Yay! The final part of my Details series is up on the Alias Design website.  Of particular note was that this part in the series was done in the Mac OS X version of Alias! I am pleased as punch to be working natively in Alias on my Mac and have few reasons to keep my Boot Camp partition around now. I look forward to all the projects that lay ahead for this software and it really is a game changer for my process. I plan on having a more in-depth ‘review’ soon!

Look for more tutorials from me in the future, but in the meantime enjoy!

J.

Finally. After more than a year and a half after the PC release, Pixologic finally announced the September 29th availability of ZBrush 3.1.2 for Mac OS X. I would find it very interesting to read a case study of the goings-on at Pixologic regarding the development.

It’s Mac Intel only which is inconsequential to me, but my condolences to the Power PC crowd out there who were hanging on.

I bought my ‘Upgrade’ in April (they’ve been taking pre-orders since the PC version was announced way back when) and have been anxiously awaiting it’s arrival. In the meantime, there have been a few very notable and somewhat entertaining threads over at the ZBrush Central forums regarding this debacle. As mentioned before – I would be really curious as to what the whole story is. Amongst the Mac ZBrush hold-outs it seems to be widely regarded as a PR train wreck. You can enjoy the more than 2300 posts (as of this writing) here.

Here’s my first zBrush thing. I did this in Boot Camp just after having bought the Mac version which came with a complimentary PC license because the Mac version didn’t work on the Mac naturally. Since a lot of the sculpting features depend on texture maps and all my software is Mac licensed (i.e. Photoshop), switching back and forth between PC and Mac OS X was too cumbersome to be practical – hence my excitement for the native Mac version to come out. Cheers and happy ZBrushing!

Way back, before the turn of the century; that’s the year 2000, (Yeah, that turn of the century – and only if you believe the 21st century started in 2001) myself and a group of other artists did a super quick project for Pangea Software. Apple was about to refresh the original gumdrop iMac’s with a new graphics processor and need some games to show it off. Brian at Pangea had had some other successes with shipping games directly on the Apple’s platform and was willing to give it another go. Out of the 2 1/2 month effort, came Cro-Mag Rally – a fun little Mario Kart-style game that follows a band of cavemen and women as they race through a variety of tracks each representing a different landmark era in the evolution of civilization.

About a month ago, the game was re-released for the 3G iPhone and it now lives on. Apple, in fact, just made a new ad for the iPhone featuring the game as a center piece. Watch it here.

When I started the project, I was still working at Thomson. When I finished the project I was working at Motorola – I was also newly wed. That was a very busy summer – not unlike this one actually – except without all the job changing and marrying and stuff.

I had taken a trip to Hong Kong right after Brian and I had gotten in touch with each other. So, I took advantage of the 20+ hour flight to do some sketching for the game. Here are some to enjoy. They have always been some of my favorite pencil doodles. The “Caveman Industrial Designer” has become bit of an icon for me.

Enjoy…

I also had the privilege of creating the characters; Brog and Grag. I think that’s cave speak for boy and girl. Anyhow, for some reason they ended-up looking a bit like Neanderthal versions of a certain bride and groom. She married me anyway. Whew…

Cheers,

J.

My boss alerted me to somebody referring to the Clover 1S as being Apple-like. Thrilled, I googled around and sure enough, found the Pulling Shots blog.

It is [also] really slick. It’s design, though primarily black, is reminiscent of Apple and their tight tolerances.

I am honored.

I’ve been looking for a reason to blog about the 1S for a while and this this seems like a great occasion. Never mind that the post on Pulling Shots is a year old. It’s new to me and the Clover team is is still building steam.

The guys (and girls) over at Clover are a fantastic bunch and a lot of fun to work with. I’m glad that they’re getting the great press that they’re getting. More power to them! Their product has been a joy to work on and it’s always great to be in the company of design savvy clients that really believe in what they do. I’m sure the copious amount of caffeine they ingest doesn’t hurt either…