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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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  PAX demo, random character art stuff | 
Posted - 8/29/2008 4:04:54 PM | CF Tech Demo at PAX
D is heading down to PAX with a laptop and a super hacked up build of CF to show off the game to whoever is receptive. Look for the blond guy with the laptop and who is not dressed as Megaman and ask to see Clockwork Fantasia, I'm sure you'll find him.
And it should suffice to say that yesterday was a crazy work day, but even I did not keep going until, well... let's see what the SVN log says:
Last update time, by team member:
Me : 6:02 pm
J : 10:41 pm
D : 1:35 am
N : 3:55 am
Yes, N is nuts.
(He said something about how I make him seem authoritarian, or something, in my posts, but really it's just me trying to add non-existent drama to the narrative of game design. N is obviously passionate about his work, but he is a mellow and exceedingly understanding guy in interpersonal dealings, honestly. Would you like to hear stories about N's firebrand diktats or would you rather hear about how we sort of talked for a minute and he was all "it'd be cool if we could get this done by Friday". I mean come on.)
Oh, yeah, here's a shot from the PAX tech demo:
Old character art, being revised. And otherwise, as perhaps you can see, N overhauled the lighting and it's seriously awesome even if the shot doesn't show much.
And ooh, creepy:
Those are crates filled with evil, mind you. J called me at 10pm to find the texture for these to put them in to the game. For you!
The UI doing its thing with some fun new graphics (that'll surely be replaced again):
You can see a radial menu sort of thing going on here. I do think that the format of this menu as such is more suited to consoles than PCs because it is of a design that is more easily traversed with a gamepad/joystick than mouse.
Dialog system doing its thing with the monk Berzelius who acts as the narrator of the game:
The image, text, and position of each are coded in xml and all sorts of things are possible. ... and I think we need a new panel background texture at a higher resolution.
PAX tech demo loading screen, just because it's fun:
It features the witchdoctor class (the witchdoctrix?).
I can't show you a picture of it, but the music for the game is really, really well done. Sure, there are only five and a half minutes of it, but it's a good five and a half minutes.
Characters
Just fun stuff. I've moved the content below to the shots above, so there's just the animation to show. Fo' sho'.
...a tinkerer wrench attack:
I'll admit now that, incredibly, I managed to avoid taking an anatomy class in art school. Partially I just didn't want to do it even though it'd be good for me, and partially I was busy taking all kinds of interesting classes like stone lithography, sculpture, and sound art. In the end I have to do anatomy anyway through animation, though as I've said before, it can be fudged. And ha, it's not that any games ever actually pay attention to actual anatomy, considering some of the character design. But I jest! As N, who seems to be surpassing dcosborn* in mentions on my journal here said, games get away with all kinds of crazy crap you wouldn't believe if you looked closely.
* It's strange, actually; N and dcosborn both give me a psycho graphics coder vibe. I want to put them together in a room and see what happens. Perhaps, like Protoss Templar, they would meld to form a being of pure 3d graphics programming energy.
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| Painterly Textures, Characters, Mobo no-mo | |
Posted - 8/22/2008 12:35:42 PM | Painterly Textures & Editor
After last weeks concerns about the realistic textures clashing with the cartoony characters, N made an Executive Decision to move in a more painterly/cartoony direction ala Team Fortress 2. Thereafter I painted raw texture material and J (the 3d/texture guy) did his magic with re-tiling, resizing, adjusting colors, etc etc, all the work of massaging them into the game, so now we have a growing set of impressionistic textures.
Thanks to N for the first image and J for the second.
 
Note also that these show off N's wonderful editor for the Spectre engine, SLED. (He sort of implied that he wanted to show off how lovely his editor is, so who am I to deny?) There are more NPR rendering techniques to come, apparently, so we'll just have to wait and see how neat this is going to look.
Also new is a cool conversation system built by D, but we'll have to wait 'til it has some content to show off pictures.
Character Concepts
Fig A is inspired largely by Rockwell's Rosie The Riveter
Fig B is based on 18-19th century calvary uniforms with a touch of the aristocracy thereof which I realize is perhaps inappropriate in a footsoldier but I'm really not going to be drawing horses in this so I think the displacement is acceptable.
 
Now back to animating them. N also agreed to go with linear style animation if I do 6 frames for a walk cycle. It's more work, but it looks much better. [Self: Stop making more work for self.]
And a dynamite-wielding ninja squirrel:
Mobo Blow Up
My motherboard broke. Well, it exhibited the signs of a bad short somewhere and damned if I could find and fix the thing, considering both my lack of EE sk1llz and the damage my mobo surely took when it was throttled by my loose video board in its delivery to here from CA (I know that at the very least my SATA1 connector was at a disturbing 60 degree angle or so). In this I think I am glad that it is my video board that survived the mutual thrashing as it is the more expensive component.
So I bought a new mobo, a new power supply (because apparently 300 watts won't cut it these days), a new mouse (my old one was turning a sickly greenish yellow; really), and some thermal paste stuff to remount my CPU. A word first: Consumer-oriented computer shops totally suck, and by suck, I mean are-expensive. In Canada here we're talking Futureshop, The Source, and even the smaller shops. The markup is horrifying. It's much nicer to buy parts from a warehouse type place in Vancouver -- a particular power supply was ~$170 vs. ~$250, as an example. Worse, worst, a USB extension cable is like 50 cents at NXSource versus $25 at The Source; only a %5000 price difference, 'eh? But I digress.
I learned how one can improperly mount a CPU, very improperly mount a CPU, then properly mount a CPU. Fascinating stuff; the effects of using thermal paste correctly and tightening the heatsink attachment appropriately are dramatic.
In conclusion: Ugh, computer trouble is not what I needed this last week.
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| CF screenshot, animation, issues | |
Posted - 8/12/2008 10:10:07 PM | CF Screenshot
Here's the first actual screenshot of CF; thanks N. for haranguing this out of everyone.
Points I was involved in:
- Characters
- Skybox
Don't ask me all that's going on there apart from that. I'm just an artist, teehee!
I kid; a lot of the engine and game logic operation actually makes sense to me from what I've picked up from trawling technical Gamedev posts and listening in on N. and D. hash out bugs. It's neat to see all of this applied on a project I'm involved in. Onward -
Counterpoints to what I am mostly involved in:
- Realisticish terrain and colorful hand-drawn characters don't particularly fit much at all, in my opinion. The TF2 'painterly' terrain approach might be in order, or anything that uses more areas of solid color (as the characters do) rather than noisy naturalistic textures. Just run the 'paint daubs' or 'remove dust & scratches' filter over everything and up the saturation a bit and it might look more unified. A cel-shading outline effect /might/ be nice for the terrain, but I think N. shot that down the last time someone dared mention it. Thoughts?
- The skybox image, however moody, is heavily distorted due to the camera angle. One solution would be to rotate the skybox 45 degrees so that the four angles which the camera will tend to view the game at will line up with the skybox planes. But there must be a utility that takes 8 planes and warps their edges so that they look like a passable sphere map!
CF Animation
N. has a lovely book on animation which I borrowed, read, and was inspired to action by. Unfortunately this makes me want to change a lot of how I've been approaching animation in the game so far. I shall explain:
Fig. A, Clockwork Soldier ; Fig. B, Elgar Abkhazi:
 
Fig. A uses the 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-repeat method of animation which leads to foot-sliding, or maybe skiing. This is much less notable on chunky anime dudes at very low resolution (as the sample I worked from was), but I think it looks quite less good on larger, more detailed characters.
Fig. B is a simple 1-2-3-4-repeat sequence. Obviously it's a lot chunkier because it cuts down the number of frames per sequence by more than half, but I believe the walk looks much more believable. Plus it's maybe a little faster and more fun to draw because I drew four rather different frames rather than five rather similar frames.
With Fig. B I've also taken the advice from said book of concentrating more on the character's volume than on line fidelity. It's a bit more wobbly but 'feels' a bit nicer, I'm feeling. Further, the linework is simplified even more than before and thicker lines are used to outline the character - it looks more like animation due to these techniques, and I think they serve well in animation.
[And don't mind any jumpy lines, that's called "mark-making"; If I went in and fixed everything to perfection we'd be no better than the machines!]
Right, so in general animating has been a fascinating provocation. Animation is all about anatomy and motion, about getting certain parts right, being allowed to fudge certain other things, and doing other things wrong quite on purpose. I feel that given this challenge, even with the frustration and work it takes, I'm growing as an artist. And that's a good feeling.
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| More Character Design & Such | |
Posted - 8/8/2008 1:55:19 AM | Lots of pictures today. (When lacking any other content..)
Character Design for CF
Character concepts are the fun part, so I'm going to revel in it a bit. Truth be told this is mostly a chance for me to be a history nerd. Maybe I'll discuss my ongoing struggle with animating the poor buggers in the next post.
Magic faction classes
Tank : Crusader
 
This design is pretty straightforward. I'm trying to avoid Christian association while maintaining a European style (as with all the characters).
Note asymmetric cape. I'm going to try to use this trick to make more dynamic characters as much as possible.
I think I'll change the mace to something more substantial looking. There's a fine line between "utterly brutal" and "elegant" in maces that I want to get just right.
Also, regarding the female crusader class, I'm a bit unsure of how to handle this. I hate the whole thing in games where plate armor on a guy looks normal enough but the same set turns into a metal bikini when worn by a woman: boob-cups are right out. What I may end up doing is giving the female version more fluted gothic armor while the male has more 'chunky' Italian style armor and see if I can do anything with the accessories.
Ranged : Sorcerer
 
My first sketch was more like classical wizarding types for this class, as you can see, but such a depiction fits more with the later-planned arch-mage sort of class. So I went more with sorcerers as recent graduates from magic school, or whatever, so they're foppish, arrogant, and blond/e. Ridiculous hats are requisite. I really do have to refine the outfits but the idea is general medieval foppery.
The imagery of wizarding paraphernalia is too good to pass up so I gave the male sorcerer the phallic wand (a staff comes with maturity), and the female sorcerer a yonnic orb. I don't seriously go for magical essentiallism but this time it's for the lolz, as it were.
Utility : Witchdoctor
Now this is a bit interesting -- I emphatically did not want to make the witchdoctor class the "dark, primitive African savage" stereotype as [unfortunately] propagated by Blizzard in, like, World of Warcraft and Diablo 3. The history of Europe provides examples of witchdoctors just fine, thank-you, and so I based this directly on black death era "doctors". (They really did wear creepy bird-masks filled with herbs they thought would protect them from disease! Too creepy to pass up.)
The "voodoo doll" - the concept of which, sympathetic magic involving a human figure, is probably found in the history of most cultures - is made of wax, based on the account from wikipedia of a witchdoctor in Britain in the 18th century. The doll gets burned in the end, of course, and this could probably make for an 'unfortunate' in-game ability.
[Holy crap his feet there are ridiculously round. Good thing this is just concept art.]
Paris: The Lead Prettyboy
I'm no expert on manga/anime, but it appears that a lead prettyboy with flamboyant hair is absolutely vital, so Paris is it.
 
He's got some kind of magic sword. And don't they all!
[Ugh, seriously: I need to sit down and spend some time on figuring out how to handle drawing noses. I must have redone his nose eight times and I'm still not happy. Very hard to draw noses are. ]
Moranth & Elgar Abkhazi
Father & Son team. Their theme is boots & gloves, respectively, so Moranth has steampunk power-boots and Elgar has steampunk power-gloves.
Moranth has to have a huge Russian fur hat so he's going to end up as some kind of Cossack dancer (which leads into a great kick-attack animation). Their father & son matching uniforms are supposed to be something like Russian naval officers, but I may have to make 'em a bit less fancy than that.
I have to give Elgar a hat so he doesn't look some much like Harry freakin' Potter.
In other news, Digital Painting
I've been feeling a bit melancholic lately and I think it shows a bit in these.
War. War never changes. [I do side with the glittering gems of hatred, by the way.]
Makes me want to do a comic again. I think I totally could with my lately found comfort in rapid digital drawing & painting. And by comic I mean a really dark & depressing """graphic novel""" type thing. Ah, maybe when I've got some time to blow.
[I remember now, I got the thought of this from that DMZ comic which struck me as way too much about style over substance. But that's how I feel about all comics. And everything, probably. I can't enjoy anything!]
Oort/Miner hardsuit stuff, I can't get over bleak Sciencefictionscapes. Though obviously this one is only sketched, but maybe it shows how I go about thinking about how to lay out a scene. Linework like that would be awesome in drawing class, but won't get me anywhere in illustration.
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