The new slogan Nukeation is going with is INNOVATING FORM™. The spinoff of that slogan will be carried over to our upcoming product - which is STILL untitled! That slogan will be "Innovating Form Creation".

We plan to put out a CTP soon It will require Visual Studio 2003 to work (2005 support is being added tho). It will help you create the visual portion of your app in about 1/18th of the time it usually takes a normal developer - maybe even less!

Here's a teaser wallpaper we're using internally.

wallpaperpregenerate.png (26.35 KB)

I invite you to register for the CTP at http://www.nukeation.com/ruid/ - and get a 30% discount on the software as soon as it's released in mid/late June. The CTP will be released some time in late May.

Even though it is downplayed on our current website, Nukeation is heavily involved in Developer Graphic Services. That is, in addition to our usual b2b graphics, web, and multimedia services, we also provide graphics-oriented services to the Developer community. This includes everything from creating the toolbar and application icons to designing the UI to physical package design. We do it all.

The cool thing is we've recently been hiring people who are either designers turned developers, or developers turned designers. This discovery was an accident, but those of us who are like that have churned out more successes (for us AND for our clients) than the others.

In our upcoming re-vamp of Nukeation (the company as well as the site), I intend to highlight our new(?) focus on Developer Services. In the meantime, if you would like to know more, just drop us a line to be sent the free Developer Sample Kit. We are putting up a new Sample Kit made with .NET 2.0 this weekend. All of you who have asked for it will be emailed a link to it.

In the coming months as the Avalon/WinFX beta 1 will ship, we intend to provide Avalon design services to companies that want to get a headstart on the Longhorn wave. Despite the somewhat drab presentation at WinHEC, Avalon and WinFX will be a major boon to the developer world. For more information on Avalon services, feel free to drop me a line (click that little envelope icon at the bottom of the page).

Skinning Metal

 

See also: PwopCatcher Skinning Video (new)

 

It all started when Carl Franklin, CEO of PWOP Productions Inc suddenly mailed me saying “I got a chance to change the world.” Carl was starting a software project that would change PodCasting forever (among other things). He wanted me to come up with a few concepts of what it should look like – it had to be skinned.

 

Carl had this abstract idea of something “warped”. After racking my brain for over 9 minutes, I sat down with my Tablet PC, and sketched out a quick metal skin with pencils and markers. Ripped out holes, embossed metal letters, and digital LCD screens found home on this metal object.

 

 

 

The idea got a solid ‘thumbs up’, and the work began.

 

Before I start blabbering about the whole process, I must point out that a good deal of ideas in the project were Carl’s or came from our discussions and my memory may elude me, so I may forget to mention, but that does not mean I forgot … umm, you know what I mean.

 

Metal Bashing

Now, there are some amazing tricks you can pull off in Corel PhotoPaint (or Photoshop, though PhotoPaint does have some tools that kick Photoshop’s ass) to achieve realism and create good looking metal and glass objects. But there are mixed methods that create even better effects – and that’s exactly what I opted for.

 

The first thing to do was create the base or body of the skin. It needed a solid, metallic feel – and what better to use than actual metal. I went down to a junk yard and got an old 3x3 aluminum plate. Aluminum is light, easy to manipulate and had the perfect bluish/galvanized tint. I marked out the rough outline of the body on the aluminum. Using an old rusted (purposefully) heavy pair of scissors, I took out the excess area from the sheet, leaving me with a rough shape of the body. The next step was to make careful incisions along key points of the body’s shape. The old, rusty scissors made jagged cuts. With some heavy duty gloves, I tore out the remaining excess metal with the help of the incisions. The remaining metal sheet was shaped like a ‘random’ shard of a space ship or something.

 

 

 

Now, the body needed depth. It’s a 0.5mm sheet. Very thin! So, I manually bent the edges. And made some noise with a hammer (along with some bumps and dents on the sheet). Now, the skin was looking closer to what I had in mind.

 

Point to be noted: There are limits to what you can do with a metal sheet to match the image in your head – these limits consist of mostly time, budget, and mainly your sanity. Scared of ruining this perfect shard of a spacecraft, I took pictures of it with my digital camera at 2848x2136+ - that’s very hi-res for an 800x600- skin. The brownish shine you see is my shirt. I tried to remove the coloring, but later on, it really helped me with some effects.

 

I decided to make the holes and other effects digitally. Taking samples from various regions of the body, and some hand-painted artwork on the Tablet PC, I ended up with a nice rectangular hole.

 

 

 

 

Depth was still lacking. This would need another round of photography. Taking my trusty camera, I headed off to the junkyard again and found the textures I wanted in an old hood of a car crash, a surgical lamp, and a failed metal sculpture project (I’m guessing it was that). The new photos were cleaned up and merged with some of my ‘proprietary blend effects’.

 

 

Pixel Bashing

Now came the digital part. I had to create LCD panels. Instead of going for “embedded” panels, I created solid, object-like, flat, rounded edge, glass displays. Painted them black, and placed them inside the central hole. The LCD screens would give the ‘status’ of the application. I created two warning-striped tabs, which would act as buttons, ‘behind’ the body on the top and bottom.

 

I won’t go too much into the detail of the process here, as it involves some trade secrets of mine, and the rest is just plain boring. Pixels pushed here, pixels pushed there, and so on. So, let’s skip to the future a bit.

 

And here we have, finally, a metal shard of some space voyaging vehicle with cool shines, metal anomalies, LCD displays, and wires hanging underneath it.

 

 

The PWOPCATCHER title you see in the lower right is homage to the ‘used universe’ / X-Wing paint effect from Star Wars.

 

You’re probably wondering why the makers of this space ship would make a LCD panel facing a metal wall, or why would there be buttons on OUTSIDE of the hull. Y’see this kind of technology and advanced thinking will not be seen in our race for the next 3 millennia. Remember, this is future technology. We haven’t invented it yet.

 

There were numerous changes made in the design process that weren’t in the original concept. There are some changes that will be made still. We keep improving on this, and won’t stop until it’s perfect. I’ll post updates to any major changes here.

 

Here is a screenshot of the skin in action!

http://www.nukeation.net/nukefiles/workinprogress.jpg

 

We have actual 32-bit transparency, full antialiasing, drop shadows that haven’t been seen before in this world (at least to my knowledge), and under the slick looking exterior, is a core that is made with the sole purpose of changing the world.

 

Last but not least, if you want to see an animated timeline of this skin's development, head on over to:

http://www.nukeation.net/nukefiles/NukePWOPSKINBORG.html 

 

Updates on the skins, the actual software and its availability, and much more will be posted as soon as it is available. You can find proper updates about the app at Carl’s blog http://weblogs.asp.net/cfranklin/

 

I’ll be posting another short like this one about our other skin code-named ‘SmokingGlass’. It’s just as fascinating as this one, if not more so.

 

UPDATE: See the step-by-step video of this skin.

 

EQUIPMENT USED:

Hardware - FujiFilm S7000 digital camera, rusty scissors, old hammer, 1 3x3 sheet of used aluminum, grey matter (6 oz.)

Software - Corel PhotoPaint, Pwop SkinMaker (for skin definition)

The cloud photos I posted in my last entry and on www.PixelatedFocus.com turned out to be icemakers! They rained hail in my region (tho not where I live). This is a freakin' desert! We hardly get rain, and now we have hail? Geez!

Well, the expect good rain this year, and early on (usually it starts in July, but may start in June this year) so I'm gonna be uploading QUITE a lot of cloud pics and other natural shots soon.

It's very rare for me to update my sites (content wise, at atleast) twice in one week, but I just couldn't resist.

This first image is part of a project I recently did for www.PWOP.com which I will soon blog about. If you can guess what it is in under 12 seconds, you win a free trip to Hawaii for two.

This second image is my trip to cloud #9.

You can find more images at www.pixelatedfocus.com

I've been waiting for a long time to actually show off my bike! This is where I REALLY start liking having my own blog. :)

This baby is a 150cc, 3-stroke, 5 gear Bajaj PULSAR. I call it the "Pulsar Skate", named after Mirax Terrik's cargo freighter, so the naming credit goes to Michael A. Stackpole.

The Skate still gives me about 70km per litre, and it has run just over 9000 kilometers. I don't go into town frequently. I live close to the hills, and I often go there for hiking and photography.

I've been waiting to customize it, but it keeps getting delayed. If nothing else, I'm going to put those warning stripes in the central and aft body "recesses" - the two long bevels.

The Skate weighs exactly 267 kilograms, which is about 3 average human males combined! It's a drag (no pun intended) when I have to drag it for about 12 kilometers from the hills back to town when I get a flat! It can top at about 120kmph, tho I haven't dared take it beyond 100. And that's only coz there were potholes the size of the Grand Canyon. Wait till I go on the national highway.

Finally found the time to upload another batch of photos taken on my FujiFilm S7000. I made a couple of trips to the hills a few days ago, breaking my 11 day hermitage (I never went out of my house/office for almost 2 weeks!).

There are some new interesting super macro shots, as well as some "wild life" shots, and one of Dad being plain ol' silly. :)

Check it out: http://www.pixelatedfocus.com

(it's Sprite® in a glass, if you can't guess)

I've been involved in a project called PWOPCaster with Carl Franklin of PWOP Productions Inc (www.pwop.com) and of .NET ROCKS fame (www.dotnetrocks.com). This is a very cool new podcasting client with a great content delivery system. You can find out more at Carl's blog:

http://weblogs.asp.net/cfranklin/archive/2005/04/19.aspx 

I've been involved in the graphics/UI side of things as well as the designing of Pwop.com. Now, okay, so we're not going to talk about this until it's all done, but I can tell you this - it has been some of my best work - and the functionality these guys have written in is FANTASTIC. Keep listening to .NET ROCKS or MONDAYS (http://mondays.pwop.com) and you'll be the first to get the beta.

If you're into .NET, you will like to know that his one of the best pieces of managed code apps out there! It'll be very interesting.

I recently talked to Nathan Dunlap who works in the Avalon team at Microsoft and is a very hot designer - check out the An Hour with the Avalon team at Channel 9 at http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=58634, where you can see him in the video and his amazing work as well - and I asked him whether Avalon will have Merge modes (Blend Modes for you Photoshop'rs) or not. He said that it is one of the top priorities for him and he also wants them badly. I'm telling you, its so good to have a real hardcore designer working amidst the developers at Microsoft. :) Anyways, so he said that community feedback helps push these features into existance.

So, this is a call to all you designers out there. Start sending feedback to Microsoft. We want blend modes. We want ADD and SUBTRACT and MULTIPLY and XOR and everything! :)

And on a related yet seperate note, I have begun work on my articles while I'm still on the Avalon kick - tho I doubt it will go away. It's a natural high for designers like me. And to have it not only co-exist, but WORK WITH MY CODE --- oh man, I'm... I'm... I'm speechless! You just cant describe the feeling. AVALON ROCKS! It just rocks. PERIOD.

I have decided that with the upcoming release of Avalon and WinFX SDK Beta, the world needs a good developer-to-designer and vice-versa "dictionary" for creation good Avalon apps. I'm currently planning on writing a series of articles (maybe try to get them published on MSDN) about Avalon, the WinFX SDK, and graphics design for Avalon.

The articles will probably be published here (if MSDN turns me down) for the moment and subsequently released as e-books with sample code and all for free. :) I'll be posting updates on the articles, their topics and expected release dates. For now, everything will be based on Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2005 and the March 2005 CTP of the WinFX SDK. If there are any suggestions or questions about the whole WinFX development scene, please feel free to e-mail me and I would try to work them into the articles. Right now, the topics I want to cover are: general Avalon development, how Avalon fits in the Windows Forms world, basic UI with Avalon, 3D UI with Avalon, and Avalon timelines and animations.

UPDATE: The series has been titled "AVALONfiltered", and the first two articles will be "An idiot's introduction to Avalon" and "First crack at practical Avalon".

Avalon is by far the best decision on Microsoft's part since their move to .NET. The designer (and I mean the person, not the IDE component) has always been left out of the Windows app world. With all the mind-boggling web design that you can see out there, there is no telling what designers and developers together can create with the Avalon engine. The intrinsic support for 3D is so cool, you can't put it in words.

I've been working on a really graphics intensive software recently, and it is all being done in a flat 2D environment with PNG alpha channels. There are so many limits to all this. You can easily emulate the things you see in Avalon with proper usage of DirectX, but this is really tough to do for something as "trivial" as a UI. The underlying code layer would be hell, and modifications would be the spawn of satan. But with Avalon, it's all gone! All gone!

The even better thing is, the developer is kicked out. No offense, but developers are not usually the best people to get a UI done from. Sure you can code it all, but they (look at me - speaking as if I were not a developer) don't have the eye for consumer-response oriented design. That is where the designer comes in. That's what they're trained to do. Capture the eye with the coolest designs. And of course these are some of the main services we are offering at www.nukeation.com - avalon based design services to be added BEFORE it is released to the public.

I just jump with boundless joy whenever I see a new feature in Avalon. The impact it will make is totally understated. People still dont comprehend the full spectrum of Avalon. Wow. New UI. No. It's not just new UI - it's your ticket to very high revenues.

Just started reading the blogs I haven't had time to read in a while, and I stumbled upon Nickolas "ActiveNick" Landry's comments on the whole MVPs for VB6 movement. I have to say it is the best comment on the whole thing after Carl Franklin's "Get over it!".

To qoute Nick:

"So where am I going with this? If you started as an “unmanaged” VB developer, let me ask you something: Have you ever been challenged as to the seriousness of your choice development tool by a C++ developer before? Unless you’ve been secluded in a Y2K bunker since Windows came out, it’s probably happened. VB developers have been the target of C++ jabs for ages now (well, you know what I mean, computer ages are much shorter than historical ages) and you may wonder as to why that is. I think I can detect a glimpse of understanding in some of you. You guys have used VB 3.0 before, right?"

and

"VB is now part of the great .NET family as a first class citizen, not some unwanted child raised in the corner as an afterthought."

If you're even remotely connected to VB, go read this 'expose' at:

http://www.infusionblogs.com/blogs/activenick/articles/60.aspx 

I guess I should mention that I've been a BASIC programmer since 1987 (used 128BASIC on a ZX Spectrum+ with 128K RAM), and Visual Basic since 3.0 (well, professionally at least - and Microsoft's Version 3 of everything is always better). Go VB.

A big .!.. to all you VB 6 "stick-on"'s.

I just finished reading Eric Sink's (http://notalegend.com) very cool article in the "Business of Software" series: http://msdn.microsoft.com/Longhorn/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnsoftware/html/software04072005.asp - Go read it. In fact, if you haven't go read all his articles at http://msdn.microsoft.com/longhorn/

As a casualty of an unsuccessful Geek & MBA co-founded company, I know exactly what Eric writes about. Here is a conversation from my past. I'm D, btw.

X: How is the development coming along?

D: A bit behind schedule, but the new features were worth it! We're about 70% finished. It should take us about 3 more weeks to finish up.

X: I see. How about we start selling the stuff you have finished and we can push the rest once you're done?

D: <reply censored to maintain the class of this blog>

A month or so after that conversation we parted ways to prevent us from killing each other. And we both are now much happier.

Eric brings up a GREAT point that Geeks need to develop their business and marketing talents. I know how useful that is as I lead the business and marketing side of my business. Almost half my clients are developers themselves and so far they like working with me. (Or so I believe.) So, I can't recommend his advice enough.

I have another solution. While we don't know the outcome or the specific timeframe of when genetic engineering will be available to everyone, we CAN do something about this right now. I urge each and every fellow developer to try to find spouses who are MBA's and marketing wizards. You can't do much about your life (tho you can do a lot!), but just think what you can do if your children have the genetic material of both geeks and business people! They just might have better childhoods too - and quite possibly less (or none) of the so called inferiorities and qualities that define the standard geek or dork or nerd. But they would still have a developer's blood in them.

This is what we need. A new breed of Geek.

That being said, I'm looking for a Marketing executive. Female. Should like 5'9" geeks. Must be able to adjust to my 18 hour coding stints. Must be able to endure budgets wasted on new technology. I like reading, writing, and long walks on the beach. :P

I feel old writing this. I really do. I always thought of myself as one of the "young dudes". Guess that's not true anymore. It has now officially been more than 10 whole years of being out in the professional world. I started working on the side when I was in school (6th grade, I think) in 1995 - teaching a class once a week about Autodesk Animator Pro and Autodesk 3D Studio 2.0 (we're talking days of 3D in DOS!). Then went on to freelancing, teaching programming, and eventually in 1998 ended up founding Atomic Diaper Productions which was quickly and thankfully changed to NUKEATION Studios - www.nukeation.com - and is the same place I have been since.

When you do a decade of graphics, there are statistics - impressive statistics - and here they are:

Pixels pushed on official jobs:           2,638,400,000+

Pixels pushed on personal stuff:      38,910,580,000+

Pixels pushed on volunteer work:      1,900,000,000+

And it all comes down to -              43,448,980,000+

And I'm not even counting the 3D stuff I've done - nor the vectors coz they dont HAVE pixels. Anyways, it's times like this when you want to reflect on all you have done, and all you want to do. And you also want to give credit where credit it due. So, Jessica, Michael, Dana - my old animation gang; Heeren (www.fissionvector.com), Aoi, Tim, and everyone else who is working or has worked with Nukeation, thank you for making my pixels more shiny. :)

huh?