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I'm a freelance 2d artist; My portfolio can be seen here.
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
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  Meta, Animation, Cuil | 
Posted - 7/30/2008 12:55:34 PM | Meta
Last week and the weekend were too crazy for an update, and this is partially to do with schedule of work (which has changed again!), so I may not do weekly updates on Wednesdays maybe (though I am today), but I will do them weekly.
Right. Still figuring it out. But for now ...
Animation!
My mission this week is to completely finish one the set of animations for one character and in doing so develop the 'animation pipeline', which should make future work more efficient. (And my ColorOven utility needs another pass because damnable Pygame doesn't do transparency very well, not that I'd expect it to.)
Right, so here's a layout of all the basic frames:
I'm moving away from drawing it all on one sheet. Yes, I did draw a utility to display animations from such a sheet, and is nice to see all the frames at once for consistent coloring, but the layout makes it difficult to line up lines while drawing so I end up with lines jumping all over the place.
I've also changed the size of the frames from 256x256 to 512x512 because the smaller size did not give me the resolution to do linework the way I was comfortable with. I don't believe this will increase workload by /too/ much, because this is not pixel art, after all, but it will increase filesizes a bit. Shouldn't be a problem.
On Being Cheap
Here's the basic walkcycle:
The cheap comes in from doing an 8 frame walkcycle from 5 frames (1,2,3,4,5,4,3,2,repeat). It makes the walk look a little shuffly, but this should fit with the tone of the game. Work on walk frames: reduced by an absolute maximum of %37.5!
Also, frame flipping!
Work on all frames: reduced by an absolute maximum of %50!
Discovering that the character looks like they're leaning slightly in the front frames and thus requiring a re-work: work increased by perhaps %20. Damn.
And sure, equipment will switch hands, but again the game as a light tone and other games do this, eg. the Baldur's Gate series, Diablo 1 (at least).
Doing it Right
In any event, I'm now drawing the animation sequences in stacks so that my lines won't jump all over the place. And note to self: follow the stupid isogrid, The Isogrid Is Truth, Instinct Is Lie.
Cuil & design
My dad works at Cuil so I've been following it. Reception looks like it was pretty, ah, "cool", so here's What I Would Have Done:
- I'd have included a "beta" tag on the front page.
This would be a disclaimer, basically. It could make people more understanding of any failures, lack of features (eg. image search), and open to the idea that it will change (for the better, one should hope!)
- The layout options could use a Google-like "one column" display option.
Of course this decision would have political repercussions because it would be an admission that Google is a good design to be emulated. Or maybe people are just used to the Google format for its own sake and will react poorly to anything different until they get used to it. Still. (And I don't really like "Web 2.0" design in general, but maybe I'm just a curmudgeon.)
- My portfolio needs to come up on the first page when searching for my name, like on Google.
But I guess the point really is that Cuil finds things differently than Google, perhaps not as well (yet?) -- is this due to being used to the way Google searches and expecting similar results or is it a higher level problem (that I imagine will be addressed). For example, a search for "dbaumgart" returns this journal on Google, but does not return on Cuil. We'll see, I suppose.
I want Cuil to do well because, frankly, they're less evil than Google (which isn't a Microsoft, granted). Luck to them, then.
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| Character Design | |
Posted - 7/18/2008 8:22:48 PM | As it happens, I've received blanket approval from he-who-is-effectively-boss to post "whatever the [flip] I want" about the Big Project. So here goes!
I'll do this in parts and as I go along.
Overview: Clockwork Fantasia
In short, the game, Clockwork Fantasia (henceforth "CF") is a whimsical steampunk Final Fantasy Tactics-like game with neat engine gimmicks (read: gameplay innovations). I'm doing the animated character sprites, UI graphics, and whatever other random bits there are.
The challenge for me here is doing character animation generally, and particularly in creating characters in a more manga/anime influenced style as well as being more lighthearted than usual. I gotta learn how to cheese it up, in other words.
Character Design
CF isn't a game with pretensions of realism at all. It's zany, rather cartoony aka "illustrative". N. brought this Valve paper on Illustrative Rendering (and character design) to my attention, and it contains some design points I'm going to try to take into consideration, particularly with regard to making the characters bright, illustrative, easily identifiable (regarding silhouette), and ... character-ful? ... full of character. The needs of CF are somewhat different from an FPS like TF2 though because the characters are drawn isometric in an orthographic field. There's much more to integrating the characters with the environment, and this'll be interesting because the environmental artist (J.) is someone who is not me -- we've discussed how some anime has cartoony characters over more painterly/detailed backgrounds, and this distinction being purposeful. We'll have to see it in-game.
So on the other hand from the cartoony, I have a very strong impulse toward historical realism, or at least mechanical? plausibility, so historical references figure strongly in my approach to designing characters.
And on a third hand, N. has stated that he wants characters to have ridiculous hats and foppish clothing as a general rule. I'll do my best!
I should explain the classes; In CF there are two sides: Magic and Steam, basically. The Steam side is more technologically driven and, as I'm thinking, more Victorian in style while the Magic side is more medieval, with styles and objects maybe 150-250 years older than Steam.
So, to start, there are three basic character classes on each side: melee, ranged, and utility. I started with the Steam classes.
Steam Classes:
Steam power armor. (Looks a lot like the Codename: Miner/Orcus hardsuits 'eh? What can I say.)
Note the 18th/19th century Bishop hat. These were used because a: putting a musket over one's shoulder then doesn't knock one's hat off and b: it made soldiers look taller and therefore scarier. The glasses are meant to imply range and fragility (the ranged units won't stand up to much melee combat, ya'see).
The engineer class, basically, with a portable steam boiler to power constructions. They've got 'tanker boots' with straps instead of laces, 'cause laces get caught in machinery. (Yes, I know that tanker boots were invented much later, it's the /concept/ that counts!) -- and I think in the final sprites I'll make their boots steel-toed.
These are concept art done so that I know what the characters are wearing and what they look like as I draw the in-game sprites. The palette used is the in-game palette and the blue hue acts as the 'player color' and is changed for each team (as I mentioned in Wednesday's post).
More shall come in more posts. I haven't quite finished the design for the magic classes anyway.
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| Just Art | |
Posted - 7/17/2008 1:35:46 AM | Animation Work
Doing the character/animation work is good for me. I've probably progressed more in a week with this impetus than I otherwise would in a month. Or months!
And I've found graphics application for my coding abilities, like for a sprite re-colorer: Colors in a range of a certain hue are used as player coloration, like the old 8-bit palette ranges, but it runs every pixel of a very particular hue (or hues?) through a function to change blue to red ... or white or black. Getting each color to look just right requires a bit of fine tuning, but it really works quite nicely. But then this is the very basics of how a Photoshop filter works -- or a shader.
Sure, it's common sense to do this -- for a coder. If left to their own devices an artist might do this the hard way. Same for an animation testing program -- building an animation in Photoshop is tedious and takes, god forbid, a whole minute or so, so I made an app that I can just drop a filmstrip-style image onto.
Digital Painting
So here're the weeks paintings; I think I got into the dark blue/purple color scheme again. I remember back in elementary school I had a brief obsession with the color midnight blue, maybe this is something in the same vein. I'm not particularly fond of light blue or purple, but dark purplish blue is just so cool.
I was thinking Lovecraftian otherworldliness, kinda like the "metal" themed Quake maps unstuck from the square grid. And just a touch of HL's Xen. This could badly use some atmospheric perspective, methinks.
A rethinking of last weeks Quake Marine, sorta. This time the monster lives only ... in your imagination. Note cheesy zoom blur.
Not finished yet, maybe. God help me for being a formalist for just a moment, but this picture is totally about composition. See how the circle in the upper left reflects that in the lower right? And how the stacked ellipses might allude to the stairs, or the ribs of the tunnel, maybe? I'm terrible!
[Bah, I cut this comment here down. In short: Maybe it's odd that I'm posting more digital painting than anything else lately because it could be seen as somewhat tangential to game dev. ... but what the heck! Art is game dev even if the culture here is mostly about coding. And I don't like Deviant Art for any variety of reasons, so it's not like I'm going to go set up shop over there.]
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| Legitimate Work, digital paintery | |
Posted - 7/10/2008 1:58:13 AM | A legitimate job!?
It seems like I've landed a more or less legitimate job for a more or less legitimate game studio start-up thing doing 2d animation, UI, and other graphics.
But it should suffice to say that I think this is pretty awesome, and even if it were to implode, it'll be great experience. [Um, not to imply that I think it'll implode, what I mean is that this is my way of being positive about the whole prospect! No, really, that's how I do it!]
This means, of course, that I'm not particularly looking for any more clients at this time, (though I am not forgetting obligations to current clients!). I should get around to making sure all the information I've posted reflects this ...
As for how this development reflects upon this journal, well, I'll find out. I've still got some freelance client work and certainly my own digital painting adventures will continue. Speaking of which -
Digital Painting
I was getting all nostalgic and wistful for Quake, so I did a picture somewhat inspired by it.
Partway through though, I realized that I was simply re-making this picture (from dec 07):
And I simply couldn't continue because I felt too introspective about making a picture with such a similar situation. (Though looking back now, I really have gotten better at digital painting, and I thought I was doing pretty badassly for that one pic.) Also, in the (new) alien robot picture, the Other is intended to be half-shogoth half-bushbot .... or something, but I realized that Quake is much more about the eldritch monsters than it is about alien robots.
Ah well. At least I got over my obsession with purple and green.
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| Smugglers 4, Games aren't Games | |
Posted - 7/5/2008 5:57:50 PM | Smugglers 4
Niels Bauer of Niels Bauer Games has released Smugglers 4 as of July 4th. It's what I might describe as a sort of turnbased space opera trading/combat/roleplaying game.
For Smugglers 4 I did a bunch of random 2d icons and ui work for Niels and it's very cool to see the game released and looking so polished. It's also got sound work done by GameDev's nsmadsen and I believe another artist who worked on the game was/is on gamedev but less active ...
So check it out, if that's your thing!
Games are not Games
[Bear with me here through the academicery, I try to keep it straightforward.]
What we are making are not games, not the way we talk about them.
What we call games are not exactly games -- The label of "games" as such leads us to think of video/computer games in limited and paradoxical ways.
For example: Poker is a game, baseball is a game, chess is a game. These games don't have stories or characters. Nor do those video/computer games which resemble such analogue games, like spacewar, minesweeper, or bejeweled.
What is going on in other games is the medium of those games is being mixed with other forms. The most obvious and early of these is probably narrative writing -- "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike", followed by other forms of narrative media like comic books (like Max Payne with it's graphic novel segments) and movies (eg. the hilarious C-movie Command and Conquer videos or all those poorly received 'multimedia adventure games' that came out when CDs became availible and Myst was still cool).
So yes, to utterly simplify the matter, what people get from games is indeed some kind of fun, but what people get from novels, comic books, and movies, all other narrative forms, is not just fun but many other things as well. If that were not enough, the static narrative of the mentioned mediums is often replaced/extended by collective narrative (read: multiplayer) which may be more (World of Warcraft?) or less (Second Life?) structured.
What we've been calling games are much more complex than our labeling implies. They're about a lot more than having some fun. The one common element throughout is interactivity, which I'd say is the defining quality of this medium.
It's not possible to re-lable games as "interactive digital media", but it might well be a more descriptive label. [ Would "interactive media" suffice? This would open to door to all sorts of analogue forms of interactivity, eg. playing (as a general category of activity), improv theatre and other such live performance ... ]
Fin.
Coffee
And I never drank coffee before but Laura has corrupted me. Damn, I see why people drink this stuff, it's amazing.
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| Iso-hell, DP | |
Posted - 7/2/2008 7:43:20 PM | Too busy today to do a proper entry, and I didn't have the foresight to plan ahead.
But a quick horror story: I drink like 3 double-plus sized mugs of tea a day, right? I found my tea tasted a bit funny so I looked in my electric kettle thing for the first time in a couple months and it had brown ... growth? all over the inside. Ugh.
At least I boiled the water before drinking it three times a day.
Isometric animation
I've been getting back into working on isometric character animation [beyond the RPG maker / FF left-right-up-down, I mean serious isometric] and I am gaining boatloads of respect for people that do it well. It's much more than making one pictures - it's making a whole lot of pictures and making them work well together. And no only well, nicely.
Of course it is also likely that the method by which I have been doing this is over detailed, so I found when I reduced my 300x300 animation to 60x60 and promptly lost half of the detail. Hrm.
Good practice, of course. Painful, but good.
Digital Painting
Anyway, here's a picture I made over the last week from a sketch I did, well, last week:
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