D02: Clean Car

Day 2! Did a VERY rough sketch of this car and then a clean line version.  I was focused on line in this drawing as well as trying to add minor details to the final drawing.

Time: Approx 2 Hours

Sketchbook Pro 6 - Wacom Intous 4 Medium

D01: Sketch Blogging...START!

So since I, once again, have been lacking, I will be starting a daily sketch blog.  I'm going to try to improve my skills and drop my concept sketching time.  So without further delay, here is day 1's sketches!

Week 1 - Xbox 360 Rendering

As the post says, its the first week of my challenge to myself and this week I wanted to do something simple just to get back into the swing of things.  Also, since this was the first week, I felt I would do a wider update, so I made a time lapse video of the process.

I posted the video below.  Enjoy!

Some quick stats:

Total Time: 4 Hours
Programs: Sketchbook Pro + Photoshop CS4 + Illustrator CS4
Hardware: Wacom Intous 5

I also want to thank my buddy Mr.Mann for the opening intro track, check out more of his work here:

https://www.facebook.com/MrMannOfficial
http://soundcloud.com/mr_mann

A Personal Challenge

So lately I have been a bit lax when it comes to my design, skill sets, etc.  My summer job has been sucking out what little creativity I have over the summer months and when I sit down to try to work on something I end up just scribbling stuff with no coherent thought process.

So in order to keep my skills moving in the right direction, I am giving myself a personal challenge.

At the end of each week (Between Monday and Friday...Maybe Saturday) I want to have something that I would consider "postable," that I can post here, to my deviantart, CGHub, etc.  I want to keep my skills up as well as continue to improve, and stilling around not doing work is not helping that.

The level of detail will need to be to a high degree.  This is only a short list, things may get added to it as the summer progresses, the subject for each piece may also vary, it could be something that is already in the real work. Somethings I would consider "postable:"

1. Something sketched to a high degree of detail (Fine details) that includes orthographic and feature sketches

2. A fully drawn, cleaned up, and inked sketch, this includes some details

3. A fully colored and rendered piece

Stay tuned!

Backup Your Data!!!

Hey everyone,

I know its been awhile since i posted anything, but I have been dealing with the end of the semester and various other things as well, one of which I will be discussing with you right now.

Backup your data!!

Seriously do it.  If you have been putting it off, drop everything, and back it up.

About a month ago I had my power supply in my computer go bad, pretty much destroyed my entire system, total damage was around, $800 worth of hardware fried.  But the worst part was not the hardware lost, that can be replaced.  I lost about a months worth of work.  Somehow 2 of my internal hard drives fried, there is no way to recover the data at all.  This can be a huge issue if you are working for a client, they pay you for that work.  I lost an entire project and I am still rebuilding the files from scratch.

What you can do:

There are various options when it comes to backing up everything.  Im going to talk about 3 that I have started taking advantage of:

1: External Hard Drives and RAID Arrays
2: Cloud Storage
3: Physical Copies

External Hard Drives and RAID Arrays

External hard drives are, by far one of the easiest things you can do to help protect you data.  Drives range in size and cost, some require extra power while others can be powered via the USB port.  A safe bet is to look for something that will cover what your files take up now and give you plenty of room to expand, personally, I have a 2TB drive I use to back everything up on, but 500GB is also plenty big.  Most drives are plug and play and your operating system (Either Windows or OSX) will format the drive correctly.

For those of you in the US, here is a link to Newegg's page listing all of their external drives: [link]

RAID Arrays (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) are a set of hard drives (2 or more) that store the same or pieces of data on them.  There are various types or levels of RAID storage, but we are only going to talk about RAID 1.  RAID 1 storage basically stores a duplicate of whatever you place onto it, onto each of the drives.  So if you have 3 different drives, you have 3 copies of the same file, and in case one drive goes bad, you still have 2 copies left.  This is a good solution, but can be tricky to pull off and can get expensive with the number of drives you would have to purchase.



Cloud Storage

This is another easy one, there are various services that offer cloud storage these days.  Like Drop Box and the new Google Drive.  The issue with these services is that some cost money depending on how much storage space you need, and the free services often have a small amount of space to use.  These are great options because these companies often make backups of your data on a large number of drives to prevent any data loss of their users.


Physical Copies

This is one that I have started doing as of recently.  Making physical copies of work.  There are two options to do this.  The first is to burn a data CD or DVD of finished work.  Any work or projects that you have checked off or completed get burned to a disk, labeled with what is sorted on it, and stored in a place that does not get a lot of sunlight.  The downfall of CDs is their lifespan, it is estimated that most CDs will only last about 9-10 years before the materials they are made of start to break down making the data stored on them unreadable.

The second solution can overcome this problem.  Flash memory.  Almost everybody has a USB drive they carry around with them, its easy, convenient, and safe for storing data on.  That is because the drives use flash or "static" memory, it does not move.  Unlike CDs, they dont break down overtime, but they can be a little more pricey than CDs, especially if you are buying a lot of them at once.  A good option is to start looking and what work you have finished and making a copy of it into a folder, keep a text document of what is on the drive, and when the file gets to be so big (around 2 - 4GBs), buy a drive, copy the data to it, and sort it somewhere.  Try and work out a labeling system along with it so you are not plugging in every flash drive trying to find the one with the project you want on it.

Again, here is a link to Newegg and all their flash drives: [link]


I hope this helps some people, I know I wish I had started doing this awhile ago.  Depending on which way to choose to do this, just remember to back it all up at some point.  You never know what could go wrong.

Happy New Year Everyone!

Happy New Year! First piece of the year, here's hoping that things get better than last year, I have many projects I want to start and many things I want to learn, so...might as well get started!

Here we go!

Ncrypt Custom PC Case

This design was based around a number of various design elements of both present and future technologies.  First of is a water cooling block for the CPU which will draw air in from the top as well as and air intake in the front.

A few other features that are not directly pointed out:
- Rubber cutouts for easier cable management
- Front Power button has 2 light bars above and below it that represent CPU load and RAM load.

 The case is intended for high end gaming as well as workstations. Also there is no CD/DVD drive, this decision for this was based around USB boot/installer drives becoming more popular as an installation method rather than CDs/DVDs, since services like Itunes and Steam have become a more popular choice for downloading.