Digital Dynamics

Introducing The Trojan Eaters

2009-02-27T22:41:00.002Z

...and the main reason why there hasn't been much activity on this blog recently.

http://www.thetrojaneaters.co.uk/

I joined this new covers band...we're currently putting the finishing touches to our set and hope to be out gigging very soon. We may need to do a couple of freebies though as most of the venues we've spoken to seem a little uncertain about booking a brand new band with no proven track record.

I'm thoroughly enjoying playing again...I always regretted giving it up all those years ago. It's much better this time - we're all pretty much in the same boat...been there before, gave it up for one reason or another, regretted it and now just want to do something more laid back and basically do what we enjoy doing.

...but it does mean my terragen & computer music stuff have taken a back-seat for a while. Let's just see what happens.

(And, yes - I know...any US friends reading this might be giggling at the band name...but we don't really have that brand over here in the UK!?)

Backlash

2008-09-09T07:43:00.002Z

My first completed project using a combination of my Juno-G and VSTs. My biggest problem at the minute is that the Juno doesn't really have enough memory out-the-box for this type of thing...so my mixdown involved making wav files of little sections of the Juno-G stuff and stitching them together on the PC with the VSTs output as well. So the quality of the final result isn't as good as it should be...that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it! Guess I need to buy some ram for the Juno.

Coming Home

2008-08-02T15:37:00.002Z

I posted this over at the planetside forums here and got some great feedback. Unfortunately, I'm struggling with the motivation to try some of the suggestions to finish it off...far more interesting to start something new!? So here it is - chances are it's going to stay as it is.

amazingtunes.com

2008-06-02T22:11:00.002Z

A friend at work told me about amazingtunes.com (about) so I've made myself a profile and added some of my tunes..

http://www.amazingtunes.com/users/ianr

It's probably come at a good time cos I got a strange e-mail from the MAGIX Community today about some upcoming changes as they've "decided that a more precise thematic direction for the community is in order" !?

...let's just see what happens!

Blender Tutorials

2008-05-24T10:07:00.002Z

A round up of some Blender tutorials I've found. The objects themselves might not be particular useful but it's good modelling practice. The 'Earth with Clouds' one is interesting though...and has potential to turn up in one of my Terragen renders soon ;-)

Flag Animation with Blender
Earth with Clouds
Modeling a glass in Blender
How to make a pencil in Blender
Making a chess pawn in Blender
Plastic Juice Bottle in Blender
Screw in Blender

Oxygene

2008-05-14T22:26:00.004Z

...part IV, I think!

It's pretty rough - it's really just something I was mucking around with to get to know the workings of my new keyboard! Done entirely on the Roland Juno G. And a very very cheesy ending...sorry.

Roland Juno G

2008-05-12T11:24:00.002Z

I've just bought one of these! :-)

Club Foot

2008-04-26T15:38:00.012Z

A cover/remix type-thing of the Kasabian song. (It's an amazing song in the first place - so I couldn't go far wrong with this one!)

The Day After Tomorrow

2008-03-26T21:59:00.002Z

I did this for the 'Objects in Terragen 2' theme over on the Google Terragen Group. It seemed like a good idea but I'm not sure if I've quite pulled it off!?

"Sonar"

2008-03-06T23:07:00.004Z

I've splashed out and bought myself Virtual Guitarist 2 (Steinberg)...This is my first attempt at using it!

Maya Pyramid

2008-01-30T21:29:00.001Z

My first Blender object of my own. I've uploaded the OBJ file to Terranuts. Help yourself to it here...but remember it is my first one :-)

BlenderCourse

2008-01-07T21:59:00.001Z

I've been giving blender another go. I didn't get very far with it the last time I tried...I just found myself following the steps in the tutorials without really taking in what I was doing. I'm sure the tutorials I used were fine - I blame my short attention span and eagerness for quick results!

Anyway, I found a little course here which seems to fit better with the way my brain works...a few short lessons with a challenge to try yourself after each one. These are some of the results I produced from the course.

In the air tonight

2008-01-01T12:49:00.000Z

This song seems to be everywhere at the minute...chocolate adverts, greatest hits albums, compilation albums...so I decided to jump on the band wagon!

A little bit of googling and I discovered that he'd used a Roland CR78 for the electronic drum pattern. Then I found some free CR78 drum samples here. All the rest was done using VST instruments & effects either from the Computer Music magazine DVD or downloaded from other free sites.

Still - isn't it amazing how they got that gorilla to play the drums :-)

Moonlit Cliffs

2007-12-03T21:02:00.001Z

This is the T2 version of 'Snow Cliffs'. The moonlit cliffs are simply the base colours layer with both high & low colour turned off and a reflective shader placed straight after it. PaintShop Pro post-work mostly to try and bring out the 'moonglow mood'!

Snow Cliffs

2007-11-25T11:47:00.001Z

This was supposed to be a Terragen 2 project. I started it in T0.9 to use it's speed to find the pov and do some quick surface and atmo tests. I was pleased with the T0.9 results so I went back and did a full render (with some PaintShop post-work). I'm still working on the T2 version - not sure how it'll turn out!

A Work in Progress

2007-11-20T21:44:00.000Z

Still needs a bit of work before it's the finished product, but I'm going to leave it for a while and move on to something else.

The Speaking Ring

2007-10-27T23:20:00.001Z

Another Dark Tower inspired one...I hope this isn't becoming an obsession :-)

I used this tutorial as a starting point for the tower. The stones in 'the speaking ring' are from a 3D object I got from here.

starburst

2007-10-25T20:53:00.001Z

Terragen 0.9 - for the Google Terragen Group's November competition "ATMO"...a bit of an 'anything goes' month..."just make sure the main feature is the sky"

Life on Mars

2007-09-30T10:56:00.001Z

I got the inspiration for the structure from here...not sure if I've quite pulled it off though! The terrain is from a DEM map of mars. I downloaded the tiff from here. Also used the SOPack plug in to colour the structure. Oh, and a little bit of processing in PaintShop.

Dr Who?

2007-09-24T20:39:00.000Z

There's probably millions of versions of this out there...but I just felt like doing something I could have a bit fun with!

Rocky River

2007-09-24T20:06:00.001Z

My entry for the Google Terragen Group's October T2 competition. The theme was "do absolutely whatever you want, just use fake stones shaders".

The group has 2 competitions every month (one for Terragen v0.9 and one for Terragen v2). It's pretty laid back though...it's all about having fun and sharing what you're doing. And they're looking for new members...why not take a look and if you feel like joining in just go for it :-)

Broken Island

2007-09-04T19:20:00.001Z

Manipulation of the terrain or post-processing of the image wasn't allowed for the competition. But I couldn't resist having a go with this one anyway!

Arctic Sunlight

2007-08-23T19:50:00.001Z

My entry for the Google Terragen Group's September's Featured Artist competition. I did it in Terragen 9.43 - I enjoyed going back to this version for a change.

Moonglow after Midnight

2007-07-17T22:38:00.000Z

I've been working on this one for quite a while - it was starting to sound overworked so I thought I'd better wrap it up...for now anyway!

The Blender of the North

2007-06-25T20:38:00.001Z

I've started learning Blender so I can make my own 3D models to combine with my Terragen landscapes. This is my first blender model in a terragen landscape. The model reminded me a bit of the Angel of the North...so that's where the title came from :-)

Here are some notes on what I learnt exporting the model from Blender and bringing it into Terragen...

Creating the model: I followed this beginner's tutorial here
Exporting from Blender: Was fairly straightforward. I exported as a wavefront (.obj) file. You get quite a lot of options so I was expecting a bit of trial & error to get the object out how I wanted it, but just accepting the defaults seemed to work fine. (Except that the first time I got an obj file with no object in it...but that was because the "Selection only" option is on by default and I didn't have my object selected!)
Saving the file in Poseray: If I just added the object straight out of Blender into Terragen then it crashed when rendering. But I found that opening it in Poseray and saving it again worked fine. Oh, and I also carried out the two steps that I found in this forum post.
Positioning the object in Terragen: I mucked about for ages trying to get the model to stand on the mountain...rather than floating above it or buried half-way into it! The way I did it eventually was to add the object as a population - setting the size of the population rectangle and object spacing such that there'll only be a single object in the population. This way I was able to position it where I wanted it in the X & Y co-ordinates, and the Z co-ordinate was automatically positioned so that the object would stand on the ground. Phew! There's more details on adding an object population here.

UPDATE: A fellow member of the Google Terragen Group has posted some screenshots here showing the method he uses to place a single object in Terragen. Thanks dandelO!

Dark Tower

2007-06-05T11:43:00.001Z

I was tempted to do some post-work on this to make the tower into more of a "fantasy architecture" type thing...but I bottled because I'm not that confident with image manipulation. Seeing as there's no post-work been done I might put it in for the Google Terragen Group's featured artist of the month.

Waiting in the Shadows

2007-05-28T15:36:00.000Z

A little bit experimenting with sound effects in the middle...I'm not too sure about that bit now though. As for the rest - the drums are sample loops from the Computer Music magazine cover DVD and the synth sequences in the second half are from Crystal (a free VSTi).

The MAGIX Community

2007-05-16T23:01:00.000Z

I've been looking around for quite a while for a kind of music equivalent of flickr. Somewhere with a friendly, laid-back attitude where you can post your music to get feedback and give feedback on other people's work. I came across the MAGIX Community. I've created myself a profile here, and posted one of my tunes...let's see how it goes!

Tubular Bells (In Progress)

2007-05-14T21:29:00.000Z

...the first 4 minutes.

This is obviously going to be a big project so I'm just going to post what I've done so far and probably do something else for a bit so I don't get too sick of it. Not sure I've mastered the guitar sound yet though!?

Wood Land

2007-04-17T22:51:00.001Z

More playing around with different shaders. There's a twist and shear shader, several fake stones shaders, and an image map shader!

The only thing that's true

2007-03-08T23:28:00.000Z

Ok - maybe a little cheesy...but I enjoyed it!

I've also switched to using Podium from Zynewave. There was a free version with this month's Computer Music magazine, and I was finding that CMusic crashed when using some 'non-Computer Music' plug-ins.

Trance - CM Studio Tutorial

2007-02-18T23:13:00.000Z

Trance isn't especially my thing, but I did this following the tutorial in this month's Computer Music magazine. I learnt a few things about using the software so it was still worthwhile!

Everybody's Changing - In progress

2007-02-15T23:06:00.000Z

I started this one, but it's been a little while and I haven't done any more on it, so I thought I would post it as it is and update it if/when I get round to finishing it. The reason for choosing a Keane song was so I wouldn't have to deal with the guitar sound problem again! ;-)

Black Mountain

2007-02-15T22:56:00.001Z

I made the terrain using the twist and shear shader and the redirect shader in Terragen 2.

First Terragen 2

2007-02-06T20:45:00.001Z

Finally got round to downloading Terragen 2 and went through the steps in the quick start. It crashes during rendering when my screensaver kicks in, but I turned off the screensaver (and other power saving, to be sure) and it rendered fine. Anybody else had this?

Jenny Was a Friend of Mine

2007-01-29T17:31:00.000Z

I thought this would be a fairly easy one to do. Getting a guitar sound was quite hard though.

First Mixdown

2007-01-29T17:27:00.000Z

A short, not especially interesting piece...really just to work out how to use the software. Done entirely with the free software from the DVD on the cover of Computer Music magazine.

Mosaic

2007-01-29T17:20:00.001Z

A mosaic of all my Terragen landscapes so far