My favorite thing at SIGGRAPH this year was NVIDIA’s “Sketch Match.” The basic idea is, they give you a theme on the spot, and you and seven other artists have twenty minutes to draw a masterpiece that incorporates that theme, plus the NVIDIA logo.
NVIDIA kept all the original drawings, but when I got home I banged out a recreation of one of my entries (below). The theme for this one was “music.”
I didn’t win, but I did get a tongue-in-cheek “Near-Winner” ribbon, which is hands-down my favorite swag from the show.
My day job. [EDIT: former day job] I worked on the physically simulated injury and death reactions, as well as the horse control system. So think of me whenever you shoot someone or ride a horse!
Trying to find a good watercolor pencil + ink combination, where watercolor washes don’t dull the line art. For this test, I applied pencil directly over a wide line of Winsor & Newton black India ink. For each color, both swatches were applied dry, and the lower was worked over with clean water. (The stars indicate the lightfastness rating from inside the tin.)
I recently bought a new computer, and was dismayed to find that my Cintiq 12WX developed the “jitter bug” when connected to the new system. This is an incredibly annoying problem that’s quite widespread — just Google “Cintiq jitter” and you’ll find numerous accounts of wobbly lines, and claims from dissatisfied customers that Wacom believes that the issue is unavoidable.
Here are some samples of the problem from my own computer using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro 2009:
No, the shakiness is not from my hand!
The problem, as it turns out, has to do with the Windows Vista/7 Tablet PC Input Service. I stumbled across this nugget in the SPB 2010 Readme file:
There are Vista performance issues due to a conflict between SketchBook Pro and Vista’s Input Services. These services automatically start up whenever a tablet driver is installed and interacts with the tablet for hand writing recognition and more. The services affect performance, the mapping of stylus buttons, and more. For ideal performance when using SketchBook, Input Services should be disabled.
I turned off this service, and voila! Nice, clean lines:
Here are Autodesk’s instructions for turning off the Tablet PC Input Service:
Go to the Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools.
Double-click the Services shortcut to open the Services window, which lists all the services available through Vista.
Scroll down the list and right-click Tablet PC Input Service.
Select Stop from the menu provided. Input Services is now disabled and your Wacom driver takes over.
I hope that Wacom and Microsoft can work together to solve this problem. It doesn’t bode well that I’m seeing it on Windows 7 RC (build 7100). I will do what I can to spread the word, starting with this blog post.
EDIT: I originally said that you could get around this problem by permanently disabling the Tablet PC Input Service, but that does not seem to be the case. I’ve discovered that I need to enable/disable it every time I boot my computer. I’m using the retail version of Windows 7 Ultimate now, and this is still an issue.
Just noodlin’ around with Autodesk Sketchbook Pro 2009. (Special thanks to Creaturebox for the free copy of sbp2009 they gave me at Comic-Con last year!)
I saw a really cool new Disney animated short at Siggraph this year, called Glago’s Guest. That’s right, Disney is back in the business of animated shorts, yay! And from the looks of it, in a big way. GG was fantastic, and I couldn’t wait to share it with my family. Word was, it would be screening in front of Bolt.
So I took the kids last weekend to see Bolt, and was disappointed to find that Glago was nowhere to be seen! Why Disney, WHY?
