Another day, another challenge. This time the main challenge seemed to come from my equipment continuing to act up. I replaced the nib on my stylus, but it didn’t improve anything at all, getting lines where I want them is still excruciating.
That said, I tried it out later on my windows machine and the process was much improved, so it looks like the tablet itself is fine. Either something has gone off with my settings or I just can’t find a good working position while I’m on lunch break.
Regardless, I did manage to get some practice in, first focusing on the usual warmup exercises of trying to get a decent line or circle on the “page”, and then switching to some practice with trying to use my arm more than my wrist for drawing larger shapes. Apparently that’s a good habit to get into, so I’m working on it.
I also took a stab at trying to do some mannequinization tracing against a few handy reference photos, trying to learn to recognize basic shapes and proportion. You may notice that there are no images in this post. That’s how badly it went. I’m going to continue to work on the process, so expect to see some of that before too long.
Aside from the drawing practice I had an interesting time this evening dealing with class instantiation in Unity and C#. Trying to set things up for automatic UI creation is proving to be a lengthy process, but one that I think will make for much more well designed code going forward, in addition to making mass changes far easier to navigate.
Also, it’s possible that I finally managed to get a viable video created for Day 4. The end result appears to play back correctly, and with proper audio sync all the way through and all of its video frames intact. It also sized up at a full gigabyte of space per minute of video, so I think I’m still doing something wrong there, but progress is being made. It’s just barely possible that I might be able to do an actual video for the Day 10 update as planned, but we’ll have to see.
Today certainly had its ups and downs. I spent more time than I would like trying to address the audio sync issues that I was having with the video for Day 4. I thought I actually managed to find a solution, even rendered the entire video out again, only to find that my “solution” somehow led to the last several seconds of video dropping from my file. Fortunately, I think I’m probably making more of a problem out of this than it needs to be. I only have the issue if I try to force Blender to render out to a frame rate that doesn’t exactly match the source video. If I just keep the frame rates native everything goes much smoother, and due to all of the practice I’m actually getting pretty fast at syncing up the external audio and adding in the various image overlays. So I should be fine as long as I can stick to the single source videos I’m doing for the vlog. Hopefully I’ll be able to find a better solution by the time I need to start getting more complex.
Art also had its ups and downs today. My main focus for the 30 minute challenge was another day of just practicing my fundamentals with some lines and circles.
Drawing Practice
I’m only posting them here to fully demonstrate why I don’t normally bother. Super boring stuff, but also super needed. Seriously, I’m fairly sure there’s not a straight line in the entire bunch, which was a bit disappointing as I thought I was making some headway with that.
After some warmup with the lines and circles, I decided to follow up on one of the anatomy videos I’ve been binge watching. Learning is useless if you don’t put it into practice, and practice makes perfect, so I put my hand at some spines:
Some Spines
The two on the top were nearly excruciating to render. I swear it took me a full thirty minutes just to draw those two. Oddly, later in the evening I sat down with my android tablet and busted out the other spines in next to no time at all. They’re a bit less deliberate, and I don’t think I got the curvature quite right, but the actual curves and lines were much easier, and involved way less erasing. I’m wondering if it’s time for a new nib on the stylus for my drawing tablet, or if the practice for the first two just really helped out.
I spent a bit more time watching the Proko videos I linked in the last post today, this time branching out and looking at some of his earlier studies, and I’m still impressed with his collection. Today’s drawing study was absolutely nothing worth posting, I spent pretty much an entire hour just drawing lines and elipses, trying to make them straight and not straight respectively, with varying results. Acquiring good pen control is going to be crucial if I want to produce the types of drawings I want to do, so there will certainly be days like today where that’s all I do. It’s not the first time I’ve filled several photoshop layers with something approximating circles.
I also managed to make some good progress on my new Unity tactic, convincing the program to build out an entire game screen for me at the push of a button. It took quite a bit of reworking of my existing code to get it to that point, but the effort should be more than worth it, as it will allow me to make changes to my design more confidently, without having to worry about going back and applying those changes umpteen million times to existing UI screens.
It occurs to me that I haven’t really mentioned my drawing setup at all, or how I’m going about this learning process and 30/30 challenge. I’ve got two apps now that I’m using for drawing. Primarily I’m working in Photoshop, going the full digital artist route. I don’t have a super fancy drawing tablet or anything, since it would be a stretch to justify at this point in my career as an “artist”, but I did spring for one of the low end drawing tablet input devices. No local screen or anything, it’s basically a hard mouse pad and a stylus, but it does a pretty good job with pen pressure, and I’m getting used to the disconnect of drawing on the screen with a pen that I’m not looking at.
The other app is something that I just started playing around with, mostly just so I’d have a way to sketch on the go. It’s Adobe Sketch, and I’ve got it installed on my small LG android tablet. No pen pressure, but it’s got a decent set of brushes, and has a direct connection back to Photoshop via the creative cloud for finishing work, so it could come in handy. Great for those days when I forget my stylus somewhere inconvenient.
A good bit of progress on the game today, as well as a stunning revelation about the abilities of Unity. It turns out that you can actually write scripts that will allow you to change the Unity editor itself, providing more functionality. I decided that I had to see if something like that was possible while I was getting into the nitty gritty of the game’s sub-menus. You see, there are three main parts of the game’s core gameplay that all focus on a series of runes. 33 runes to be precise. Which means that the same general structures are showing up in different ways in about four different places, 33 times each.
It was getting to be a bit of a nightmare linking everything up and trying to make a nice responsive, resizable user interface for the game under those conditions, but today I realized that I don’t have to go through all of that craziness. All I have to do is go through some other craziness to tell Unity how to do it for me.
Queue evil laugh here. *Mwahahaha*
On the drawing side of things I found a pretty great series of training videos focused on human anatomy for artists, you can find it at ProkoTV. The guy is a bit corny, but I think he’s really speaking my language. The problem with learning art is that there are so many different styles and ways to accomplish the same thing, and methods that work for one person may not work at all for someone else. Binge watching the series, I have a feeling that this might be really tuned with my style of learning, which is super useful.
As for actual drawing, I spent today’s 30 minutes mucking around trying out some of the things that I learned in the video, but I did it super loose, just getting some practice in, so I didn’t actually save the results. I’ve got to spend some more time on the deep basics before we get to those sketches.
Another day with no video upload, and the more I think about it, the more I’m thinking that’s probably ok. The main point of the vlog updates was to post some progress and work on my delivery and video editing skills, but that doesn’t really need to be an every day thing. For the time being the video editing takes *way* too long, even though I am improving, and the thing about practice and progress is that it is freaking slow. By design. So there won’t always be something worth showing off.
So, that being said, I think I’m going to shift up my approach. I’m kind of thinking that instead of trying to do “most” days, I’m instead going to do (hopefully) all days in blog form, and only major milestone days in vlog form. So I’m pretty much aiming for 1, 5, 10, 15, etc. Every five days. And yeah, I know, it’s day 5, but I just did a video yesterday, so you’re just going to have to wait to see my smiling mug again.
That being said, I totally did a video today. Not one I’m going to be posting. After the debacle that was the video for Day 3, followed up by the wreck that was Day 4, I realized I needed to do some experimentation. Some quick reading showed that most films are actually shot in 24 frames per second, rather than the HD camcorder / video game style of 60. And since 24 frames is a lot easier to work with than 60 anyway, I opted for a more “Hollywood” look for my vlog entries. So I found a new camera app for the phone that would let me specify the FPS, went for a good 24 frames a second, and did about a minute and a half of test footage just to see if I could clear up my audio syncing problems in the Blender VSE. (Video Sequence Editor)
Unfortunately the app only *tries* to get to 24 fps. What it actually spat out was 23.87 fps, which caused Blender to freak out on the audio again. The problem is that it rightly treats the audio and video tracks differently. The audio, since it’s just audio, is a specific length of time, measured in straight seconds. The video, being a series of still pictures, is just measured in frames. If you play it back at the right FPS the two will match up, if you don’t, they won’t. But Blender has a few built in FPS settings that it likes to use when building its video output, and 23.87 isn’t one of them. In theory you can set it to whatever you want, but I couldn’t seem to get that to work, unfortunately.
Fortunately, I found a solution. It’s a bit of a hack, but it will have to do, and should eliminate any future issues with audio syncing. Blender has a speed control effects strip that you can add to your video, technically for the purpose of doing slow motion and high speed manipulations on your video tracks. But it can also be set to stretch the video track exactly to the length of your audio. So if I get the starting frame rate fairly close, say 23.87fps, a quick adjustment with the speed strip should get me to exactly where I need to be. Going forward I’m planning to just start with that for all future video editing, should save myself a ton of time.
As for progress on the 30/30 drawing challenge, today I chose to spend some more time working on my pet WIP, the Space Monster piece. As before, I’m saving this one until it’s “finished”, so I don’t have anything to actually show off in the blog, but I’m still going to update the meter, since I spent about an hour adding texture to that sucker today.
Hey, a new video. A terrible video, but it’s a learning process.
(Edit: By Day 10 I managed to finally correct the audio issues with this video, and while showing improvement is a good part of this blog series, watching a video with audio sync issues is no way to spend your time, so the original has now very thankfully been put out of its misery so the actual content can come through.)
Here’s a bit of art from today’s effort:
Since I mentioned it in the video, and in yesterday’s log post, I thought I should probably dive a bit more into the video game I’m working on. Probably should have spent more time on that in yesterday’s blog post, since it took up so much of my day off, but here you go.
I’m working on a video game. I’ve got a few of them planned, actually, but one thing at a time! Ok, several things at a time, but one thing HARD CORE at a time. I’ve isolated this idea as the best starter, not just out of the video games, but from all of my general projects. It’s complex, but not super complex. It requires skill, but not super skill. It’s something that I can reasonably do a pretty decent job on while I’m honing the skills I need for the other projects, so that’s what I’m doing.
This one is an incremental game, along the lines of Cookie Clicker, or Adventure Capitalist, or any of the dozens of other incremental games out there. It’s a fun genre, and while there are several, it’s not exactly a bloated market while still having enough of a fan base for there to be a demand. I’ve had an idea for my own incremental floating around in my head for a while now, and I’ve been working out some of the details, the game mechanics, what features I’d like to have, that sort of thing. I even made some basic attempts to start coding it up in javascript and WebGL not too long ago, but kept running into various road blocks.
Now that I’m coming back at the concept with more determination and a bit more knowledge, I really feel like it’s starting to come together. I’ve been learning the Unity Game Engine, with help from a subscription to cgcookie.com. Finding that site was one of the things that really led to this strong push for learning. I had the desire, but didn’t really know where to start, and *boom*, here’s a group of people that are set up just to teach me a specific huge chunk of the stuff that I need to know. I found them because I was looking for Blender training, in relation to an upcoming That Explained project, and was elated to see that someone was combining concentrated learning tracks in 3d modeling and animation, game development, sculpture, and concept art. Fantastic.
Until I found that site I hadn’t even realized that Unity would be an option for this game, but it turns out it’s pretty much exactly what I needed to both get it into production and take it to a level that will help it stand out.
That being said, video game design is a LONG process, especially for a single developer, so it’s probably still going to be a while before anyone can play this game. But, when you can, I will let you know.
The other major thing that I mentioned in the video, of course, is the 30 / 30 challenge I’ve given myself for drawing and 2d art. That’s really another thing that I probably should have mentioned before now, but in retrospect it seems like the perfect thing to put in a blog, so here you go. This isn’t just day 4 of the blog, it’s day 4 of the drawing challenge. 30 minutes a day for 30 days, a concentrated push to improve my drawing skills.
Why drawing? Because dang it, that’s a skill that would be super freaking helpful. I need book covers, I need character sketches, I need to be able to think visually to help set scenes in my novels, or design levels in my games. I need promotional materials for everything. There’s a reason that cgcookie has a whole section dedicated to concept art, it’s super valuable. And for such an important skill, my current skill level is *way* under par. So that’s my first target of concentrated growth. I’ll be continuing to study a bit of everything, and reporting on whatever I learn, but for the rest of the 30 days, that’s the main learning focus. Working on the game, learning how to draw.
Alright, so I tried to post a video for Day 3, I really did.
Like, seriously, I tried a lot.
I spent around an hour and a half to two hours working on what would have been a seven to ten minute video, and have literally nothing to show for it except the following pieces of knowledge:
While you can use the Samsung SideSync App to view your phone screen on your laptop, making it easier to film HD video using your camera phone, it isn’t super fond of having a spotty wi-fi connection.
If you have problems with spotty wi-fi you can use SideSync while directly connected to your phone via a USB cable.
If you have your phone connected to the laptop via USB it will have the added benefit of actually charging while you are using it.
If you charge your phone while attempting to record HD video, the phone has a tendency to overheat. Rapidly.
If the phone overheats, it will randomly stop recording HD video.
In reviewing the video footage for Day 1, I decided that I had spent too much time checking the laptop screen to make sure that the shot was still good and that the video was still recording, and as a result did a much better job of keeping my eyes focused on the camera while recording, rather than the feedback monitor. In retrospect this was a revelation with unfortunate timing.
When filming in HD at 60 frames a second, if you are sitting *just* a bit too close to the camera the auto-focus will freak out and start visibly adjusting the focus pretty much every time you breath funny.
All of this combined made for a mess of broken up video, missing segments where I didn’t know how much of the recording was lost when I started re-recording, and video footage that was simply too terrible to actually watch. Considering how late it was getting, I made the decision to just scrap the whole thing and call it a night.
As for actual progress, other than learning valuable lessons about my recording tools and process I put some work into my upcoming video game, and spent a considerable amount of time practicing shading techniques on a piece that I’m working on, which I will not be sharing yet, as it still has quite a lot of polishing to do. Hopefully it will be here soon.
No vlog post today. I was planning on doing one, it’s only day 2 after all, but PAIN happened. Also, it’s been a late night, on account of holiday.
So, what happened was this: excited about having a bit of spare time due to tomorrow’s holiday, and also enjoying my new “toy”… ok, let’s just go with straight up toy, a usb to guitar connector, I was looking forward to sitting down and spending a bit of time strumming away with Rocksmith, which is essentially Rock Band, but with an actual guitar instead of a plastic one. Since we were spending time with our new pup in the living room, I decided to bring the whole rig down there for some practice time. Unfortunately, while carrying both laptop and guitar, along with the various cords and chargers, I was a bit off balanced, and my foot slipped on the stairs and it was all over. I landed hard on my arm and back, electronics went flying everywhere, the dog lost her mind (barking at me, rather than checking up on me mind you), it was a bit of chaos.
I’m fine, all in all, pretty bruised, and my side hurts like mad, but nothing seems broken. Even so, I didn’t really feel up to trying to go through the effort of making a video. It would mostly just be grunting anyway.
That said, injury may stop the updates, but it can’t stop the work. Well, it can, but I didn’t let it this time. Today I practiced some sketching, working on gesture drawing based on references.
The first one is just super simple gesture lines, as well as I could work them out with very little knowledge of what I’m doing. For the second batch I increased the time with each reference photo from 30 seconds to a full minute, and spent some time trying to work out the basic shapes of the form.
This is a fairly standard form of practice, as I understand it, so I’m sure this won’t be the last time I do something like this. And hopefully, like anything else, the more time I spend learning how to spot the gestures, the better I’ll get at it, and the more demonstrative the gesture drawings will be.
If you don’t feel like watching the video that’s ok, I’ll do a quick sum-up and recap. I’m on full tear project mode. I’m busting it up and loading it out and working myself crazy to expand my skill sets to make the projects linked here the absolute best that they can be.
And, since I’m going crazy doing that, I thought it would be a good idea to spend some time in this learning phase practicing and improving my skills at some of the other aspects of the business, such as keeping up with a regular blog, and other social media related things. Hence these posts, and also the vlog on youtube.
More recap!
This blog is all about my quest to improve the skills that I need in relation to my various projects: Taloria, Let’s Talk About Games, That Explained. The whole Illustrious Kingdom experience. Sometimes this could be very interesting, sometimes it may get a bit boring and repetitive, but I hope not. And I hope that maybe someday having written it down may help inspire someone to go on a similar journey. Or heck, maybe it will just help inspire my future self, to realize the improvements that I’ve made from all this concerted effort.
So, like I say in the video, follow along, enjoy the ride. And together we’ll see the twists and turns and ups and downs, etc.
