Video: Star Wars Mod In GTA 5

"GTA 5 - Star Wars Mods [Mod Showcase]" by GTA Series Videos

All Star Wars fans long to experience the life of a Jedi or a chance to pilot one of the franchise's iconic starcraft.  Luckily for us, the Grand Theft Auto 5 Star Wars mod lets us do just that.  From Star Wars costumes and face paint to arming your character with its own light saber, this mod's got it all.

What's epic about this mod is that it not only gives the world of GTA V a Star Wars make over but it will also give the player the power to use the Force and I mean you can really use the Force to levitate, throw, and choke people with. There are a lot more goodies to be seen from this mod, one of which is the Imperial Star Destroyer which floats above the city of Los Santos.

Watch the video below to learn more about this fun GTA Mod.

Featured Site: Metaflop

Metaflop by Swiss designers Marco Müller and Alexis Reigel

Metaflop is an easy-to-use web app that lets users design their own fonts without the expense of typography software or the hassle of dealing with the technical aspects of design, like programming language and coding.

Metaflop makes designing your own fonts as simple as adjusting a the app’s sliders to adjust a typeface's characteristics, such as cap height and ascenders, in real time.   Once you're satisfied with your font design, you can easily download it as a .otf font for free.  It's also a great way for new graphic designers to learn the terminology surrounding type design.  If you've ever read about typeface terms like ascenders, cap heights, overshoot, descenders, and contrasts, there's no better way to figure out what these terms mean than by using a slider to change their variables and see how it changes a typeface in real time.

In an interview with It’s Nice That, designers Marco Müller and Alexis Reigel said: "We are aware that it is difficult to produce subtle and refined typographical fonts (in the classical meaning)… Nevertheless we believe there is a undeniable quality in parametric font design and we try to bring it closer to the world of the designers."

Video: If Apps Were Superheroes

"If Apps Were Superheroes" by Nacho Punch

"Imagine a world where all your favorite apps like Facebook, Vine, Instagram, Snapchat, Yelp and Google+ were all super heroes. APP-Vengers Assemble!"

Fresh Take: Humanization

"Humanization" by Jon Lock

Prints available for purchase from Society6. US$17.68

Browsers and social media drawn as anime characters.

Resources: Dropmark

Dropmark is the smart way to organize all your links, files, and notes into visual collections. Perfect for creatives, teams, educators, explorers, and you.  All your stuff in one simple, visual, private place.

Resources: IOGraphica

IO Graphica is an application that records your mouse movements as colored lines that many people around the internet are hailing as modern art.  The process creates a visually aesthetic piece that looks very similar to brain mapping data.  The graphs the software produces make great desktops, especially when they're product of a particularly frantic gaming session.

Video: Presto Demonstration

"Presto demonstration at NVIDIA's GTC conference" by Pixar Graphics

A demonstration of Pixar’s Presto animation system software at NVIDIA’s GTC conference, which was created for Brave and will be used on future Pixar movies.

Tech: Polyfauna

"Radiohead / Polyfauna" by Universal Everything

PolyFauna is a free "exploratory audiovisual" app from the band Radiohead and design studio Universal Everything that lets users explore a psychedelic multimedia inspired by The King of Limb sessions and featuring the song "Bloom."  Download the app for free on both the Android and iOS platform.

"Inviting the user into an immersive, expansive world of primitive life, weather, sunsets, mountains and forests, Polyfauna comes from an interest in early computer life-experiments and the imagined creatures of our subconscious. It is inspired by everything from the atmospheric landscape paintings of JW Turner and Peter Doig, to the computational life forms of Karl Sims."

Kickstarter: Hello Ruby

Hello Ruby by Linda Liukas

Linda Liukas is the founder of Rail Girls, a non-profit that teaches computer programming to women in cities around the globe. Her proposed children's book, Hello Ruby, made its debut on Kickstarter on January 23rd.  The adorable book's goal is to teach young girls how to code.  The Kickstarter campaign is going ridiculously well, but who doesn’t want to support something that awesome?  It exceeded its $10,000 funding goal in just 3.5 hours. Four days later, and with 25 days of the campaign to go, she has raised $185k from more than 4,300 backers.

The story follows the adventures of--you guessed it--a girl named Ruby, a "small girl with a huge imagination," who meets penguins, a snow leopard, and green robots (among others) on her adventures.  It's actually two books: an illustrated storybook with Ruby's tale, and an activity book that teaches early programming skills. Both are aimed at 4-7 year-olds.

"Every kid has a magical childhood book that makes world seem full of adventure and possibility. This is my book. You can help me make this book real on Kickstarter."

Project: Virtual Middle Earth

Middle Earth modelled in Outerra

Source: Imgur via Reddit

Someone has decided to demonstrate the astonishing potential of the Outerra game engine by recreating Middle-Earth on a 1:1 scale.  The results are impressive to say the least.  They blow the graphic environment of Lord of the Rings Online out of the water.  To really get a feel for the scope of this project, check out the video tour at the bottom of this post.

Outerra is a 3D planetary engine for seamless planet rendering from space down to the surface.  Every detail is refined to full resolution right down to the centimeter using fractal algorithms, thereby offering unlimited visibility, progressive downloads, and procedural content generation.  What's more Outerra offers integrated physics engines for vehicles, making an ideal platform for game designers.  Download the tech demo and play around with some simulations for yourself.


Here's the best part.  Outerra has Oculus Rift support. So, you could conceivably pair the Rift with something like the omnidirectional treadmill and actually retrace Frodo's journey for yourself.  You know, if you needed something to do in your spare time for a year.

Video: Space Engine 0.97

"Space Engine 0.97" by Solaris SE

Gravity got you rethinking that next trip to outer space? Explore the Universe from the safety and comfort of your own home with Space Engine, a beautiful freeware simulator based upon real astronomical data.

Resources: Freeform

"Freeform" by leapmotion

The Leap Motion is a motion controller for the Mac or PC which lets you control on-screen action through hand movements and gestures. Freeform is an app that unleashes your inner Michelangelo, allowing you to sculpt 3D objects on the screen much like you would if a hunk of clay were sitting in front of you.

Tech: 360 Degree iPad Animations

"Disarming Corruptor, Matthew Plummer-Fernandez" by M Plummer-Fernandez

Here's a video explaining an interesting new tool released by M-Plummer Fernandez that carries with it some frightening potential. While 3D printing has been burgeoning with the technology becoming cheaper and more accessible, people have already begun to explore the grayer area of this technology, including copyrighted designs. Corruptor allows people to encrypt these models by 'obliterating' them, a 3D term for damaging a model beyond recognition so they can be passed on without people knowing it's true nature. 

Tech: 360 Degree iPad Animations

IDNA – spatial storytelling from apelab - Emilie Tappolet

Movies are great.  They're stories where someone else has already made all the decisions.  All you need to do is sit back and watch.  But video games represent a growing segment of our entertainment dollar for a reason.  Our generation is sick of its passive role.  

Resources: Fotor

Now here’s a useful online resource: Fotor allows you to easily edit your photos online; ranging from basic cropping to HDR (High Dynamic Range) processing. Not only is it user-friendly and very easy to use, it’s super fun, too! I’ve spent hours just making collages!

Tech: Comic Machine App

"The Comic Machine App" by Comic Machine

The Comic Machine is a digital comic platform for the iPad that uses layers of images and text to create a new more dynamic expression for digital comics. It's still a work in progress, and my initial download proved to be a bit clunky, but the general concept is sound and the video demo gives you an idea of the possibilities coming down the line.  Issues yet to be resolved include scaleability, but this is definitely the most commercially viable attempt at taking motion comics mainstream that's I've seen so far. I will be developments in this software closely.

Download: 8-Bit Game of Thrones

"8-Bit Game of Thrones" by FaheyKotaku

There are a few Game of Thrones video games, but Abel Alves's 8-bit version is the most nostalgic for those of us who grew up playing the classic NES.   Game of Thrones: The 8-Bit Game isn't an attempt to re-tell George R.R. Martin's entire story.  That would take hundreds of hours of game play, especially without dialog. Instead, this version casts the player in the role of their favorite characters at key moments in the series.

In the video above, you can watch Jon Snow battling his way to the wall. In the official trailer below, Daenerys Targaryen journeys to recover her stolen dragons. The 8-Bit Game can be downloaded for free right here.

Resources: Clara.io

Clara.io

A private beta has been announced for an online in-browser 3D modelling tool that allows users to create, collaborate, and share 3D work online.  It looks and sounds impressive, it may even be a potential game changer.

After nearly two years of development, Exocortex is pleased to publicly announce Clara.io, our next-generation 3D content creation tool that runs within the web browser using commodity technologies (JavaScript, HTML5 and of course WebGL.)

Clara.io is built to resemble traditional desktop 3D content creation tools on the surface, thus Clara.io is immediately familiar to most 3D artists. But because Clara.io is built for the web, it is always accessible, there is no configuration, it is cross platform, all of your creation history is stored automatically, you can collaborate in real-time, and you have access to unlimited cloud computing on-demand.

Video: The Future of Design

"The Future of Design" by Spacexchannel

SpaceX is exploring methods for engineers to accelerate their workflow by designing more directly in 3D. This video is just a small taste of what's to come.

Resources: Webflow

Emojify turns your smartphone photos into a wild collage of emoji Smileys, Ghosts, And Poo.  It's ASCII art for the new millennium!