If you've ever needed to take photographs of printed artwork you know how hard it is to get them all to match. By applying your artwork to a 3d object you can create the illusion of a tabletop shoot without all problematic issues that would normally arise.

No "umm" counter yet :( maybe I can find someone to hook it up this weekend.

Mentioned

http://cgtextures.com/

What we're making

Over the past year and a half I've spent a considerable amount of time encoding videos for flash. Since videos are usually huge, it's always a delicate balance between good quality and good user experience. As subjective as these "standards" may be, I thought I'd share how we in the biz encode our videos for online use.

flv encoding specs

VBR, 2 pass

Video target bitrate: 850 (something around 1000 is a good place to aim)

Audio bit rate: 128

Keyframe rate: usually 25 (more keyframes = better quality...but be careful)

You can find a more detailed explanation here: Encode to FLV

Even though flash has been around for almost 15 years, the job of flash designer is relatively new. Most of my time at Domani Studios is spent acting as a "bridge" between the design world and development world creating assets that would later be combined with action script and a bucket of other goodies.

Things have changed so dramatically, even in the past couple of years that it's become very important to understand both the design and development process. Setting up your file so that developers can easily use the animation and design assets you've created should be at the top of your list when you're starting a new project.

When we first got The moon project at Domani it became apparent very quickly that rendering hundreds of thousands of images on my local machine would NOT be an option. I also realized it would be a major pain in the ass to set up each machine manually so we decided to set up a render farm. Here's the steps we took to get it up and running and the things I wish I knew ahead of time.

(more...)