BnBGobo99

Hello all, I made a silly little video to make fun of ourselves at work for doing something ridiculous at a ceremony. It's an inside joke so the video itself won't make much sense, but I wanted to share the artwork part of it. (backstory: we are the "krakens" and every time a member of our unit won an award we would run this octopus/squid thing across the stage much like a Chinese New Year lion dance. It didn't go as well as we anticipated and turned to a bit of a joke after a bit, so this was just pointing fun at the whole thing.) I licensed some animal shapes through Envato (that's why I have the copyright banners on the designs, since I licensed it for the video only) and manipulated a few animals together to make our kraken. I then took some paper strip images and a stick image (both through Envato as well) and used Affinity Photo to merge it all together to make the sprites. The biggest challenge was getting the two sides of the paper strips to come together to look like a single ripped piece but still blend into one. I ended up adjusting the levels and black/white output sliders until the two strips had the same tone/gradient and appeared as one. All these sprites were then taken into Blender and animated into the video you see attached. I hope you enjoy it, even if you weren't there to get the full effect of the backstory. kraken.mp4

Hello everybody! One of my Airmen is leaving to a new duty station, and following tradition we are presenting him with an appreciation going-away gift. His family are big Star Trek fans, so I thought giving him a Star Trek themed piano finish plaque a-la a "PADD" would be neat. Everything is a vector. For the hangar, I edited out everybody from the squadron photograph I did and combined it with some test shots without folks to get a full hangar without people. I tossed that image into Inkscape to get a vector from the photograph after doing some edge detection, levels, and black-and-white adjustments in Affinity Photo. I am seeking a blueprint of the hangar so I can make a nice clean one, this vector is a mess but it worked in a pinch. The Star Trek bits are taken from an LCARS program called LCARS 47. I had to convert them to vector, but that wasn't difficult at all since the shapes are easy. The Starfleet Intelligence pin is by the DeviantArt user cbunye (pending permission from him for me to engrave it.) Mockup done in Blender.

Fantastic work! I was able to get CSP on sale with the same intention of using it the way you did, so I'm happy to see how well your workflow turned out to be. Excellent artwork!

When you import an svg into Blender it is tiny, you usually have to scale it up 100x. Shameless plug for a svg tutorial I did for Blender many years ago: https://www.blendernation.com/2013/12/09/tutorial-inkscape-to-blender/ If you plan on adding the graphics from Affinity into Blender as just image planes or textures, I agree with going as png. If you want to convert the svg design into something with depth then svg is the way to go, it just needs some finessing. I very much liked how the label designs and everything came out!

@Jowday Sorry it took so long for me to reply, thanks for the post! I lived on 12th street and then 20th street--it's interesting to see photos and film of the area from that time of the base. Those small trees planted about the base then are now giants. There's my hangar in the video! Looks pretty untouched, hmm, we've been misled I think, lol.

The leaf bits came out with a nice painterly look, while the strawberry itself came out very realistically! If you ever have the chance, I'd be interested to see how you do your preparation before you start building and workflow once you do start.

I'm a fan of the outlines, just like @DannyBCreative noted. They have their own distinct appeal

Good work! I usually cheat by using Inkscape to do the bitmap-to-vector conversion (something I hope future versions of Affinity Designer will add)... I've only tried to re-draw one from scratch by hand, so I give props to you. I know nothing of Pikachu, so I can't comment on the accuracy, but I like how your design looks.

Thank you everybody for the comments. @jmwellborn, it's our honor to serve you, honestly. @Jowday, thanks for taking a crack at it--I saw the leveling of the formation, looks good I like the lightening of the paneling inside the open bay doors, it enhances the contrast for that photo from the other two. My first attempt (y'all are seeing attempt #3) was cropped like your second post. I had just the center group, but when I added the side formations at later days' shots I had to include the entire hangar to make it fit the 8x10. Interestingly enough, this was used as a gift for our outgoing Chief, and included in the frame was the original blueprint for the hangar from 1930's, so having the blueprint on the bottom of the frame and the whole hangar as a photo on the top turned out to be aesthetically pleasing and fit well. For history buffs, our hangar was burned out during the Dec 7 Pearl Harbor attack, with several other hangars behind ours hit worse or just as bad. Below is a photo of Hangar 11 or 15 which is a few rows behind ours. (visit source for much larger view: https://vintagetopia.co/2018/08/09/19-interesting-facts-about-the-attack-on-pearl-harbor/)

I'd like to share a labor with you all. I welcome your thoughts and critiques (and tips for next time too), my friends are either non-photographers or are too nice to tell me what they think. My unit has 24-hour operations so it's near impossible to get everybody together at once. Instead of waiting for a down-day, we just took photos at different times on different days and would splice them together. We had the option of doing sun-sync and trying to catch the shadows at the same angle each time, or just "storm the beaches of danger" and take the photos at wildly different times (my idea, to my regret at times during this project). My intent was to get a sunset, early morning, and mid-day shot for maximum contrast, but instead I only got about a 5-hour spread represented. Taken with a budget D3400 using kit 15-55mm lens and a borrowed D810 using 35mm prime. Sky replacement was done by the plug-in "Uplift - Epic Skies". I had to warp the photos (the left side crazily so) to get them to line up. Masks and adjustment layers on each. The folks and the hangar behind them were also taken separately from different photographs (one with the hangar roof visible and one with just their bodies/faces for clarity (except the right panel, I couldn't zoom in since I was using the prime lens that day), so five photographs (not counting the skies). I also had to clone the sides and ground because I didn't have enough coverage for an 8x10. Biggest errors I see are (1) it's not centered--that's my bad, I was focusing on the doors when I took the photographs and didn't realize the doors aren't centered on the roof (agh!); (2) the formation isn't straight (I'm thinking I could have done a last perspective shift after the entire thing was composed to level out roof horizontally and the formation horizontally at the same time); (3) many of the door windows don't line up; (4) the roof is masking-clipped, especially on the left (all that warping did a number and I wasn't careful on the cleanup). All told, 11 hours of work (I'm very... very slow at doing this)... 2.5GB file size (still can't figure out why, I think all the adjustment layers and masks maybe?)

Giant thank you! I signed in tonight to export a file in pieces because it hasn't been exported as a whole correctly in previous versions--saw the update was available, re-launched and exported as a single file in perfect form. This update saved me over an hour of work, thank you so much!

"Wow, that is amazing" were the words that escaped my mouth from the results of the second image. I have some scopes and macro filters around the house, I want to go try this!

I have been using Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer for a little under two years now, and I have enjoyed Designer very much. I used Designer and Publisher to build the below trifold for my church. I'd like to share it to show how useful Publisher was, it's not as polished as much of the other work here, but it will serve it's purpose. I was supposed to get this published in time for Tropical Storm Olivia, but since it's overhead right now I guess I'm a little late. (The names and personal numbers are fake.)