Posted On:2012 | Greyscalegorilla
Another Great Year Of Greyscalegorilla
As the year ends, I wanted to thank you for visiting this little site of mine. I’m not a great writer, but I’m going to give this a shot…
It means a lot to me that you visit the blog, use our plugins, and give us great feedback. I hope it was a good year for you to learn, and make beautiful work. Helping you make great stuff and making your job easier is what this site is all about, and I wanted to thank you for joining us and being a part of this community. It really means a lot. Thanks.
We have some HUGE things planned for next year. More tutorials (duh), a really fun new plugin in the works, huge updates for our current products, and of course, all the other fun stuff like the podcast and Five Second Projects. Here is to another great year! Keep learning and having fun!
It may be a bit quiet here in the GSG studio through the rest of the holidays. But, here are a few things you can do just incase you get bored.
- Check out the HUGE new tutorial Page.
- Catch up with all the GSG Podcasts.
- Join The Latest Five Second Project. It ends December 30th. DO IT!
- Watch me ramble on and wave my hands around and talk about work.
- Look at all my silly photos and animated GIFs over at my Tumblr.
Five Second Projects Winner “Huge Mustache”
Winner
Congrats to Viktor Tornfors for winning the latest Five Second Project, “Huge Mustache.” Another Five Second Project will be announced in the next week. Thanks, as always, for all the great entires. Check out some of our other favorites below.
Honorable Mentions
New Keyframe Look For R14: What Are Those New Triangle Icons?
In this quick video, I talk about what those new triangle keyframe things are in C4D R14.
Example
Texture Kit Pro Gallery
Hours of overnight rendering and coding sweat got put into our new Texture Kit Pro Gallery Page and we are pretty proud of it. We thought it might be nice to showcase ALL of the textures included in the new Kit in one infinitely-scrolling page. They are organized by category as well so it’s great to use even if you already have the Texture Kit Pro and want to find the exact texture you want for the project you are working on.
New Texture Kit Pro
Texture Kit Pro is finally out. We have been working for the last month creating over 300 new textures to add to the 200+ already included in the original Texture Kit. As you may have read before, this is a new step for the Texture Kit. We will now be updating the Texture Kit Pro ourselves, creating high quality images, photo-real procedurals, and ready-to-use textures for all types of situations including architectural visualizations, mograph animations, or product stills.
Organized By Type
We have also updated the way Texture Kit Pro is organized. Now you can search by type of material including metals, fabrics, brick, hair, abstract, plastic, man made, and more.
Current Customers
You should have received an email with a link to donwload your free update to Texture Kit Pro. If not, please contact our customer support and we will get it to you right away. Be sure to include the e-mail address that you used to purchase the original Texture Kit.
New Pricing
Texture Kit will now be updated “in house” with professional photographers and Cinema 4D artists, instead of relying on other artists. For this reason, we are raising the price, but not for a week. Now is your chance to get the new Texture Kit Pro at the previous price of $69. It will go up to $99 at the end of next week. UPDATE: The price is now $99.
Get Texture Kit Pro for $99
Coming Soon: Texture Kit Pro
It’s been over a year since we released the original Texture Kit. It came with over 200 custom-made Cinema 4D textures and a big promise of frequent updates from different artists. Well, it didn’t quite work as planned and frankly, the updates I promised never came. I dropped the ball and I’m sorry. I figured that there would be a never-ending supply of textures from artists that would keep the Texture Kit growing. I assumed that everyone had their own collection of textures that we could buy and incorporate in future updates of the Kit. I was wrong.
Most artists do what we all do when we need textures…
1. We use Google images to search and see what we find. That works, but we end up using images that don’t belong to us, and could potentially breaking copyrights of the original image holder. Not good.
2. We find free pre-made ones on free sites. Some of these are good, but the quality can be hit or miss and they can be hard to keep organized.
3. We make our own at a HUGE cost of time. Making custom textures often look great, but it can take a long time to tweak them to make them perfect.
So with that in mind, we are looking at Texture Kit in a new way.
Texture Kit PRO
We have taken texture building into our own hands. New, professionally built, textures made in-house, specifically for Cinema 4D. First, the numbers. We have more than DOUBLED the texture count with over 300 new textures with about half of them being procedural. We hired professional photographers to take high quality photographs of real textures. Then we created cropped images, bump-maps, reflection-maps and put them all together to just drag and drop into your scene.
Texture Kit Pro will be a free update for any current Texture Kit owners. And, of course, if you get the texture kit any time before the launch, you will get the update with everyone else. C4D textures have been our world for the last month and we are excited to get this thing in your hands in the next week or so. UPDATE: It’s out!
Half Rez Animations
As Half Rez got closer and closer, we realized we needed some animations to play between speakers and during cocktail and food breaks. So, after a few concept brainstorming sessions, we came up with these. The interstitial concepts centered around using the Half Rez pixel as a character in different comical situations with the Half Rez speech bubble logo.
Interstitials
For sound design, fast turn around and cartoonish whimsy were paramount. The office took turns doing our own vocalized sound effects for each animation. Then, each performance was blended together to make the final, silly sound design.
Interstitials “Sound Design”
These background animations were, more or less, glorified screen savers that played during breaks. Mostly eye candy to feature the logo and remind the guests where they were.
Background Animations
The scale of a project like this is just perfect for tackling in a day or two. Small, bite sized animations are fun to work on, fun to concept and quick to turn around. I wish all work was limited to ten seconds of animation.
Half Rez 2012
A quick look back at the Half Rez Festival held in Chicago on September 19th. We had over 100 people show up to the event to network, learn and help. Plus, we had a great set of presentations that showed off what you can do with this incredible software we have access to.
I honestly believe that it’s events like this that help put the people together in the same room that need to be together. In a time where you can learn stuff from hours of training videos online in the comfort of your own home, it’s easy to ignore the importance of a festival like this. However, having all these people in the same room, all with similar goals, all in different parts of their career, and all helping, meeting and learning as much as they can created an personal event unlike anything you can get online.
A HUGE thanks to everyone who came out and to MAXON for sponsoring the event.
CREDITS:
Video by Dave Kiss and Sergio Salgado
Song: Train To Hometown by Katsuhiro Nagasawa CC BY 3.0
Greyscalegorilla Plugins are Fully Compatible with C4D R14
We have officially tested all of the Greyscalegorilla Products with the new Cinema 4D R14 and everything is working great. However, we had one small texture issue with City Kit. A free update (V1.21) has been sent out to everyone who purchased City Kit either directly or though a bundle. Check your email or the email of the person that purchased it for you to get your download link to the update. Please update no matter what version you are on, just incase.
Emails have already been sent out. However, if you did not receive it, please contact support. Be sure to include the email address you used to purchase the product or a copy of your receipt so we can send your update there.
Thanks again for using Greyscalegorilla Products, Kits, Packs and Plugins. We love hearing how they help you get your work done faster or make it even easier to make it beautiful. Stay tuned for more free updates of our products.
Branding Half Rez: Getting Ready For The Big Day
With only 2 days left until Half Rez, it’s been getting really hectic around the studio. We’re getting all the details ready for the big event, starting with a new logo, new buttons, and some 3D Logo animations to show on the big screen. The presentations we have scheduled are looking great, and the run-through went smoothly. This is our first big event, and I think it’ll be a fun one. If you can’t make it, we will be posting most of the presentations on Greyscalegorilla soon after. However, if you were lucky enough to get a ticket, I will see you there with bells on and a beer in my hand. Can’t wait!
Camera Calibration Tutorial Preview Render
A preview of the huge, 2 part tutorial coming next week about the Camera Calibration Tool in C4D R14. I will even try a bit of modeling in this one to build out the scene for the projection. It’s the first time learning a bit about modeling, so this should be an interesting one. The tutorial should be out early next week. But, as always, try to make it yourself before the tutorial is out. Even a small part of it. It’s a great exercise. Until then, have a good weekend!
Seth On Getting Paid For Your Work
A well written reminder from Seth that being competent isn’t all you need to succeed.
…access to tools is no longer sufficient. Everyone you compete with has access to a camera, a keyboard, a guitar. Just because you know how to use a piece of software or a device doesn’t mean that there isn’t an amateur who’s willing to do it for free, or an up and comer who’s willing to do it for less.
It’s true, if someone wants professional work, then he will need to hire professionals. But it’s also true that as amateurs are happy to do the work that professionals used to charge for, the best (and only) path to getting paid is to redefine the very nature of professional work.
Read his entire post, Here.
See Also, “MORE“.
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