New Video: Melodies of Life from FF9 Piano Colection

Played another piece from Final Fantasy IX Piano Collection, it's called Melodies of Life. My most favourite song so far.

New Video: Tifa's Theme from FF7 Piano Colection

Wow... it's been a long time...

Finally I've got some time to do my own things, so I took the time to play two piano pieces from Final Fantasy Piano Collection. This one is called Tifa's Theme, it's very soothing. I like slow songs... dunno why. Probably because it's easier to play...

This time around, I lowered the camera angle by a bit so the pedal is visible.

I hope you enjoy it. Please feel free to comment ^_^

Mii-chan Ohayou! (Completed)

It's been a while (once again) since I last posted my entry. But only yesterday, I got the time and the urge to finally complete the painting. I attempted to make the lighting more dramatic but didn't like it. I wanted it to have more colourful and cheerful atmosphere so this was the result.

The painting was done using Corel Painter IX using only acrylics-based media and later retouched in Adobe Photoshop CS2. I tried to make the hair to have more anime feeling, but it didn't go well with the overall "3d" feeling of the environment, so I drew the hair strands individually and blend it with the base hair colour. It took me 4 weeks to finish this painting, while only effectively worked on it for 40 hours (a week's worth of paid work... ermm... uh-oh).

I hope you like this one and please let me hear your thoughts. I was gonna say this was my first attempt in painting, but do feel free to criticise as much as you want. Thanks for your patience ^_^

Mii-chan Ohayou! (75% completion)

It's been a while since I posted the last entry. Reason being, I was very busy with lots of unfinished stuff and they're unworthy of posting. Today, I spent about 8 hours to continue painting Mii-chan Ohayou!, but still 75% towards completion. There's a lot of mistakes in the painting that I haven't fixed. But oh heck, I'm posting this anyway just for the sake of posting it. Well, hope you like it so far (the progress..) I promise the end result will have more intensity in it. As always, please feel free to comment, criticize, etc. Thanks ^_^

Papervision3D: Piano Demo

I just created another "unfinished" project. But this time it's for a noble cause. One of the guys in YouTube had requested a recording of an LCD panel for the Eyes On Me song that I posted sometime ago. So, for that purpose, I thought creating one in PaperVision3D might actually be better. And I was right ^_^. It's easier to learn with the 3D interaction rather than staring on the striking blue-lit LCD panel.

Here's a bit of explanation how I did it. For the recording, I recorded the movie, audio, and notes altogether to produce separate files. The movie was recorded as raw AVI and converted into FLV. The audio was recorded as raw WAV and converted into MP3. The piano notes were recorded as MIDI and converted into xMIDI (Xml for MIDI). They were all then parsed into the application and played in sync (well at least it tries to LOL). Hardest part for me was to balance the performance and the details. I ended up tweaking it for average of 15-20 fps on Pentium 4 and was quite happy with it (it's not a real-time game anyway).

So please enjoy and let me know if you have any feedback. Or at least, enjoy the songs ^_^. And please be patient while downloading, as each song is about 15 megabytes (it's worth it!!! .... i hope).

Oh, and here are the links to MP3 files if you want to download and keep them. Copyright remains mine, but you can distribute it whatever you want LOL.

Final Fantasy VII - Aerith Theme (3.7Mb)
Final Fantasy VIII - Eyes On Me (3.0Mb)
Uncharted Waters - Mast in the Mist (2.9Mb)

Sketch: Mii-chan Ohayou!

The previous drawing of Mii-chan in bikini attracted some controversy in a number of forums on which I posted the artwork. Some people say they prefer cute mii-chan than a fleshy one. So here is a new drawing to make up for it LOL. (The title "Mii-chan Ohayou!" literally translates to "Good Morning, Mii-chan!".) I am going to color it in Corel Painter IX later on, currently still trying to play around with the feel, and to be honest, it's a really neat piece of software. So, please keep visiting. I hope to complete the coloring before end of this week.

Sketch: Mii-chan Style Guide - Figure

Finally, the style guide for Mii-chan in full figure. I put a bikini style so it hides only as little flesh as possible. I spent about 6 hours in total for both, a lot of corrections especially around getting the proportion that I want. This time the anatomy reference book became my close friend :D. Well, I keep saying it's a style guide, but in actuality, to be a style guide it needs to have a proportion measurement. But I was just too keen on seeing the end result and so I removed the guides lol. Well, I hope you like this style too. Please comment and any critics are highly welcome ^_^

Sketch: Mii-chan Style Guide - Face

I just found a new anime titled "Someday's Dreamers" and the poster art manga style is very impressive. After some thoughts, I realize I'm still not satisfied with the previous styles that I've drawn for Michiko-chan. Seriously, at this rate, I'd never start drawing Michiko-chan for real. So I took a step back and restart from scratch to find another more suitable style. So this is sortof a "style guide" for the new style. It's just for the face though. Hopefully, I can commit to this style this time. I will be posting the full body style guide by this weekend.

Music: FF8 Piano Collection - Eyes on Me

This is probably an embarrassing entry since I'm not that good in playing piano. But I just love the song too much. It's the piano version of Final Fantasy VIII, titled "Eyes on Me". The original song was sung by Faye Wong and became a hit. This is also my first attempt in youtubing. Playing this song was giving me a bit pressure, because it was being recorded. I was like "argghhh, my finger slipped!!" for two times before I got it right the third time. To top that, the digital camera that I was using can only record max. 3 mins of video regardless of the memory space. So, I was like... "hurryyyy, finish the song!! finish the sonngg!!". And well... this is the result. All in all, please feel free to comment and criticize. Thank uuu!!

Papervision3D: Dynamics Demo

Finally after some time, I managed to get back into Papervision3D sound and safely :). I wanted to continue the WingZero project, but reckoned I need a particles generator before getting doing the missiles. So this is a little experiment that I've developed, which once optimized will be integrated into the WingZero game.

Well, I followed quite closely the notion of a particle system from 3DS Max. So, it allows me to specify the radius angle of the particle spray, particle size, speed, rotation, etc. I can also set the particle to move in wobbly motion. I can also set each particle to vary from the original size, speed, and etc, which creates a more disordered, thus more natural, effect.

Well, enuf said. Have a go and feel free to post any comments, suggestions, critics, etc.