http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnhar/archive/2007/03/07/return-of-the-son-of-programmer-art.aspxThe Sprite Effects sample uses this picture of my cat Rhys : I needed an alpha channel to mask out the cat and remove the couch from the background: a common requirement when fixing up photos for use in games. The first step is to use whatever kind ofenCommunityServer 2.1 SP1 (Build: 61025.2)http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnhar/archive/2007/03/07/return-of-the-son-of-programmer-art.aspx#1830932Thu, 08 Mar 2007 00:44:27 GMT91d46819-8472-40ad-a661-2c78acb4018c:1830932JoelMartinez<p>nice! &nbsp;I never would have thought to make a normal map that way, but it makes total sense now :-D</p> <p>Is it just me though, or is there no NormalMapProcessor in the framework? &nbsp;if that's the case, any chance we might get access to the juicy bits?</p> http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnhar/archive/2007/03/07/return-of-the-son-of-programmer-art.aspx#1830937Thu, 08 Mar 2007 00:45:51 GMT91d46819-8472-40ad-a661-2c78acb4018c:1830937JoelMartinez<p>Nevermind, duh ... it's a part of the sample :-P</p> http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnhar/archive/2007/03/07/return-of-the-son-of-programmer-art.aspx#1859384Sun, 11 Mar 2007 17:24:23 GMT91d46819-8472-40ad-a661-2c78acb4018c:1859384Pekuja<p>I really like this series on programmer art. I usually just draw stuff if I need something, but this has opened my eyes to more possibilities. I hope you do more of these posts.</p> <p>This made me also think about music. You can make pretty pictures by taking photographs, and you can make sound effects by recording actual sounds from your environment or making funny noises to a microphone, but you can't really make programmer music except for maybe sampling bits of existing music, but that gets really shady copyright wise, so you probably don't want to do that. Do you have any tricks for programmer music, Shawn?</p> http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnhar/archive/2007/03/07/return-of-the-son-of-programmer-art.aspx#1860511Sun, 11 Mar 2007 23:02:29 GMT91d46819-8472-40ad-a661-2c78acb4018c:1860511Pekuja<p>Heh, so I apparently missed the fact that you are a musician too, so maybe you don't have the need for &quot;programmer music&quot;. I'd still be pretty interested to know if you have any thoughts on that. ;-)</p> http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnhar/archive/2007/03/07/return-of-the-son-of-programmer-art.aspx#1867299Mon, 12 Mar 2007 23:08:10 GMT91d46819-8472-40ad-a661-2c78acb4018c:1867299ShawnHargreaves<p>Music is an interesting one. Unlike graphics, there's no such easy way to cheat as using a camera. For sound effects, you can get a long way with a microphone and some creativity banging real world objects together, but music is pretty hard to fake without actually being a musician!</p> <p>Fortunately, though, music is much less closely tied to gameplay than art is. It would be pretty rare to find a good artist, take a watercolor they did last year, and be able to use that in your game, but for music it's easy to reuse whatever tracks someone might have previously recorded. You just need to find something with a genre and mood that fits your game, but rarely need the music to have been recorded specifically for you.</p> <p>So, find some amateur musicians! If you don't know anyone who plays in a band, craigslist might be a good place to ask. I bet you can find some up-and-coming local artists who would be happy to donate a couple of free tracks in exchange for some links and their logo in your game splash screen.</p>