May 2024

Garrett Ray Jewellery

The majority of the world's opals are from Australia. Being an Australian business, Garrett Ray Jewellery wanted to publish some useful content that showcased their expertise in opals.

After weeks of research and content production, we're pleased to present the Garrett Ray Jewellery Ultimate Opal Guide.

A close up photo of the surface of an Opal

Shopping for opals? Confused about the different types? Or maybe you just want to know why they look how they do. Check out the Garrett Ray Jewellery Ultimate Opal Guide to answer all your questions.

Langenium progress

After over a decade of being limited to keyboard and mouse only controls, we're pleased to announced the Langenium game will soon have on-screen controls. Players will be able to control their aircraft speed, position and look around with the camera on any device.

With touch controls implemented, we wanted there to be a stronger sense of travel speed and so we began to implement an afterburner thruster effect on the game's primary aircraft. First looking at special effects libraries listed by THREE.JS, ultimately going with three-nebula due to the appeal of a desktop tool to design the new effect. While it was easy enough to build an effect using their tool, there were issues integrating the three-nebula library with the latest three.js version. In the end sprite particle effects code from the v4 build of Langenium was migrated into the new v6 codebase, allowing for a rudimentary thruster effect.

A close up photo of the surface of an Opal

Play the Langenium Demo now.

Marketing update

Online marketing

With social media companies pushing for increased revenue from advertising, it can be challenging for small businesses to stand out and find new clients without spending money on ads. We have a couple of social media profiles around the web but have found very little traffic from any of them.

After recently being listed on Design Rush, we've seen an uptick in site visitors from around the world. We're hoping the increased visibility will allow us to reach a wider audience for new business and collaboration.

This month we also decided to start using Google Ads in order to drive more traffic to the studio website, this is going quite well with more traffic from all around Australia starting to trickle in. We don't use Google Analytics so we were concerned about how it'd work with Matomo Analytics, but happily can report Matomo has great Google Ads support.

Website updates

Since launching the 3D website last year, we haven't updated the main pages with any new content. As money is now being spent on ads, we're revamping and deepening the content areas of the site in order to better present our offering to new clients.

Starting with this month's About us page refresh, we've put up some additional information about how we run projects and what clients can expect when they hire us. Over the coming months we'll be revamping the Services page as well and adding some new CMS driven 3D elements.

Video ads commercial

Every couple of weeks, we'll be creating a new video to showcase our services and past work in that category.

To kick things off, we made this month's video promoting our video ad production services.

Showcasing our past ads that were made with 3D and video footage, using an AI generated Australian voice for the voice over. Video editing and final touches using DaVinci Resolve.

Find us online!