What am I waiting to be released?

Affinity products have a lot on the horizon, some things are closer than others for release. Updates to Photo and Designer could come out at any time as the beta versions have been through a few iterations already. As the year come closer to an end though, I am very anxious to see some sign of their new Digital Asset Manager and I am really hoping for the promised reveal of their Publisher program that could finally be competition for Indesign. Affinity does not hide its development which has 2 results on it's users... 1) you feel in the loop and can plan for what is coming and 2) the ultimate frustrations of waiting for the crushing amount of time it takes to get a program right before release. They are pretty good at squashing bugs and releasing very usable apps so it's worth the agony of waiting, it's just not easy! hey are not promising a ton of new features in the next update but what they are promising I am looking forward to using - such as the drawing tool and font menu improvements.

The Room 4 will be released this fall... sometime. I really love the earlier games and so far each one has been different and challenging in different ways from those before it. I re-played all three previous games this summer and still loved them all.

MAC OS High Sierra has been released - sort of. It was released with no support for fusion drives and apparently has some issues with Indesign, which I still use so I won't be updating until I am sure those issues and some Metal 2 bugs I've heard about are handled.

X-Particles 4 : the Cinema 4D plugin has become an essential part of my work and this new update looks amazing. When they introduced fire and smoke a while back, the effects were underwhelming. This new release integrates a new fire/smoke simulation system from a company they bought out and it might decrease or end my dependence on Turbulence FD for this effects. Right now I have to use X-particles and Turbulence together to get decent results.  I would prefer it all in one package and it looks like I'm getting just that!

Pixelmator Pro has been announced for this fall, again... sometime. While I won't use it for photos, the little I saw of it's new drawing and painting tools might lure me away from Sketch, which Autodesk has put into the hell that is the Adobe pay us every month subscription "service". So my version will eventually stop working and I won't subscribe so I will need a replacement for my preferred drawing app. If Affinity Photo was more advanced intros area I would be happy to stay there, but I don't think drawing is priority in their future plans.

The long goodbyes:

I might be deleting a few programs as well. Flash is already gone and when I update to High Sierra eventually, Final Cut Studio will go as mentioned las post. There are a few others that I might just give up on. Dreamweaver I haven't touched in 2 years, Hype 3, and great app for html 5 animations I haven't used since I started with Sparkle web design. I still have 21 Adobe products sitting on my disk I almost never touch... some I've never used even once. Titanium Toast, DVD creator, Disk Cover... will I really use these once essential programs again? I like to keep my system free of apps that just sit there, taking up space.

Final goodbye to Final Cut Studio and Flash

Not a surprise to anyone, but Adobe is pulling the plug on Flash, the animation turned practically independent OS application originally developed by Macromedia. I have along history with Flash, and loved using it under Macromedia. When Adobe bought Macromedia, it was almost exclusively for obtaining Flash which it saw as the future standard of the internet and aggressively pushed it way beyond it's limits and original functions into a space no one asked for. They also pretty much abandoned all the other great Macromedia products, including Dreamweaver which had become the best WYSIWYG html editor around.

At first, mostly because of the advantages for flash video, the newer version caught on but quickly the hack-ability and lack of stability became apparent to anyone opening a Flash file. Steve Jobs notoriously banned the format from Apple's mobile devices and the long, slow death knell began to sound. HTML 5 and other new internet advances soon took over most of the functions only Flash could offer and to be frank, I haven't opened the program in about 5 years.

Sadder for me is the knowledge that the next Mac OS update will kill Final Cut Studio for once for all. I actually used it just last week to export a video in a format for Amazon Video Direct that Final Cut X can not do... for reasons I'll never understand and Amazon refuses to explain. The Final Cut debacle is well known and hate for the Final Cut Studio replacement isn't unfounded, or wasn't unfounded at the time. The application has changed a lot, bringing back old functionality and new better workflow over a slow development period but without demanding an upgrade fee in all that time. I still use some of the suite as well. While programs like the DVD creator and Colour have been obsolete for a long time now, Sound track Pro still has been very useful to me time to time. I have the new Motion X and it's a slight improvement over the studio version (why won't Apple give that software some real love?) but I haven't bought the new Compressor which exports to different formats... and I might have now that the old Final Cut will be no more. Adobe's premier Pro has become what Final Cut likely would have been in some respects but it's also stuck in older ideas about editing and part of the heinous Adobe Creative Cloud ripoff, so I won't be using that and keeping Final Cut X at the top of my video editing list for now.

Recent photography work

I was recently in Colorado taking photos and the photo above shows the massive difference working in RAW can have on a final photo. The amount of detail that was extracted turned a nothing, dark boring image into something much more interesting.

One of the feature in Affinity Photo is the de-hazing filter and it's pretty amazing. Since I was running around taking photos of distant vistas, haze can be an asset but also a problem. This show the difference that filter can make. There is a lot of control over the strength  and look of it so it's up to you as to how much or little haze you want to get rid of.

I was also, with my brother's advice, able to finally crack the problems I was having with night shots. I was WAY overthinking what I needed to do and he had a simple solution for my most vexing problem - focusing at infinity and keeping it there when you can't see a thing because... well, because it's dark outside.

The Oval Portrait

My first attempt at Edgar Allen Poe. This was challenging on several levels, mostly getting it done in a much quicker pace than I normally would so it could be presented to the "Another Hole in the Head" film festival before I leave for a photo voyage soon.

The original story is short and pretty basic, perfect for animation but it was pretty flowery in prose as a lot of Poe is so some of that had to be cut down and worked into something where the text isn't competing with the visuals to the point of being distracting.

This marks the 5th gothic horror animated short in a row that I've done and unless I can somehow start getting paid for them, I would like to switch to something more cartoon-y next as a break. I have plenty of other horror stories lined up so I doubt this will be the last but it's good to shake things up a bit!

Prague - Praha icons

Another one. 

Boston Icons

One more for practice. These are sort of fun to do so expect more in future. 

Some progress on my next animation - The Oval Portrait - based on the story by Edgar Allen Poe. I rendered the wife with an alpha channel and the painted in Affinity and Photoshop layers of the painting in progress, almost to completion. This will be projected on to the canvas as the artist works to give the impression time is passing.

Iconic Montreal & Provincetown designs

Again, more practice in Affinity Designer and trying to keep my skills up until business picks up again! 

Affinity Designer - practice projects

I have been trying to get more deeply into Affinity Designer lately. I started with a quick project for a friend. he wanted very clean illustrations based on crop circles which presented some challenging elements but also taught me some important new tools in the software.

Drawing and particularly using the pen tool in AD is so much easier than in Illustrator! While Ad still lacks in some areas.. no spiral tool or warping tools - to name a couple examples - the ease of drawing almost made up for their absence in most cases.

Next I decided to re-create a friend's tattoo and my own as I didn't have any drawings of them oddly, just photos with them visible in them. The only image I had of mine was from a 20 year old photo website of mine in .SWF format (Flash)!

The biggest challenge was my friend's tattoo. There are not very clear photos, its complicated (an adaption of a voodoo vévé) and even the actual tattoo has faded and blurred to the extent that many details were lost. I do love vévé drawings, however and it might not be 100% accurate but it has a hand drawn look i did not expect from a vector drawing program. I am actually thinking if incorporating a vévé design into my tattoo at some point now.

Obduction - game review

Obduction is a game I have been waiting for years to come out. made by Cyan, the same people who gave us the original Myst games, games I love to this day and replay now and then, I was really looking forward to it and playing a game with no violence and allowed me to explore a place at my own pace.

So the game finally has arrived and it's pretty wonderful. While some people complain about stuttering or bugs I haven't really experienced much of that, or maybe I haven't experienced more of of it than I see with most games I play.

Visually and storewide it doesn't disappoint and was well worth the wait. The renderings and landscapes are breathtaking, artistic and beg to be explored. The interactions with the residents of the world are limited mostly to video clips which is fine, though I know some people wished there would be more character interaction - it's not something I want from a Myst-like game.

Speaking of Myst-like like. this game does not loo like the games from the series or follow the plot or have any thematic connection to them. It is very much it's own thing and I applaud the makers for that. Where it resembles that previous franchise is in the gameplay and feeling of the environments. Like those past  project, Obduction has many puzzles to solves and nooks and crannies to explore but follows it's own rules and aesthetics.

To be 100% honest, I am reviewing this game without finishing playing it. The reason why is the one thing I find wrong with this new adventure. Some of the puzzles involve math, literally they do and that's not my strong point, but you can find solutions online and hints and get past them easy enough and continue to explore. I have reached one area, the "maze" which embodies the worst tendencies that Cyan games puts into some of it's puzzles. It's pretty much impossible to solve even with cheating, especially if you missed a step. If you do manage to figure it out, it involves so much back tracking and repetitive action that's it is just a total gamer killer in terms of enjoyment.

So I am now re-starting the game from the beginning, following a guide to get past the log-jam of the "maze" so I can actually finish the game. Disappointing to be sure but I would still say on balance it's well worth getting and playing. I am not unhappy with my purchase, just this one part of it that really goes too far in terms of difficulty. I am sure there are those that find this sort of thing the reason to play, but I am just as sure that most of Cyan's fans are more like me, liking the puzzles but loving the exploration more.

I know there are two endings and I hope they are better than the tow endings of Quern I recently finished, where both basically took you to the same place. I also hope that, like the original Myst, I can walk around and see some thing is might have missed after the game is over.

UPDATE:
I am finally out of the maze! The guide I used wasn't totally clear but I managed to follow it enough to get it set up so the maze would take me to all the locations and i went beyond that, but not to the end of the game - yet. I also discovered in a comment that ALL the bridges can be activated using the the same code which saved a lot of time trying to match each bridge to a different code.