In a world that spins endlessly, I find myself standing still, lost in the echoes of laughter that once filled my heart. The warmth of companionship feels like a distant memory, replaced by the cold reality of solitude. Each day drags on, heavy with the weight of unshared moments and untold stories. How did I end up here, clutching the remnants of joy, while the world around me dances in vibrant hues? I often wonder if anyone notices the silent battles I fight within. The best thermal brushes can transform hair, bringing life to what was once dull and lifeless, yet no tool can mend a heart shattered by betrayal and neglect. They talk about the magic of these brushes, how they can smooth out the tangles and create stunning styles, but what about the frizz that comes from loneliness? The ache that lingers long after the laughter fades? Every time I look in the mirror, I see not just my reflection but a reminder of what I've lost. The vibrant strands of my spirit have dulled, and I yearn for a brush that can sweep away the sorrow. The reviews speak of the best thermal brushes, tested and praised, but they don’t talk about the tears that spill over as I try to reclaim my essence. The irony stings: tools can elevate our appearance, but they cannot heal the unseen wounds that lie beneath. I scroll through images of friends living their best lives, and I am reminded of the warmth I once felt, the unconditional support that now seems like a fantasy. The brushes may help to achieve a perfect look, but they cannot fill the void of companionship. The ache in my chest serves as a constant reminder that no amount of styling can bring back the laughter shared, the moments cherished, or the love lost. As I stand in front of the mirror, I wish for a transformation that goes beyond the surface. I wish for a return to happiness, for the touch of a hand that understands the depths of my sorrow. The best thermal brush may create beauty, but I seek something deeper—a connection, a reason to smile again. Until then, I will continue to wander through this life, searching for solace in the shadows. #Loneliness #Heartbreak #EmotionalJourney #Healing #FindingSolace

A serial killer is stalking the streets, and his murders are a work of art. That’s more or less the premise behind Psycasso®, a tongue-in-cheek 2D pixel art game from Omni Digital Technologies that’s debuting a demo at Steam Next Fest this week, with plans to head into Early Access later this year. Playing as the killer, you get a job and build a life by day, then hunt the streets by night to find and torture victims, paint masterpieces with their blood, then sell them to fund operations.I sat down with lead developer Benjamin Lavender and Omni, designer and producer, to talk about this playfully gory game that gives a classic retro style and a freshtwist.Let’s start with a bit of background about the game.Omni: We wanted to make something that stands out. We know a lot of indie studios are releasing games and the market is ever growing, so we wanted to make something that’s not just fun to play, but catches people’s attention when others tell them about it. We’ve created an open-world pixel art game about an artist who spends his day getting a job, trying to fit into society. Then at nighttime, things take a more sinister turn and he goes around and makes artwork out of his victim's blood.We didn’t want to make it creepy and gory. We kind of wanted it to be cutesy and fun, just to make it ironic. Making it was a big challenge. We basically had to create an entire city with functioning shops and NPCs who have their own lives, their own hobbies. It was a huge challenge.So what does the actual gameplay look like?Omni: There’s a day cycle and a night cycle that breaks up the gameplay. During the day, you can get a job, level up skills, buy properties and furniture upgrades. At nighttime, the lighting completely changes, the vibe completely changes, there’s police on the street and the flow of the game shifts. The idea is that you can kidnap NPCs using a whole bunch of different weapons – guns, throwable grenades, little traps and cool stuff that you can capture people with.Once captured on the street, you can either harvest their blood and body parts there, or buy a specialist room to keep them in a cage and put them in various equipment like hanging chains or torture chairs. The player gets better rewards for harvesting blood and body parts this way.On the flip side, there’s a whole other element to the game where the player is given missions each week from galleries around the city. They come up on your phone menu, and you can accept them and do either portrait or landscape paintings, with all of the painting being done using only shades of red. We've got some nice drip effects and splat sounds to make it feel like you’re painting with blood. Then you can give your creation a name, submit it to a gallery, then it goes into a fake auction, people will bid on the artwork and you get paid and large amount of in-game money so you can then buy upgrades for the home, upgrade painting tools like bigger paint brushes, more selection tools, stuff like that.Ben: There’s definitely nothing like it. And that was the aim, is when you are telling people about it, they’re like, “Oh, okay. Right. We’re not going to forget about this.” Let’s dig into the 2D tools you used to create this world.Ben: It’s using the 2D Renderer. The Happy Harvest 2D sample project that you guys made was kind of a big starting point, from a lighting perspective, and doing the normal maps of the 2D and getting the lighting to look nice. Our night system is a very stripped-down, then added-on version of the thing that you guys made. I was particularly interested by its shadows. The building’s shadows aren’t actually shadows – it’s a black light. We tried to recreate that with all of our buildings in the entire open world – so it does look beautiful for a 2D game, if I do say so myself.Can you say a bit about how you’re using AI or procedural generation in NPCs?Ben: I don’t know how many actually made it into the demo to be fair, number-wise. Every single NPC has a unique identity, as in they all have a place of work that they go to on a regular schedule. They have hobbies, they have spots where they prefer to loiter, a park bench or whatever. So you can get to know everyone’s individual lifestyle.So, the old man that lives in the same building as me might love to go to the casino at nighttime or go consistently on a Monday and a Friday, that kind of vibe.It uses the A* Pathfinding Project, because we knew we wanted to have a lot of AIs. We’ve locked off most of the city for the demo, but the actual size of the city is huge. The police mechanics are currently turned off, but there’s 80% police mechanics in there as well. If you punch someone or hurt someone, that’s a crime, and if anyone sees it, they can go and report to the police and then things happen. That’s a feature that’s there but not demo-ready yet.How close would you say you are to a full release?Omni: We should be scheduled for October for early access. By that point we’ll have the stealth mechanics and the policing systems polished and in and get some of the other upcoming features buttoned up. We’re fairly close.Ben: Lots of it’s already done, it’s just turned off for the demo. We don’t want to overwhelm people because there’s just so much for the player to do.Tell me a bit about the paint mechanics – how did you build that?Ben: It is custom. We built it ourselves completely from scratch. But I can't take responsibility for that one – someone else did the whole thing – that was their baby. It is really, really cool though.Omni: It’s got a variety of masking tools, the ability to change opacity and spacing, you can undo, redo. It’s a really fantastic feature that gives people the opportunity to express themselves and make some great art.Ben: And it's gamified, so it doesn’t feel like you’ve just opened up Paint in Windows.Omni: Best of all is when you make a painting, it gets turned into an inventory item so you physically carry it around with you and can sell it or treasure it.What’s the most exciting part of Psycasso for you?Omni: Stunning graphics. I think graphically, it looks really pretty.Ben: Visually, you could look at it and go, “Oh, that’s Psycasso.”Omni: What we’ve done is taken a cozy retro-style game, and we’ve brought modern design, logic, and technology into it. So you're playing what feels like a nostalgic game, but you're getting the experience of a much newer project.Check out the Psycasso demo on Steam, and stay tuned for more NextFest coverage. #making #killing #playful #terror #psycasso

html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "; Epic Games has made Odyssey, Praxinos’s 2D animation plugin for Unreal Engine, available for free through Fab, its online marketplace.The software – which can be used for storyboarding or texturing 3D models as well as creating 2D animation – is available for free indefinitely, and will continue to be updated. A serious professional 2D animation tool created by former TVPaint staff Created by a team that includes former developers of standalone 2D animation software TVPaint, Odyssey has been in development since 2019.Part of that work was also funded by Epic Games, with Praxinos receiving an Epic MegaGrant for two of Odyssey’s precursors: painting plugin Iliad and storyboard and layout plugin Epos. Odyssey itself was released last year after beta testing at French animation studios including Ellipse Animation, and originally cost €1,200 for a perpetual license. Create 2D animation, storyboards, or textures for 3D models Although Odyssey’s main function is to create 2D animation – for movie and broadcast projects, motion graphics, or even games – the plugin adds a wider 2D toolset to Unreal Engine.Other use cases include storyboarding – you can import image sequences and turn them into storyboards – and texturing, either by painting 2D texture maps, or painting onto 3D meshes. It supports both 2D and 3D workflows, with the 2D editors – which include a flipbook editor as well as the 2D texture and animation editors – complemented by a 3D viewport. The bitmap painting toolset makes use of Unreal Engine’s Blueprint system, making it possible for users to create new painting brushes using a node-based workflow, and supports pressure sensitivity on graphics tablets. There is also a vector toolset for creating hard-edged shapes. Animation features include onion skinning, Toon Boom-style shift and trace, and automatic inbetweening. The plugin supports standard 2D and 3D file formats, including PSD, FBX and USD. Available for free indefinitely, but future updates planned Epic Games regularly makes Unreal Engine assets available for free through Fab, but usually only for a limited period of time.Odyssey is different, in that it is available for free indefinitely. However, it will continue to get updates: according to Epic Games’ blog post, Praxinos “plans to work in close collaboration with Epic Games and continue to enhance Odyssey”. As well as Odyssey itself, Praxinos offers custom tools development and training, which will hopefully also help to support future development. System requirements and availability Odyssey is compatible with Unreal Engine 5.6 on Windows and macOS. It is available for free under a Fab Standard License, including for commercial use. about Odyssey on Praxinos’s website Find more detailed information in Odyssey’s online manual Download Unreal Engine 2D animation plugin Odyssey for free Have your say on this story by following CG Channel on Facebook, Instagram and X. As well as being able to comment on stories, followers of our social media accounts can see videos we don’t post on the site itself, including making-ofs for the latest VFX movies, animations, games cinematics and motion graphics projects. #download #unreal #engine #animation #plugin

William Morris Biscuit Set. All images courtesy of Ella Hawkins, shared with permission Dr. Ella Hawkins Reimagines Ancient Artifacts and Prized Objects as Edible Replicas May 31, 2025 Grace Ebert Academic research is notoriously niche and often opaque, but Dr. Ella Hawkins has found a crowd-pleasing way to share her studies. The Birmingham-based artist and design historian translates her interests in Shakespeare performance, costume, and matieral culture into edible replicas. Hawkins bakes batches of cookies that she tops with royal icing. Decorating takes a scholarly turn, as she uses tiny paintbrushes and a mini projector to help trace imagery of William Morris’ ornate floral motifs or coastal scenes from English delftware. Rendering a design on a single cookie can take anywhere between two and four hours, depending on the complexity. Unsurprisingly, minuscule calligraphy and portraits are most demanding. Ancient Greek Pottery Sherds Hawkins first merged baking and her research about a decade ago while studying undergraduate costume design at the University of Warwick. She decided to bake cupcakes based on Shakespeare productions that her class examined. “It felt like a fun way to look back at all the different design styles we’d covered through the year,” she tells Colossal, adding: I carried on decorating cakes and cookies based on costume design through my PhD, then branched out and spent lots of time doing cookie versions of other artefacts to keep busy during the pandemic. She has since published an academic book on the topic and is a senior lecturer at Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. But she also continues to translate artifacts and prized objects held within museum collections into delicious canvases. There’s a set made in collaboration with Milton’s Cottage, a museum in the country house where John Milton finished his epic Paradise Lost. Anchored by a delicately crosshatched portrait evoking that of the frontispiece, the collection contains typographic titles and signs that appear straight from a 17th-century book. Delftware Tiles Hawkins ventures farther back in history to ancient Greece with a collection of pottery sherds inspired by objects within the Ashmolean Museum. With a bowed surface to mimic a vessel’s curvature, the irregular shapes feature fragments of various motifs and figures to which she applied a sgraffito technique, a Renaissance method of scratching a surface to reveal the layer below. The weathered appearance is the result of blotting a base of pale brown-grey before using a scribe tool to scratch and crack the royal icing coating the surface. She then lined these etchings with a mix of vodka and black food coloring to mimic dirt and wear.Other than a select few preserved for talks and events, Hawkins assures us that the rest of her cookies are eaten. Find more of her work on her website and Instagram. Medieval Tiles, inspired by The Tristram Tiles, Chertsey, Surrey, EnglandMilton’s Cottage Biscuit Set developed in collaboration with Milton’s Cottage Outlander Biscuit Set Elizabethan Gauntlet Biscuit Set Next article #ella #hawkins #reimagines #ancient #artifacts

Dyson has a death grip on the fancy vacuum market, and it’s for good reason. The company overengineers their floor-cleaning products in such a way that makes them way more exciting than a vacuum should be. It also makes them pricy. Right now, Walmart has very deep discounts on a ton of popular Dyson vacuums, some of which are down as low as Many of these are the cheapest I’ve seen out there right now by a long shot, so grab the one you want before the deal ends or they sell out and keep your home grime-free. Dyson Big Ball Turbinehead Canister Vacuum | Yellow/Iron —The canister-style design adds flexibility. Dyson Battery-powered vacuums are great until they aren’t. I prefer a wired model like this canister-style cleaner for several reasons. First, you never have to worry about running out of juice before the job is done. Second, in my experience, they just provide more consistent suction power than their more portable counterparts. This canister vac has a long hose and a full-featured rotating brush head to give you all the cleaning power you’ll need for cleaning any surface. The interchangeable heads make easy work of all kinds of cleaning, even above the curtains where that spider has been chilling for the last two weeks. More deals on new Dyson vacuums Dyson V7 Advanced Cordless Vacuum Cleaner | SilverDyson V8 Extra Cordless Vacuum Cleaner | PurpleDyson V12 Detect Slim Cordless Vacuum Cleaner | NickelDyson V8 Cordless Vacuum | Silver | NewDyson V15 Detect Vacuum | Nickel | NewDyson Ball Animal 3 Extra Upright Vacuum | Copper | NewRestored Premium Dyson Ball Animal 3 Upright Vacuum | Nickel/Silver—Dyson has one of the most rigorous refurbishing programs in the game. Dyson Some people aren’t keen on refurbished products, but Dyson does it right. These models have been totally checked over and brought back to like-new condition. You get a warranty and all the performance of a brand-new machine at a fraction of the cost. This is a version of the vacuum I have been using in my home for several years. My dog’s hair is brutal on vacuums, and the Animal Ball’s burly suction power and unstoppable revolving brushes make quick work of it. It’s a great option for both carpets and hardwood floors. Plus, it comes with all the extra accessories for reaching tough spaces, such as under the couch. Have you vacuumed under your couch recently? I didn’t think so. More deals on refurbished Dyson vacuums #walmart #blowing #out #dyson #vacuums

html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "; A creature created with Nomad by Glen Southern. The new desktop edition of the formerly mobile-only digital sculpting app is now available in free public beta. Hexanomad – aka developer Stéphane Ginier – has released the new desktop edition of Nomad, its popular digital sculpting app for iPads and Android tablets, in free public beta.Beta builds are currently available for Windows and macOS, although they currently only include a limited range of tools from the mobile edition. A rounded set of digital sculpting, 3D painting and remeshing features First released in 2020, Nomad – also often known as Nomad Sculpt – is a popular digital sculpting app for iPads and Android tablets.It has a familiar set of sculpting brushes, including Clay, Crease, Move, Flatten and Smooth, with support for falloff, alphas and masking. A dynamic tessellation system, similar to those of desktop tools like ZBrush, automatically changes the resolution of the part of the mesh being sculpted to accommodate new details. Users can also perform a voxel remesh of the sculpt to generate a uniform level of detail, or switch manually between different levels of resolution. Nomad features a PBR vertex paint system, making it possible to rough out surface colours; and built-in lighting and post-processing options for viewing models in context. Both sculpting and painting are layer-based, making it possible to work non-destructively. Completed sculpts can be exported in FBX, OBJ, glTF/GLB, PLY and STL format. New desktop edition still early in development, but evolving fast Nomad already has a web demo version, which makes it possible to test the app inside a web browser, but the new beta answers long-standing user requests for a native desktop version.It’s still very early in development, so it only features a limited range of tools from the mobile edition – the initial release was limited to the Clay and Move tools – and has known issues with graphics tablets, but new builds are being released regularly. Ginier has stated that his aim is to make the desktop edition “identical to the mobile versions”. The desktop version should also support Quad Remesher, Exoside’s auto retopology system, which is available as an in-app purchase inside the iPad edition. You can follow development in the -beta-desktop channel of the Nomad Sculpt Discord server. Price, release date and system requirements The desktop edition of Nomad is currently in free public beta for Windows 10+ and macOS 12.0+. Beta builds do not expire. Stéphane Ginier hasn’t announced a final release date or price yet.The mobile edition of Nomad is available for iOS/iPadOS 15.0+ and Android 6.0+. It costs about Nomad on the product website Follow the progress of the desktop edition on the Discord server Download the latest beta builds of the desktop edition of Nomad Have your say on this story by following CG Channel on Facebook, Instagram and X. As well as being able to comment on stories, followers of our social media accounts can see videos we don’t post on the site itself, including making-ofs for the latest VFX movies, animations, games cinematics and motion graphics projects. #desktop #edition #sculpting #app #nomad