Sew's Art Blog

Early blog? Late blog? My brain and sleep schedule got rocked up so only time will tell!

I’ve been spending a lot of time working but I’m in one of those weird places where the amount of progress appears minimal. This is a big fault that I have, and I’ve discussed it a little before. There is no point in tweaking every frame to some impossible standard of perfection when the end result reads as the same for 99% of people. I do this with paintings, a lot too, but take comfort in that I know I’m not alone with it. There are countless art tutorials on painting and sketching where they could have really stopped eight steps before they do for the same effect. It doesn’t justify it, but it’s nice to know you’re not insane sometimes, you know?

 

Let’s just call it good for now and sliiide on to something more important.

Ask your mom or ask your dad!

What a wheek! I forced myself to do the most tedious tasks art-wise during the little bursts of time I actually had. Finishing up meshing, finishing up skinning, tweaking art, tweaking animations, drawing and painting the “b side” for female animation. This is something that should have been done at least a week ago but I’ve been having some issues. One with just generally being kind of busy, though that’s nothing new. The other being some slight hand pain issues that you totally shouldn’t worry about because I have it under control, I just have to be more aware that the strain of attempting to brute-force pictures can be physical as well. Lol?

Boring animation stuff aside, now whut? I’ve sketch up a decent design for a default outfit (that isn’t the Apathy design). It’s something super simple that can be usable for the time being without being as complex as the Apathy design. The big plus is that the design is symmetrical, save for a single mark on the chest. This will make the art load for this much smaller than asymmetrical design (likeapahtys) would, but will still help me be sure that things are mirror and lining up like they should for later.

I want to get this done and tweak the battle animations a bit more and add things for hurt and dead and whatever. Just rough animations that I can weak later, things that shouldn’t take too long. Hell, even if they look bad, as long as the place holder is there I am sure I will be constantly tweaking things once I see them in game and think “oh god i have to fix THAT before someone sees it” (which is what I did with the maptiles). From that I want to break away from character animation and move onto something else. Hawk was mentioning animating NCPs vaguely to me the other day, so maybe some more kind of feely UI work. I dunno, I dunno what is most pressing.

I should probably find out!

The terrible task of Meshing and Skinning. Skinning, different than Skins. Skins are what let me swap between male and female with just a click, while Skinning allows me to set vertex weights to different bones than the ones they are attached to. First I have to figure out where my vertices need to go.

This part isn’t really very straight forward. It all makes sense to me, but getting it to work a practical way that is useful takes some time and tweaking. I have used to have to manually edit my vertexes during an animation to make up for gaps in the art. This is super common on hard joints like the elbows and knees. With Skinning set up properly though, the vertices fix themselves automatically. I had to mess with it a lot to figure it out and get it to work how we need it to since there is no documentation on it right now. My first real task we trying to recreate all of our old animations as best I could.

“Run animation” Needs some tweakin’

“Lance attack” I dunno, it was there.

“Attack2”. Would be more impressive with a sword or something in hand, yeah?

They all need little tweaks here n’ there. The exciting part for me is that I did all of those animations in one day. The majority of my week was spent Meshing and Skinning. I even made a few walking animations that I know we don’t need. The only important rough that is lacking is an idle animation. That is on me not really know what to do with it, though..

I also made some other important decisions!

It’s all pretty well explained there in my letter to Hawk, but doing this will save another large chunk of time, as I won’t have to recreate an entire skeleton and animation for soul purpose of just having clothes mirror properly. Rejoice!

I’m having to be very careful and very organized when it comes to costuming so I don’t confuse myself and makes thing needlessly convoluted. This is a part that isn’t a big deal to anyone but me, probably. Everything is very organized, it’s just that there is so much of it, it can seem like clutter.

There are actually 5 more normal bones not listed here.. lolz?

The slots will never change (though I may need to add a few more depending). The attachments are what I really have to make sure stay in check. They need a proper naming convention, probably just GENDER_SETNAME-ITEM, like FEMALE_SPORTY-LEFT_UPPER_ARM, or something I can glance at easily. Luckily, each set (South/East) are hot-keyed so I can toggle the entire thing on or off when I need to easily. Thankyouspine.

Before I can sign off on it though I need to run a quick test just to make sure my outfit theory is good..

Hey, it is.

I did it! A month in the making. Whoo.

I say that, but I’ll probably redraw the inventory icon. I have more to say on all this but I’m kind of beat right now.

Been working with our UI some this week. Making tons of mock ups, trying to get something to stick proper.

This is the evolution of the first few attempts. Iconography slowly became a bigger draw, but after awhile we started to miss our bars.

Not final, but it’s where I’m current sitting and debatin’.

We started using Trello this week and I really like it. I’ve barely been around to use it and add all my tasks properly yet, but I’m very excited to.