Saturday 17 August 2013

Re-live the 80's with Illustrator.


I developed a design brief for my students that requires then to recreate their own work in the style of the 80's arcade pop-culture.  Its a great era and one that seems to be fairly popular even today with its pixel-art, rainbow electric graphic design asthetic and just the fact I grew up in that era also helps... :D

While its easy enough to create pixel-art in a bitmap editor such as Photoshop, Windows Paint or the Gimp - For some real flexibility artistically, Illustration software like - well - Illustrator is a better choice.  Because its vector based, pixel shapes are crisp and square.  They can be rescaled without pixel artifacts or antialiased soft edges.  And it can be manipulated with transforms, 3D extrusions and more without losing quality.

That means groovy poster art, alongside the usual pixel-level bit map export.  Some examples below show a range of ways that we can make the classic invader into a variety of visually interesting styles in Illustrator.  Of course, we can also export the original image in actual screen res. pixels too for those actual bitmap projects (ie. like game makers, etc).

Sunday 11 August 2013

"Its a wrap" - a light wrap that is...


Often when in a hurry, I'll render out composit shots from my 3D software once the main lighting and surfacing are working rather then spend time rendering passes and compositing them. Today I was thinking - one thing that often helps integration with a photographic plate is applying some light wrapping.  Its a process that is common in compositing - but what about throwing that idea into a 3D application's rendering output?