The problem is, as much as I enjoy recording them, they are terribly time consuming. Between the prep, recording, editing, encoding, uploading, and all the other assorted work that goes into, they eat up a lot of my time. 

I would love to continue doing them if it were in a format that’d be a bit easier on me. After watching guys like Gabe at Penny Arcade and Scott Kurtz over at PvP do their live comic-casts, I started thinking about doing FCAP as a live show using Ustream.tv instead. It’d almost certainly be longer, and with the chat room the folks watching would be able to ask me questions live, which would be pretty cool! 

Ustream also has recording functionality built it, so I’d be able to record the shows as I make them and publish them out to the video sites when I’m done (hopefully) without having to go through all the rigarmarole I did before. You’d be getting pure, unedited Butch, though, so you’d have to be prepared for more “Um”ing, “Uh”ing, and cursing. 

My big concern is that the quality of the broadcast wouldn’t be sufficiently high to make it worthwhile. The only way I can really be sure, though, is to actually get in there and try it out. If any of you are interested in helping me test drive, shoot me an email at butch@zombienirvana.com or send a tweet to @ZombieButch and let me know. If I can get a few folks to do a quick test run and give me some feedback on it, I’d appreciate your help!

Show Notes:

• You can see an example of some bad Dissolving in action in this video; it’s something that shows up a lot in (bad) PowerPoint presentations, of which I’ve had to watch far too many.
• I hope I didn’t come off as too much of a smarty-pants in the introduction. A lot of folks get pretty close to understanding Dissolve mode, it seems, but they end up getting some piece of it just a bit wrong. (Google up “Photoshop dissolve” and you’ll see what I mean.) As I’ve pointed out in the past, I always think it’s better to understand exactly how and why Photoshop does things. Next time, since I don’t have to go through the whole explanation, I’ll have time to show two or three cool things you can do with Dissolve!
• Any of the Purchase links here will take you to a page where you can pick up 10 Towns & Villages, but I hope that if you’re interested in it you’ll head over to YourGamesNow first! Not just because I make more money if you buy it there (which I do), but because it’s a great site to support. YGN is a RPG co-op, owned and operated by the folks who publish there. You might have heard horror stories about other sites giving publishers a raw deal; that doesn’t happen at YourGamesNow, and I’m proud to be a member (albeit a small one). Even if you don’t want to buy 10 Towns & Villages, I hope you’ll check out YourGamesNow the next time you’re looking for a gaming PDF!

FCAP #17: Show Notes

• Sorry it’s been so long since I put up a new episode, folks. It’s been crazy at Casa del Zombie.
• The map pack I’m working on is a collection of 10 generic town and village maps. The maps are all completely unlabeled – no compass rose even! – and are presented as high-res JPG’s. You’ll be able to print them out, edit, and label them however you want to suit your campaign.
• If you’re shopping around for an older, less expensive version of Photoshop, version 7 is the oldest I’d recommend. It’s a real watershed in the development of the program; 7.0 introduced the new brush engine, which – as you can see from this episode – is almost worth the price of admission all on it’s own.
• Even if you have a Wacom tablet, this is still a useful technique to learn. Drawing all those ridge lines over and over again, I would’ve ended up with some serious carpal tunnel syndrome doing it the old fashioned way!
• This is totally unrelated to Photoshop, but I have to mention it anyway as it’s zombie-related. The trailer for George Romero’s new movie Diary of the Dead is up at YouTube, and it will have all the true zombie fans drooling.

Show Notes:

• I usually have each episode at least partially scripted out. I’ll typically write out the opening, the closing, and any bits in the middle where I want to make sure I don’t forget a step or (more often) if I just hit a section that doesn’t sound right off the cuff. This one’s completely off the top of my head, and except for a couple of edits where I completely fumbled a phrase or had a particularly long pause to think about what I was going to say, it’s the first take. Not too shabby, although I wish I’d mentioned that I’d turned down the opacity of my brush earlier.
• Speaking of brushes, just about any brush that’s got some texture and slightly roughened edges will work for this. Try out several and find one you like; the watercolor brushes are an obvious choice, of course, but you can get some interesting effects with others as well!
• There’s one more step to these mountains, by the way; in the original map, if you look closely you’ll see that the mountains have snow-covered tops. I’ll cover that next episode.

Show Notes:

• I had this one done a couple of days ago, but I decided to take one last crack at the encoding thing to see if I can come up with one that’ll be bulletproof in the future while keeping the quality as high as I can get it. Hopefully I’ve found the sweet spot now.
• Getting your forest to look like the ones in the Western Lands map takes time. You’ve really got to build up a lot of (virtual) paint. It’s time consuming, but hey, I never promised these would all be fast techniques! You can save yourself a bit of time, though, if you just go ahead and paint in the area where you want your forest to be in one stroke, then do the sponge technique on top of that.
• There’s still one small technique we have left to do to really finish off the forest, but it’s similar to one we’ll be using on the mountains as well, so I’ll be devoting a good chunk of next episode to it.
• Although you might think just by looking at it that I used a Blur or similar filter on the original map, I did not. It’s a) a pretty high resolution map, reduced in size for the web, which softened it up a bit, and b) built up with lots and lots of layers of color. You could certainly use a bit Gaussian Blur to save yourself a little time, though.
• You might also notice if you look closely that the forests in the eastern portion of the map are a bit more brownish/tannish. I didn’t save my brush in the tool presets, so I had to pick my colors all over again. I like that it has a little bit of variation though. If I had to I’d probably explain it away as a result of different trees being predominant in those areas.

Show Notes

• The only way this episode could have been more annoying would be if someone had trained small animals to gnaw on my nether regions for the last two weeks. Between Labor Day, the flu, and having to record it three times, I can safely say that this one left me yanking my hair. And let me tell you, I don’t have that much to spare.
• In the original recording, I went off on a tangent talking about the Threshold command, but I realized that a) I was rambling, probably due to all the DayQuil, b) I was running short on time, and c) I’d covered it already in an earlier episode and didn’t really need to talk about it again. I kind of did the same thing with the “create a new document of the same resolution by loading a copy into the clipboard” thing, but the Threshold bit was easier to cut without an obvious gaping hole in the audio and video.
• In case you’re wondering, the Stroke layer style wouldn’t have worked correctly to add an initial outline around my landmass. Why not? Well, I used that watercolor brush to add the land color in, and it’s not all at 100% opacity. You get an interesting effect when you combine Stroke and some other layer styles with areas of varying opacity, but it’s not one that’s really appropriate in this case.
• One other thing I almost forgot. There’s another, slightly more involved version of the technique I used to create the coastline. It’s basically the same, but you put the individual “wave” lines on their own layers, and as you go further away from the shore, you increase the amount of Noise you add to each one and decrease their Opacity so that they fade away as they move out.

“Frustrated” doesn’t quite sum up my feelings on the situation right now, folks.