Typography Basics for Artists. Part 2 - Matching the Typeface

Anatomic parts of a glyph according to Wiki: 1) x-height; 2) ascender line; 3) apex; 4) baseline; 5) ascender; 6) crossbar; 7) stem; 8) serif; 9) leg; 10) bowl; 11) counter; 12) collar; 13) loop; 14) ear; 15) tie; 16) horizontal bar; 17) arm; 18) vertical bar; 19) cap height; 20) descender line. And here it comes finally - the second part of the typography basics for artists, where we're going to address a very common and practical task of matching a typeface to some pre-existing reference. The first part can be found here, and again, the material of these posts should...

My article on CG cameras in 3D World magazine

It should be out and on the shelves by now. Unfortunately, few errors sneaked into the printed version of the article. However, the editorial promised me to fix those in digital edition and to put the edited pdf into the online 'Vault', which all print readers have access to when they buy the issue. 
3D World Website
A little preview of the article below.

CTU's Faculty of Mechanical Engineering video

//player.vimeo.com/video/84875334?portrait=0

Double no: No, I didn't forget about the next part of a typography article and No, I didn't lie claiming it will take a while... And while a while continues, here is a piece of recent work I accomplished with the guys at DPOST Prague.
Czech Technical University 150th Anniversary from DPOST Prague on Vimeo.
Aside from wearing both Director's and Art-Director's hats, I've spent quite some time with hands on material here, taking the 3D work into Houdini to design the cubes effects, animate and render.
Probably the only 3D parts of the spot, which are not mine are the inner models...

Two Killer Tips for Mastering Any Software

RTFM. Please.
At different stages in the career I've been paid for working in Houdini, Nuke, 3DSMax, XSI, Fusion, Maya, Shake, Blender and After Effects among the other applications. I've been using Lightwave, 3D-Coat, Combustion, Rayz and so many other things. Not even mentioning programs like Photoshop, Corel Draw or Inkscape here. Of course I'm not the master in most of them, but I think I'm OK with learning new software, and here are the two tricks I know.
As obvious as they are, it is quite amazing how often even quite experienced artists manage to ignore them.
First one: RTFM....

Animusic - Part 2

//https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=2lExkQMEHhU

After sharing few introductory words in Part 1 at www.rock-is-dead.info - here are the wireframes we all love so much.
It was incredible ten years ago, it is incredible now. Procedural animation - the concept that keeps fascinating my bent mind, and the concept that wouldn't be possible in any previous era. The idea that instead of telling a computer what to draw, you rather teach it how to draw things changes the whole landscape to me.
The Animusic project was started by two artists Wayne Lytle and Dave Crognale. Their proprietary software uses MIDI input to drive the animation in a...

Tessellation Kit

Introducing the Tessellation Kit. It’s a tool that lets you draw tessellations by pushing the edges of shapes into each other.

Just click on the canvas and drag the mouse around to extend a shape, and mathematics will take care of the rest. There a few buttons that let you change the shape of the tiles and the colors you are working with and a toggle for changing how the shape repeats.

Together they make it pretty easy to make something like this:

Despite it’s simplicity, it can do quite a lot. I used it to recreate this Alhambra tiling:

And this interlocking...

Understanding Images

Form-color correspondence
according to Bauhaus I once heard they study Totoro at the aesthetics classes in Japanese schools. Aesthetics classes… Wouldn’t this freaking world be better if we had some?
At least we can be learning things on our own. And one thing I stumbled upon only few months ago, but which I believe must be obligatory for anyone dealing with images in one way or another is Language of Design course by Charlotte Jirousek of Cornell University. Abstract, objective, well-rounded, on the topic so vital and so overlooked.
Wish I knew of it years back - would’ve saved certain amount of time....

Typography Basics for Artists. Part 1 - Broad Classification

Major type styles. Typography is a separate world in its own. It lives according to the myriad of rules - aesthetic, conventional, optical and technical. Few professions include understanding of this world in a job description, and they mostly contain a word “designer” in the name - like graphic designers or (suddenly) typeface designers. Among the artists however it is not uncommon to be way less familiar with the principles involved in creating, manipulating and judging fonts. Still it’s a valuable knowledge for anyone dealing with images, which I’d like to address here. By no means I claim myself as an...

Couple of old works revived

While the article announced last week continues cooking itself, as an intermission here goes a couple of images which I found in the attic of a hard drive and tried to shake some dust off this week.
Masquerade Grande Pellicano

Lets Play: Ancient Greek Geometry

Today I’m releasing Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Geometry. It’s a Compass and Straightedge tool/puzzle game written in JavaScript. I’ve always thought Geometric Construction felt like a puzzle, so to me this pairing was quite natural. Compass and Straight edge is a technique for constructing shapes out of circles, straight lines, and their intersection points. You can read the wikipedia here – but watch out, some of the gifs are spoilers for the game.

I know that there are a few Compass and Straightedge tools out there already, but none have the simplicity, accessibility or fun of a modern web application, so...