Price of Renovation, Music, Retextures, Automation, VOs, CafePress, Money
I was researching on the prices for items I would need for renovation. The first thing I looked up was the foam pads to stick on the wall for echo diffusing … I found a 80 tile pack for 125 bucks (plus shipping) on ebay. Sure is a lot so I might want to sit on it for a while until I get a bit more stable in finances. At the mean time, I’ll probably purchase another blanket as a stand-in for foam. It seems to work well when it comes to minimizing the echo in my recordings and that’s a good thing.
Meanwhile, I have managed to find my adapter so I can hook up my vertical-standing mic on a mic stand. Before I buy a stand and filter, I want to replace my bed first because I’m not sure where that stand would end up with my bed in the way.
I took a quick look at Walmart.com and found some rather affordable twin-sized inflatable beds. My current bed size is “Full” but it seems to take up like half the bedroom. I suppose the inflatable beds could work but I would have to determine how long it takes to inflate and deflate the bed so I can put that into consideration when I get ready for work, and when I go to bed. Before doing that, though, I need to clean up my room.
On the side of The Movies, I’m expected to get a theme song from Capemedia by this weekend. There’s no singing on it as Cape mentioned to me in a PM, unfortunately, but I think I can live without it. We’ll see. I just hope it’s at least 90 seconds long, the length of most TV-Sized anime themes. If it’s too long, I could always cut it. If it’s too short, then I could get a bit cranky …
I’m also considering in reworking some of the flesh textures, like Mixmasterfestus did with OIO3 … but I’m not sure yet … It’s actually not a big issue once I figured out a formula for doing it. What I would do is open up the texture, record an automator action, and then start running some filters and adjustments until I get a desired look, and then save the automator so I could just run the same scheme on the rest of the same textures. Saves a lot of time, I’d say!
Speaking of automators, I’ll be sharing my automator droplets when it comes to overlays when I finish up with Coconut Girl. I’m sure some people might find some use with them … except I’m not sure if they would work in the Windows version of Photoshop CS2 since I do all my texture editing on a Mac. I guess if I add an .exe to each droplet, like the example droplets that came with Photoshop, then it might work.
I’ve been a bit slow when it came to voice-acting but I managed to finish recording Nukester’s VOs … I just ended up falling asleep as the audio track was being rendered because the track was rather big and I was a bit tired. What I usually do is record the VOs in GarageBand; and then bring that big AIFF file it renders out into Freeverse’s Sound Studio for volume-tweaking, clean-up with SoundSoap, and splitting into smaller files; and then mass-trimming and mass-converting to WAV using Sample Manager. Although, I think Sample Manager could also be used for splitting at Markers, but I haven’t tried that yet… I think I’ll give it a shot tonight when I get back from work.
On the flip side, I managed to talk to Ken yesterday about CafePress. He said that there’s a base-price for everything and the profit would be the difference of the selling price and the base price. Not bad, I’d say. I just have to figure out what kind of prices I would set when I start selling CG Art on shirts and stuff. The shirts at Hot Topic are around 16~20 bucks so I could set it around there.
Speaking of money, my tip jar is at 300 bucks … 1700 more and I’ll have that new iMac. On a side note, I’m rather glad that Apple went Intel because at least I could swap out the processor in about two or three years time, assuming the processor is socketted and not welded in. I’ve avoided the iStuff in the past, and attempted to save for the Power/Pro stuff for a while now but since the upgrade options have gotten better, I’ll settle with an iMac. Upgrading the MXM Card looks rather tempting but considering the technology is still new, I’m not expecting a whole lot of options for it right now, but I’m sure there will be more stuff to hit the market after a couple years or so.