mrbava

Author: mrbava

  • Oculus Rift Impressions

    Oculus Rift Impressions

    My only other experience with a virtual reality headset was back when Nintendo released the VirtualBoy. I distinctly remember trying it the Price Club near my house. With its entirely red display and pixelated as hell graphics, it’s no wonder the device failed. Fast forward many, many years later and here we are in the present day with the Oculus Rift. I’ll list out the impressions by category to make things easier.

    Visuals

    At first, I wasn’t incredibly impressed with the visuals. My friend had the A cups inserted, so that made my vision very blurry and narrow. I swapped out A for C and things drastically improved. I was finally able to read text and unfortunately, individual pixels. We loaded up some of the tech demos and while they were cool, they lacked polish and refinement; though, the toilet simulator made me laugh harder than I should have. After taking a few breaks to help ease the dizziness, we tried minecraft and half-life 2. Minecraft was my favourite demo of the bunch because I feel it best implemented the new features of the Rift. 3D depth of fiend was quite apparent when you ran up a mountain and looked down. I felt as if I were atop a real mountain, along with all the vertigo that goes along with it. The only thing missing was the sound of birds, my heartbeat and a cool mountain breeze. Half-Life 2 needed a third party tool to transform the game to the Rift and it looked good but not great. I’ll end with saying I mainly stood

    Feeling

    I’ll start by saying I do suffer from slight motion sickness if I’m in a car. I can’t read or look down while someone else drives or I’ll get an instant and long lasting headache in addition to mild nausea. The unit felt a bit heavy at first but I got used to it quite fast. It felt great after that, though the nose piece did poke my forehead a couple times, no biggie. I felt a bit strange when loading up a few games, and moving was out of the question as it instantly brought on some nausea. I eventually got used to it, and paired with an xbox 360 controller, began my journey up a mountain. I felt some slight vertigo at the top as I peered down, but the amazing sensation and immersion felt better and I forgot about everything else I was feeling. The immersion with this unit is incredible. I didn’t use a set of headphones, but I can only imagine how much better that would be. I’ll eventually move around with the joystick, but for my first try I wanted to ease into the experience, and not go nuts like some others have. Some certainly pay the price with motion sickness afterwards.

    ocbava

    Final Thoughts

    I think the Rift is a game changer ( literally, hurrr ). The immersion I felt was instant, and very gratifying. I can see puzzle and horror games taking off with the Rift, with Architecture students using the unit to its fullest. Once the production unit hits with a higher res screen and better refresh rate, I can see a lot of the dizzy spells going away.

     

  • Time to learn how to model in 3D

    I started up a game studio with a good friend last year, and we’re set to release our first game in the next few weeks. To create hype for the new release, I wanted to create some promotional items to send out to media websites, friends and family. What started off as a sketch not unlike most of my projects, quickly turned into me downloading blender 3D and hitting YouTube for beginner tutorials. I dabbled with 3D back in school but it was only for one semester, and unfortunately back several years ago it just didn’t have the same appeal to me as it does today. With new renderers, software, and cool ways to show off your creations; I set off to join the masses to create cool 3D imagery. I started off with a base model, did some extrusions and formed the shape of the ship from our game. Some subdivision masks, and a LOT of patience later left me with a smooth version. From there I learned about UV unwrapping and texturing, lighting and finally – rendering.

    Here’s the model I rendered in Blender 3d from scratch. I then brought it into photoshop and added some fancy magic with the red whip and highlight effects. Pretty cool for only 2 weeks of very sparse tutorials, and 30 minute at-a-time spurts of work!

     

    3d shwip

     

    From now on I think I’ll one way or another incorporate 3D into my future projects. Perhaps I use them for some cool 3D icons, or maybe some nice text to help stand out from the rest. It’s incredibly easy to learn 3d in my eyes, and youtube and other various resources really made it easy for me to stay interested.

    3d wireframe of our ship

     

    shwip details

  • What being a hybrid designer has taught me

    I was the kid growing up who took everything apart and wondered how it ticked. I’ve always had an insatiable desire to figure out how something works. I remember first learning how a manual transmission worked after watching my dad drive for years and years. Once I learned about flywheels and clutches, I instantly gained a respect for the engineering that went into every car. I played primarily with Lego and reclaimed parkay flooring as a child with my older brother. We would construct vast structures out the wooden blocks which would later include a cathedral, various other buildings and a bridge that spanned both our sofas. Littered on the bridge were toy cars and lego vehicles we managed to build out of nothing but pure imagination.

    Fast forward a couple of years and I began learning about design and photography. Aperture, ISO, shutter speeds, typography, colour theory and the grid were my next adventures. I learned about the rule of thirds, exposure; and, how to compose a photo in a way that told a story. Much was the same when it came to designing websites. I loaded up IE 6’s source code viewer and began my journey into front end development. Back when I started learning these techniques, Iframes were popular and Google was just beginning to gain traction. There were no guides on how to build a website, you had to go to school to do it. I learned how to build a site by de-constructing my favourites.

    From there, I learned to respect the medium and how to exploit it in order to get the best designs on the net. Photoshop can do great things, but they didn’t necessarily transfer over to browsers 5-10 years ago. I learned that in order to be a better designer for the web, my experience with how to actually build the site came into play when I made executive design decisions. Today, the lines are blurred since browsers have caught up and now allow us designers to go nuts with our work. Webfonts, transparency, css3, and html5 are amazing tools that I am so grateful to have access to nowadays.

  • My print debut in The Web Designer’s Idea Book.

    I’m happy to announce that my site has been added to Patrick McNeil’s most recent book: “The Web designer’s Ideabook vol. 3!”  I’ve updated the site a bit over the past year, but the general look and feel remains the same. I’m listed under the Cufon section of the book. Unfortunately, I moved to webfonts about a year ago to decrease load times. Thanks again Patrick for choosing my site!

    mrbavabook

  • Subtle 3D

    I love to implement 3d into some of my designs. Here’s a small showcase of some recent projects.

    3dSoap
    A simple logo for Soap News on Globaltv.com. I employed a really easy gradient technique and a soft backend shadow to give the impression of depth.
    dpad
    Test logo for a member on a forum. Showcasing the power of subtle and easy photoshop layer effects and dropshadows.
    I spoon nutella tshirt
    The graphic I created for my Nutella t-shirt, I made it float to look cool.
    gtv
    The dropshadow underneath the main navigation, cool and clean – with a not so in-your-face shadow.

  • Celebrating the Launch of Jamhammer Games

    Last year a friend and I decided to take on the gaming industry and start development on our first ever video game. Taking inspiration from Bizzare’s Geometry Wars, we took that concept of a shoot em up to a whole new level. We felt certain elements were lacking from the genre, so we introduced a whip that the player can hurl around. Adding to that are mines you can hold behind you ala mario kart and shells. Then the next logical step was to enable the player the ability to use their whip to smash the mine around. Once hit, the mine becomes even more powerful and gives you a nice padded style bonus; which, you can use to upgrade certain elements of your ship. That is just a small example of what we plan on adding to the game, and the industry. I don’t like when developers try and define what I think is fun. That’s why we gave our players the option to leave the battlefield and rethink. I’ve never seen a game do that, and why not? Sometimes you just need to cool down and rethink your strategy.

    We want to create the games that we have always wanted to play, and that the bigger game companies fail to create. Stay tuned for more information on my newest venture and check out the site when you have a chance.

     

    Jamhammer Games Logo
    The Jamhammer Logo and Branding I created.

  • Survivor Infographic

    The content team at GlobalTV.com asked me to create an infographic for their upcoming season of Survivor, entitled Survivor: Caramoan. Looking over a few important details, I researched past Survivor seasons and put together a working package of themes and visuals. Have a look and read the article, linked here.

    Survivor Infographic
    The header image of the Infographic. I extracted the base logo from previous seasons and added a 3d effect in illustrator, and then added the wood texture to give it more oompfh.
    The middle section of the graphic gives readers info about the odds of becoming a survivor on the show. I sourced some high res wood textures and burned them into the wood to give it a more authentic look. The fabric plates use the look and feel from several props on the show, including the hand created torches.
    The middle section of the graphic gives readers info about the odds of becoming a survivor on the show. I sourced some high res wood textures and burned them into the wood to give it a more authentic look. The fabric plates use the look and feel from several props on the show, including the hand created torches.
    The final section of the site shows a call to action to get readers to interact with the article and potentially win a prize. Wood textures, obviously an important theme here played a role in rounding out the look and feel of the graphic.

    See the full image and read the article here.

     

  • Should every web designer know how to build the sites they design?

    I feel that if you are a web designer you should know at least the basics of html and css in order to build what you’ve designed. This way, you fundamentally understand how a site is built from the ground up and can appreciate the inner workings of front end design. I’ve had arguments that go both ways, and they usually end up with someone feeling insulted.

    Personally, I take a front end design path when creating a new website. Firstly, I create the brand and two versions in photoshop – the desktop and the mobile versions. I then start coding my framework and css and begin sending my clients the progress. I let them know it is a work in progress and they understand, barring I explain in detail why something hasn’t been implemented yet. I find it incredibly arduous to create multiple photoshop documents for one site and often hear designers complain about such a task. Smart objects were introduced a few Photoshop versions ago and should be used in everyone’s daily workflow. Despite some shortcomings, they make reusing assets within one document incredibly easy and efficient.

    When I say that all designers should know how to build the site they design, I come from when I was looking into becoming an architect. I thought being an architect back in my naive days was just to draw fancy looking buildings, and then have them magically appear. What I learned was that architects are basically artistic engineers, and they need to know the physics and math in order to design something that won’t kill everyone inside OR defy the laws of physics. My point is that they understand the medium they are designing for and understand what makes things tick.

    This line of thinking can relate to front end developers with no skills in design. Often my designs are not cut out right, and look quite different to what I mocked up in photoshop. Someone recently said to me that it’s very uncommon for a final design to look identical to photoshop in a browser. I disagree in that I hope that front end developers use those mockups as a perfect representation of what should be on the final screen. If front end developers learn how to properly dissect a psd file, I believe our woes will dwindle, and; most importantly  our sites will look great when multiple people are working on them.

    We all need to take steps to learn one anothers crafts in order to have the best of design and code out there.

  • Love nutella as much as I do? Show it off!

    I created this graphic a while ago for my love of Nutella. Let everyone around you know it too, they might even have a story to share. mrbava_store_tshirt

  • Introducing Shwip and Jamhammer Games

    Cue the introduction of Jamhammer games – an incredibly stupid name a long time friend and I created while brainstorming names for our newly formed “game studio”. Why the quotes you ask? Well… It’s the beginning of what I hope to be a fruitful venture into the video game industry, one I’ve always wanted to be a part of. With an artist on one end and a very talented programmer on the other, we decided to get together and take on the industry, one shoot em up at a time.

    One of our favourite games back a few years ago was Geometry wars. A shoot em up you could pick up and play for 10 minutes before work, then go about your business. It was addictive, fun and incredibly smooth to play, not to mention it created a feverish competition between all my friends who had it. Leaderboards would be challenged daily; and, while we couldn’t ever compete with the top players ( FIGGYG! ) , we had our insane battles. Shwip is a combination of my love for design and polished looks, and my friend’s insane coding abilities. What I love about working closely with one of my best friends is that I can relay what I’m thinking of putting in as a feature, and he will instantly understand and write the code for it. Brainstorming and throwing around ideas between one another reminds me of working closely with a client on a major website or app.

    Shwip main marketing image

    This is where Shwip comes into play. It’s our take on one of our favourites, with some new features that will hopefully spruce up the genre. First of all, we have a damn WHIP! How many games have whips?? Especially in SPACE ( or the void as I like to call it ). If you have a steam account, rate and fav our game on Greenlight, we really want many people to enjoy our game when it’s out. Check out the trailer while you’re at it.

    Steam Greenlight Page