A busy couple of days. I wanted to investigate creating some Spotify Canvases using my software Argus. These are short looping videos with an unusual 9:16 aspect ratio, the opposite of widescreen. I chose 720x1280 and made a normal HD 1280x720 animation, previewing and creating it all sideways, then flipping it when complete. The max length is 8 seconds, which I used. The visual effect is something like an animated gif, rather glitzy and eye catching but could get annoying. They also remind me of the animated 'photos' in the Harry Potter newspapers in the films.
Creating these was very easy in Argus (apart from the aesthetic parts, art always takes time to get right). A lot of time, several hours, was spent updating Argus and detecting minor bugs. This is highly bug-free software; it turned out that what I thought was a bug was actually bad animation design, I tried to move an object that I hadn't told to appear. I've added a few features and shortcuts too.
So today I've created five 'Canvasses'. Here are some screenshots, from Take This Rose and The Dream of Wasps:
I will make these for all of my music releases now; they are not much more work than the extensive work I put into the CD album art.
I found an annoying bug and I'm not sure if it's in Photoshop, the dds converter, or the renderer:
You can't even see it there! Inside the red ring is a very thin strip of pixels, or half pixels. They are only highly visible at certain angles, like exactly 270 degrees as here. The left of the texture should be pure black, no visible pixels at all. The 3D plane which the Lego image is wrapped on to uses exactly 1.000 as the U/V texture coordinates. Setting the values to 0.999 eliminates the line. The texture is 1024 pixels, so this error is about one pixel or less (it looks less). The image though IS black there... I wonder if the texutre is repeating, that the line of pixels are those from the right edge. For a high end graphical application, tiny things like this need tracking down. Little unexpected lines, however faint, are not acceptable. I've never noticed it before.
I'll spend more hours investigating tomorrow. I've uploaded my five Spotify Canvasses for Nightfood and it's been a very long and tiring day. Time to rest.
