZqc&hd=1
Xpider Sven
We had a baller 7-legged spider hanging outside of our project window the other day and took some awesome footage of it. Unfortunately, he went missing when the weather got colder and rainier :(
I played around with the footage of our Xpider and video effects in Premiere.
Watch the videos in FULL HD and FULL SCREEN for the ultimate experience!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed4MM_nLc-Y&hd=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_0OINiWsIU&hd=1
[HOW] HTML/CSS: Prevent Scrollbar Jump
Firefox and Chrome doesn't show a scrollbar on the right if the content of a page isn't longer than the window. But when the content becomes longer, the vertical scrollbar appears and causes the layout to shift. This "jump" can be quite annoying as the whole layout moves to the left. To fix this:
html {
overflow-y:scroll;
}
Project Xense & Random Doodle
At the Entertainment Technology Center they allow us to borrow Wacom Tablets, so I got myself a Wacom Intuos 4 Extra Large. Yes, EXTRA LARGE!!! It's 462mm x 304.8mm (18.2" x 12.0") with 8 express keys, a touch ring and a pen with Advanced Pen Tip Sensor.
Anyway, working hard on Project Xense to create 3 interactive exhibitions for the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington DC about retinal implants, cochlear implants and neuroprosthetics.
Here's random wacom doodle of a girl with a prosthetic arm...
