The Backstory

Jürgen ‘Jot’ Brunner, a dear friend of mine is working more or less alone on a whole indie-game by himself, and since I played some betas so far I can say: I love its atmosphere and how its presented and I bet you’ll think so too if you know Braid. And Jot was looking for some 70’s computer-type font, that was technical yet playful. So I sat one afternoon in the café, caffeinated myself close to cardiac arrest and started painting glyphs.

I oriented myself on digital types, the old utopian computer fonts but tried to always keep the proportions a bit bell-bottomed. Lucky Jot liked as much as I the fact that all characters remained their hand-drawn imperfections and rhythm.

The Sample

Maybe you like it too, so feel free to download the TTF here. The hinting for smaller types is non-existent so better not use it for your love-letters or diary entries in 12 pt or smaller.

Donation & Download

The font is donation ware. So if you want to say a little “thanks” by donating money that would be really nice. Thank in advance!

	Click the Image to download the Digital Disco TrueType Font

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Austria License.

So yesterday I finally had the cash together and some time to pick up the heavy packing case with tons of 1990’s state of the art consoles. There was a a black Game Boy pocket, a painted PlayStation (“it glows under a UV-lamp”), a SNES with 50/60 Hz switch (“So you could play Japanese titles as well”), Nintendo 64 with memory extension, a Sega Dreamcast with modem and keyboard and a Sega Genesis with 32x extension and SEGA-CD drive, something so bulky that you just gotta love it. Everything in good to very good condition, complete with many controllers and memory cards (such as the Dreamcast’s VMU).

Holy frick!

And that was not all, there was a bunch of Sega 32 games, some dream cast CDs, excellent N64 cartridges (such as Golden Eye 007, Ocarina of Time or Perfect Dark) and many PS1 games. I don’t know when I have the time to hook all these consoles up or rather implement them into my museum’s grand hall of ludology (i.e. my dorm room), nor do I know where to put all the stuff! I guess for now I put them back into the big torn box they came in hoping that Ikea might sell some day a Billy-shelf that fits my nerdy needs.

In case you are interested in a complete list of the games I own, you can check out my have-list at MobyGames.

I guess it was one of those days where the simple act of waking up exhausted me so much that everything I did felt so mind numbing and tedious like following a paper trail.

But I won’t bore you even more with my gloomy day, just enjoy some music:
Seph Carissa – Papertrail. 2010.

A click on it takes you to a bigger version at DeviantArt.

On a related note I decided to changed my alias as music producing artist from texx sound to Seph Carissa. I’ve been pondering than for quite a while now and waited for the right name to find me. So there it is, texx is gone, Seph takes over. Why? Long story. Too long to tell, so you I suggest you only listen.

My new track, Vaccine, it a little inspired by recently watching 28 Weeks Later and I wanted to try something longer and more cinematic for a change. So I hope you enjoy it!

Seph Carissa – Vaccine. 2010.

There’s quite a bit I have planned for in 2010. First and foremost I’ll get busy on some new AEtuts+ video tutorials introducing Nuke to the After Effectors among you all and something I have in mind for quite a while now, working title: “The Art and Science of Rotoscoping”. (Everything’s “art” and “science” in visual effects, if you read the books.)

There’s a new series for flickr that I have in mind by the name of “Austrian Details”. There are so many things I encounter that are so typically Austrian in some way and that people from other places probably wonder about when they see it. When it launches I’ll tell you here.

I’ll also be holding Tutorials on the Salzburg University of Applies Sciences again, this year with a main focus on compositing, color grading and VFX.

In May the fmx/10 in Stuttgart will be held again and yours truly is looking forward to cover the whole event on this blog like the years before for those of you who can’t attend.

So I’m getting all educational it seems. And creative. I’ll try to post somewhere something creative I did every week. Since I’m an aggressively creative person that shouldn’t pose any problems to me.

Life’s incredible again! Stay productive and wise! Any single ladies out there, btw?

You may know my blog post about me visit to Berlin this year. I found it a little demotivating to work with the constraints of the layout of my blog and the web in general, and viewing photographs on a computer screen in a web browser is equally rewarding. So I decided to make a book. A book with many colorful photographs I took in Berlin in the past years, accompanied by some personal notes and stuff.

Since it’s priced at very juicy 50 Euros I don’t expect that any of you actually buys it but then I thought “what the hell” so if you’re feeling rich and out of your senses and want to cast a smile on my face then buy one and give it to your friends (or foes).

Thanks for reading!

Today I couldn’t sleep. Maybe the visual overkill of watching Avatar hours before is responsible for it. By the way: A visually and aesthetically stunning movie despite the predictable plot.

After an endless hour of being unable to dream of tall blue people I decided to get up again and do something non-visual on the computer. Since I have quite an obsession with CSI: New York for its cinematography and especially Bill Brown’s music I thought give it another try (and because I already attempted something in that direction earlier.)

I don’t like to repeat myself so I went this time something further away from the symphonic, more towards the electronic genre and even made my first attempt at break-beat at around 0:52.

When listening just picture yourself a typical CSI:NY montage of Sid Hammerback dissecting a corpse with nifty zooms and dolly shots.

texx sound – Investigation / “Who Gave You this Number?”. 2010.

So I would like to hear your feedback. And thanks for listening!

Hey everybody! Sorry for not updating in quite a while yet again, but as you already know: When there’s not much on the blog going on, then there’s much work I’ve been doing. Amidst all the NDAs and top-secret stuff there’s something now from a current project I can show you. Read on if you’re interested in the current progress of the awesome project I am currently involved in and wanna see some eye-candy.

Freightliner Truck Spin from Phil Strahl on Vimeo.

Be sure to watch it in HD!

I’m not going to tell what movie this truck is from, but some of you might already know. I am rather proud of the shading and texturing which was done with simple Blinn-shaders in Maya (apart from the windows, which are a mia-Material). All modeling was done by Jonny Hennebichler by the way, who will be also responsible for the animation to come. And, boy, that’s gonna be awesome!

For the dirt specs and scratches I have three custom Photoshop brushes and I used mostly photos just as references instead of textures, so the only photographs that ended up in maps are on the axes (you can’t see them there though) and the tire rubber.

Since the truck is intended to be rather prominently featured in a 720p production it is rather heavy on details and map-resolution, in total there are 50 maps, mostly for color and specularity, some of them are in 4k resolution.

One frame of this turntable rendered in about 4 minutes on my quadcore, with medium quality Final Gathering enabled.

Since the lighting was done with Physical Sun And Sky I had to do a quick color grading in Nuke where I also added some grain so it’ll give you an impression of the look I want to achieve. It is not perfect, e.g. I chickened out with the reflections, they are too subtle, but in sum I am rather happy with it — I hope you like it was well.

Work in progress.

But I can’t change that fact and don’t get your hopes up, I won’t post the video here for free. I just want to get that point straight. It was a lot of work and I spent days polishing it.

I want the next tutorial to be really worth your money, so as soon as I have some more time on my hands I’m happy to post a new one. One that makes you feel really good about investing $9/month in the tuts+ service.

So feel free to post your ideas and suggestions right here. What’s cool? What do you want to see? Drop some inspiration on me, folks, and write me some comments!