OxCreative

Tap Tap Revenge

I was recently introduced to an iPhone game by some friends entitled ‘tap tap revenge’. I had seen the game in the app store and had never bothered to download it.

They encouraged me to do so and I have since been addicted! It’s similar in gameplay to guitar hero and you simply tap the notes as they pass the line at the bottom of the screen. I was stunned to see that they have some really good music – I thought it would all be unsigned acts as the app was free.

What’s More you can play online and against friends!

If you have an iPhone or an ipod Touch, Tap Tap Revenge is definitely worth downloading!

First Tutorial – Blood Effect In Photoshop

I have been planning for a while to create some tutorials and so I was playing around with photoshop CS4 and came up with the following method to creating a blood splatter effect.

Blood Splatter Tutorial

Time: 20 mins
Skill Level: beginners to advanced
Equipment Required: Mac/PC, Photoshop (CS, CS2, CS3 or CS4), Wacom Graphics Tablet (optional)

Step 1
Create a new document in Photoshop – I created a 500 x 500 pixel document.

Step 2
Next, create a new layer and fill the layer with black.

Step 3
Go to the brush selector and choose the ‘soft round 65′ brush (hover the cursor over the brush picture to see the name).

Open the brush panel (F5 key or go to Windows > Brushes) and select the ‘shape dynamics’. Set ‘size jitter’ and ‘angle jitter’ to 100%. Select ‘scattering’ and set ‘scatter’ to 100% and select the ‘both axes’ option. Select ‘other dynamics’ and set the ‘opacity jitter’ to 100%. Finally select the ‘wet edges’ and ‘smoothing’ options.

Step 4
With our customized (customised for us Brits!) brush selected, choose a dark red/maroon colour and brush over the page and you should get the following effect:

 

 

Step 5
Repeat step 4 with a variety of light and darker colours which should leave you with an image like the following:

 

Step 6
Select the magic wand tool from the toolbar and set the tolerance to 60. Select the black area and delete it. Your image should now look similar to the one below:

 

 

Step 7
We now have the basis for our blood splatter but it needs a bit of adjusting to look more realistic. Go to the layer style panel by double clicking on the layer we have been working with. select bevel and emboss  and check both the contour and texture options. Under the texture option, select the cloud texture and set scale  to 81% and depth to +79%. Under the main bevel and emboss settings, use the following settings:

 

Double-click the contour icon and use the following settings:

Use the above input and output percentages for the first point and for the second point use the following percentages:

 

Step 8
The final effect should be the same as below. By adjusting the scatter settings of the brush, it can also be used for freehand drawing.

 

 

I hope this tutorial is useful and am happy to answer any questions people may have. More tutorials will be coming soon!

Work, Stress and High-Tech Gadgets

I love my job. I have good work equipment, great colleagues and the relaxed dress code & flexible hours are fantastic. However, we have had a lot of changes; new projects, current projects expanding and being amended and my workload is huge. It seems like a constant strain to get everything finished in order to meet deadlines and, as the only designer where I work, if I decide to take holiday it just means there is twice as much work when I get back (thus reversing any positive/stress relieving effects of a holiday!).

I’m still hoping there is “light at the end of the tunnel” in terms of workload.

The equipment on the other hand couldn’t be better and to end on a cheery note…..we recently moved the office around and thanks to Brooke and Rich, I got a lovely spacious corner desk and some drawers (this pic was taken before the drawers were put in!).

Google Gone Wild

A couple of days ago (31st January 2009) I received a birthday gift from my wonderful girlfriend -  a 320 gb seagate freeagent go (silver). Now whilst I work on a Mac, I  suggested for her to get me the standard one as opposed to the 320gb seagate freeagent go for mac (silver) which is approximiately $60 more for very little difference.

So after picking it up from the postal office after initially missing the delivery, I was excited to open it and try it out. I ripped open the packaging and plugged it into my macbook pro and waited… and waited and, to my utter disappointment after 10 minutes, still nothing happened.

I quickly went to the seagate website to find out what was wrong. Apparently, some macbooks and macbook pro’s have low usb power and not enough to support a 2.5″ drive. Seagate suggested I would need a usb Y-cable (which draws power from one port and power and data on the other).

As usual my impatience got the better of me and I went to good old reliable Google to scour the wondrous world of forums filled with people’s problems for mac usb power issues.

However, every link I clicked in Google, was flagged up as potentially containing malware and being harmful. My first thought was that I had some sort of hijacking malware on my mac which was affecting my browser and causing the issue.

Google's self discipline

I spent a further 30 minutes looking into anti-malware and spyware removers for Mac before I had the idea to test Google on another computer. Low and behold – Google was wrong!

Due to the usual reliability and problem-free searches I have with Google, the most logical answer to my problem was the last one that I thought of.

It just goes to show that just because something is usually reliable doesn’t mean it always will be.