Jay Versluis

How to render with Alpha Channel in Anime Studio 8

November 5, 2014September 11, 2011 by Jay Versluis

We’ve been playing with Anime Studio 8 Pro and love it – for years I’ve been bombarded with “special offer” emails that told me how amazing this programme was so we finally gave in. I’m glad we did – Julia and I are having lots of fun creating 2D animations.

The included tutorials are great, but I believe they’ve been made for previous versions of the software. Some features have changed, and this is one I’ve had trouble funding on the web:

How to render an animation while retaining the Alpha Channel.

Woody dancing at the office

September 3, 2011 by Jay Versluis

Woody is our favourite wooden artists’ manikin. He currently lives on a shelf with two woolly ninjas (Blackberry and Blueberry) but we though it was time that he was brought to life. I was delighted when I found him in the additional content for Poser 7. I animated him using Animate 2 in DAZ Studio …

Adobe Premiere Pro CS 5.5 – my personal hands on review

September 3, 2011September 1, 2011 by Jay Versluis

To complete my migration from PC to Mac I’ve downloaded the trial version of the latest Premiere Pro CS 5.5 yesterday. I bought CS 3 a few years ago and haven’t regretted it, but at work we have CS 4 and now CS 5 and I can see the feature improvements and benefits to our workflow.

As last time, this is a rather large expense for me (£285 for the upgrade, which is still better than £810 for the full version) – however Premiere is a fascinating powerful programme and I know how helpful it is.

My old version has made its money back many times over so I’m sure this version won’t disappoint me either. In fact, I’m quite excited about the new options in version 5.5 and the idea of having it on my laptop.

Here are my hands-on notes, my first impressions and my two cents about Adobe’s rival to Final Cut Pro.

For the geeks: I’m using Premiere on a MacBook Pro with 8GB of Ram, 64 bit OS (Lion) and an Intel Dual Core i7 processor at 2.7 GHz.

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Dancing Robot Splash Screen

August 28, 2011August 28, 2011 by Jay Versluis

I thought I’d share a couple of Splash Screens I created for my (since rejected) iPhone Apps. Splash Screens are loading screens which are shown while the sometimes lengthy startup process would show a black screen – unless you provide an image. Makes for a much nicer user experience.

Dancing Robot (above) is lovely cartoon figure called Klank by 3D Universe – I absolutely love their style! I have a couple of other figures made by them and I’ll show you some pre-production artwork a bit later.

As you may have guessed, Dancing Robot is essentially the same app as Dancing Alien with a different character, an animated background and different music. Guess I won’t be submitting that one to Apple…

Twitter for Beginners

July 22, 2017August 27, 2011 by Jay Versluis

In a surprise move, my wife Julia has just joined Twitter. Welcome, @Julia_V1!

When I was at that point a couple of years ago I remember thinking “why oh why would I even consider joining this… er… movement?” I admit it’s hard to explain what makes it interesting. Twitter needs to be experienced to be appreciated.

Here’s a little how-to guide about the language and conventions used on Twitter, I thought this may be useful for other newbies too.

Grab a coffee while I tell you everything I know about the (apparently) hottest social network in the blogosphere.

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Steve Jobs resigns from Apple over the rejection of my Dancing Alien app

August 27, 2011August 26, 2011 by Jay Versluis

On Tuesday, my “Dancing Alien” App has been rejected by Apple on the grounds that “it wasn’t very useful”. They pointed me to Section 2.12 of their submission guidelines which explains this.

Today, only a couple of days later, my good mate Steve Jobs resigns from Apple, probably as a direct response to this appalling decision. This is the second time in his career that he had a falling out with management over decisions he’s just not 100% behind.

I’d like to say from the bottom of my heart: thank you so much for your support, Steve – but this wasn’t necessary. I appreciate the gesture though, and I’ll put you on my list of Beta Testers so you can run t he app anyway.

I’m already planning my next app which will include the alien, so I’ll let you know how that’s going. So please, nobody else needs to quite their job over this!

How to change your Playstation Network Password after “The Incident” (even though Sony mess you around with a link that doesn’t ever work)

August 22, 2011 by Jay Versluis

Months after “The Incident” at the Sony Playstation Network happened, many users are still having problems resetting their password.

This mandatory security procedure is necessary says Sony, and I can understand that.What I can’t understand is why they keep sending you to the same link to change your password, when all said link does is bring up an error message stating that the site is down.

Let’s take a look how we can remedy this.

I’ve submitted my first iPhone App to Apple

August 16, 2011 by Jay Versluis

I’ve just spent the last three hours trying to make sense of how to submit my first iPhone App to Apple. This is not an easy task, I can tell you that! Now the waiting game starts – let’s see if I’ve done everything correctly. As nice and easy as the end user experience is, …

Creating Dancing Alien v1.0 – Release Notes

August 14, 2011 by Jay Versluis

It’s been an exciting day here at The Render Farm: we’ve decided we wanted to release our first app by tomorrow evening, and the next thing we knew was that Julia’s soundtrack was ready for it. Not even half an hour later we previewed stunning animations with several characters… we couldn’t believe it ourselves – since we’re neither musicians, animators or coders!

I had conducted several tests based on the ImageHop exercise from SAMS Teach Yourself iPad Apps by John Ray, all OK but implementing several views really was hard. I’ve decided instead to keep it ultra simple and literally only have one view for Dancing Alien and one lone “i” button at the bottom right as an About / Credit page with link to our website. Works much better, is much simpler – and more to the point it’s possible to implement by tomorrow evening.

London Riots Business Idea

August 10, 2011 by Jay Versluis

With Anarchy breaking out in London over the last few days, I had a great business idea: sell remote controls for TVs that have been looted! We can also sell chargers for laptops that went walking from PC World & Co. We’ll create an interface where customers can pop on the serial number of the …

Simon from Poser: 3D Animation gone bad

August 1, 2011 by Jay Versluis

Here we have my good buddy Simon – he’s one of the default figures that comes with Poser. I accidentally added two animation imports on top of each other which wasn’t so good for his hip. It looked rather amusing as he twists out of it so I thought I’d post this. It’s also my …

Objective-C: The Final Frontier

July 28, 2011July 28, 2011 by Jay Versluis

It’s been a tough couple of days with my head spinning and – as my wife says – me being not very happy. This is because every book i read about iOS developing appears to be hopelessly out of date. My fault for wanting to get my hands dirty with bleeding edge shenanigans.

Book No. 1 “iPhone Apps for Absolute Beginners” is written really well, however 9 out of 10 examples don’t work. Outdated code, code not reprinted properly, instructions are for Xcode 3, you name it. There’s only so much frustration you can take until you put this to one side and look elsewhere.

Book No. 2 “Teach Yourself iPad Apps” started out a bit tough, but now that I’ve got my head buried deep in this matter sounds more promising by the minute. At least: the examples work, even if they’re based on Xcode 3 too. The author was nice enough to include an updated Xcode 4 chapter on his homepage.

Frustration and agony to one side, let me share with you the exciting things I have managed to build these past few days.

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My first Test App: “How ya’ll doin?”

August 10, 2011July 21, 2011 by Jay Versluis

It’s exciting times here at the hacking front: I’ve deployed several test apps today and had a closer look at Xcode 4.1 – the latest coding environment for iOS and Mac.

After having spent most of the day downloading and installing Mac OS X “Lion” I found out the hard way that Xcode 4.02 was no longer working… so I had to download that as well. Once it was all working I found no major changes had been made in the software other than a spurious error message because I didn’t sign up for the Mac Developer programme and some library couldn’t be downloaded. Let’s ignore this message, shall we?

iOS Development: Let the journey begin

July 20, 2011 by Jay Versluis

It’s only been 4 weeks since I’ve bought my first ever Apple product. We now have SIX in our household and my ISP has just informed me that I’m now downloading over 40GB per month (and should really pay more). I have to admit: iPad, iPod Touch and Apple TV have forever changed our lives for the better.

Ever since I tried Art Acedemy for Nintendo DS I thought wouldn’t it be great to have a tool like that with a bigger screen and more drawing controls? Like the professionals have? Like a Wacom Tablet with a built-in screen? It appears to have arrived as an app for the iPad – and it’s …

My personal Harinezumi 2+++ Review

July 5, 2011July 4, 2011 by Jay Versluis

A few months ago I took a wander around town with my friend Andy Toms, and we happened upon the temporary Photographer’s Gallery not far from Warren Street.

Spontaneous as I am I spent a rather shocking amount of money on a tiny little plastic camera called The Digital Harinezumi 2+++

This little piece of cheap engineering is a 3MP digital camera that’s meant to take “bad” pictures and apply off-the-wall lo-fi effects on the fly. Anything from harsh black and white to over-saturated colours is what you get for £140. Did I mention it does video too?

I’ve fallen in love with it and due to its small size keep carrying it almost everywhere I go. I haven’t experienced the willingness to take digital pictures with any other digital camera. In fact, Zumi feels and behaves like a plastic film camera!

Now that I’ve spent some time with her I can show you some funky results and talk you through the ins and outs of my first every digital plastic camera.

Most images on this page are shot using the Vivid 1 setting - just like this one. No processing was done, all pictures are straight from the camera.

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Half Spoon Sugar

July 4, 2011 by Jay Versluis

Even though this packet of sugar claims it’s OK for another two years at least, it has “Made in 1965” written all over it. I took this picture with the iPad camera in bright sunlight and then added a Rich Lauren effect via Classic Toy. I liked it so much that I did it AGAIN …