Big News Brewing

Apologies to my faithful readers. This blog has been sorely lacking in new content for some time now. I have been playing a bunch of games over the past few weeks, and big, BIG things have been happening at work so the blog updating has taken a back seat for the moment.

The games I have been playing have been pretty interesting and probably deserve more commentary than a 3-4 sentence micro review.

The work related stuff is definitely worthy of a nice lengthly post, so I'll get to that ASAP as well.

I'll tack this one random blurb about software on here at the end: My concept arting buddies tell me I am late to the party on this, but I just discovered “Alchemy,” which is a pretty neat little drawing program. (AND FREE!)

http://al.chemy.org/

It might seem pretty uncontrollable, but that is kind of the point. It allows you to rapidly lay down some rough forms and then pick the interesting shapes for further development in photoshop, painter, zbrush, etc. There is no undo; the idea is to promote the “happy accident” and go with it.

The download link is kind of hidden : http://al.chemy.org/downloads/Alchemy-006.zip

There are some pretty interesting tools: Pull Shapes quickly down images stored in PDF files you save to folders in the install directory. Speed shapes splats out random blobs. You can control line thickness and shape attributes with sounds from a microphone. Crazy stuff.