Electric Mouse Dreams Day 6: Cristin Pescosolido

Was there ever a dream you had of people riding through mountain terrain on gravity-defying electric mouse vehicles? I had such a dream, sometime in the 90s. I told my college chum, Cristin Pescosolido, all about it! Our High Priestess of Gothtober, Cristin, has used special effects magic to give us a glimpse of just how REAL this dream could look.

Sketch of mouse dream by JP, and the inner workings of Cristin’s application of Unreal Engine below! 3-D wow!

Here is Cristin’s account of creating this lively futuristic scenario:

“This was made entirely in blender and unreal engine 4 over the last three weeks.
I had never used either package before, so the learning curve was steep.

The modeling, texturing, and animation was done in blender. The shading, particles, lighting, and landscape was done using UE4.
There is still a bunch of stuff I need to figure out, like reflection maps, audio (the mix output from UE4 is still experimental in the version I was using) and why my particles didn’t render in every shot.
But hey, it was a huge amount of fun, and I did a lot of writing of my own materials, something I’ve never done before. Blueprint is fun, and I can’t wait to learn more (and maybe dig into c++ instead of blueprint inside UE4).

Gothtober 2012 is LIVE!!!

The step-by-step sketching process of illustrating the Gothtober 2012 interface, launching on our 10th Anniversary!

Eeeeeeaaauuuuuggghhhh!!! It’s GOTHTOBER TIME, we are LIVE!
Presenting another 31 selected autumn varietals for your discerning visual appetite, please visit www.gothtober.com this instant and tell me if you thought that scare crow stuck its tongue out at you. It did, right? (I hope so!)

More details about DAY 1 posted soon, but for now, let’s give a hat’s off to Jesse Albini, Cristin Pescosolido, Josh Fielstra and yes… me, because we were all clenching our butt cheeks getting this one out the door! There were technical difficulties, but thanks to quick thinking, ingenuity and common sense, you now have the calendar, and it’s time for the countdown!

DAY 2: Gothtober’s FIRST ANAGLYPH FILM!!!

Today’s film is a technological tour de force in countdown calendar films. You can watch Cristin Pescosolido’s film “Swifty and the Atomo-Flora” in 3-D! All you need are a pair of the classic red and greenish/bluish glasses, and you can see the eye-popping action fly out at you!

Shot with an HD 3-D camcorder, observe what happens when a visitor from another planet decides to visit our earth!

The bright, pumpkin-colored costume is off of Tom Swift and His Subocean Geotron. To create “Swifty,” Cristin used orange kite fabric and an excel spreadsheet to help calculate the roundness of each piece of fabric to make an inflatable sphere. Cristin sewed the costume together. Air intakes at the bottom of the suit help fans that sit in mesh pockets within the geotron.

You also might notice that the film has only ONE actor, and that’s not a typo. Using her mad digital-compositing skills, Cristin duplicated Jennifer Howard (in the white hazmat suit) running out of the tunnel approximately 7 – 8 times to get the desired effect of a gang of people running. Jen Howard plays Swifty as well.

Chris Morgan, composer, says “I just started playing around with ideas for fun, and ended up with the following, which incorporates elements such as an homage to the dire straits “money for nothing” drum fill, cyber-stripper doo-wop music, police radios and the swiss-made hang drum.”

Gothtober Fun Fact: You can find Swifty’s earlier adventures behind DOOR 2 of both Gothtober 2005 and 2006 in the archives.