Sew's Art Blog

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.

While my cohorts won’t admit it (at least not to my face (but probably more as a tool to keep me moving)), the way the base animation looked needed some love. Both structure-wise and painting-wise. Since I was faced with the task of basically redoing my Spine project, I figured now was the perfect time to kill some birds.

 

The first step was to adjust my default standing position. The old one was just the first frame of the only animation that existed at the time, but it’s kind of a bitch to work with. A much better idea would be to draw the character standing a little more normally. So let’s do that real quick!

 

 
Balls for hands and feet – The #1 sign of a lazy artist

 

What’s this?! Surprise, women! And surprise, all pieces completely redrawn and proportioned better! Ho-Ho. They are also drawn a lot larger than the old version. Yeah, I know, even my old version was way bigger than we’re putting them in game. I think Hawk said he was resizing the old one by around 80%. Yikes. So why would I take the time and trouble to make full version even larger? It’s just easier to work with, get off my back old man. Here’s the back view, ’cause I’m generous.

 

Butts & Ammo

 

Okay, so now what? After some quick alignment tests in Spine to make sure I drew all the pieces the right sizes to prevent overlapping, it’s time to do some paintin’. Oh boy, my favorite. Oh, and actually drawing the hands and feet. Lazy, lazy.

 

 
Some of the lines on the male chest have been erased and edited ’cause I forgot too before saving this. Also, the female torso is a different size than the male so doesn’t line up perfectly right here. Pretend it does! (’cause it does)

 

Now everything looks good again! Excite! From here, I do a heavy amount of work in Spine. I convert several of the body pieces into meshes to help remove gaps in the animation. I’ve also gone ahead and properly set up the skins in spine, so switching from male to female during any of the animations is as easy as clickin’ a button. After all the meshes are made, it’s time to recreate all the animations again. This is probably the easiest and hardest part of this process.

 

 
boing. This are 50% of sketch size

 

Keep in mind these are nowhere near finished animations. I did this animations super fast just to kind of get a feel that I was on the right track and that my meshes were working properly. The left upper arm still need some tweaking, just a little too bulky at the top and I can’t mesh that away.

 

I have a few things left to do here that I was hoping I’d have enough time to finish before this blog went up, but I guess I don’t. I still have to paint the North set and mesh it, then do the the animations proper again. None of these are the daunting task that I thought redrawing everything was though, so I’m very pleased with the speed and quality I managed to do this at.

 

 

I did in less than a week what took me more than a year to do the first time. I’ll just let that sink in.

“can’t your folks loan you some money to get someone good from wayofthepixel to get the art you need done?”

 

Attempted different things for battle animations this week. Just lots of roughs to get the message of the attack down. Easy to adjust to make everything line up perfect later.

 

 

Some default map idles. Not happy with them, not upset with them. Need some attention eventually.

 

 

 

First attempt at an attack. Didn’t turn out so well.

 

 

A jab! It kind of works, it kind of doesn’t.

 

 

This one I’m pretty happy with. The gif runs a little faster than I want, so some of the frames go by too quickly and are sometimes unreadable.

 

I learned about a feature in Spine that would improve my workflow quite a bit by allowing me to group multiple assets to a keyboard shortcut so I could turn clothes on/off very quickly, as opposed to going through and manually hiding/unhiding each individual attachment. For some reason after I set a group though, Spine is completely unable to save. It doesn’t crash, I just get a “failed to save” error and that’s it. I spent a good few hours messing with it before giving up and submitting a bug report. mylife.com

 

I also made some quick portraits for in-game testing that I wouldn’t normally share, but what the hell. All the love.

 

     

 

well? can’t they??

Every post on this blog looks depressingly similar.

 

I spent a lot of time messing with Free Form Deformation this week. I was going to put it off until later since we can’t currently implement it into the engine, but after thinking about it I realized I could cut down on my art load by a hefty amount if done correctly. I managed pretty well, I think!

 

 

Lots of little edits, like the butt lines up way better and doesn’t me sad anymore. But the important thing is that I used FFD to remove the second foot I was swapping with. So now I just have one foot that is manipulated in the frames it needs to be, instead of swapping with a whole new one. This will save me a ton of a time, but not because of the base itself. The real test was making sure I could manipulate an actual shoe the same way (though I couldn’t do that easily until I was using the same base foot consistently too)

 

 

Very excited! So now everything has to be drawn once, as opposed to me drawing each shoe 4 times. As far as the rest of the animation goes, lots of changes made. Still tweaking the arms and I could probably keep tweaking them all night, but I decided to stop for now and call it good. Easy to fix later and I’m very eager to start on my idles so I can go hide in the magical land of drawing monsters.

I was deathly ill last week, but, no such luck this week, so let’s get right to it. We’ll start with art talk and then move into realtalk.

 

The Art

 

My last big issue with this has been the feet. I broke down the issue by thinking “How would I handle a sock?”, and then went from there. I kept the feet the way they were, but broke the shoes into two parts: the bottom base and the ankle area. The base is attached to the foot bone, and the ankle attached to the lower leg bone. Initial results are as follows.

 

 
This will definitely work (and it’s still neat to me that you can’t even see the terrible alignment errors at full speed). This is a big moment for me because it marks the end of the very obvious terrible issues I have been having it. All it needs is painting and visual tweaking. You’ve probably also notice I’ve left parts of the animation ‘unfinished’ for awhile, like the arm on the downward animation, how it’s just sitting there all derpy. This is a subtle way of me telling myself that it’s OK to leave something bad for awhile so I can progress past the point I was stuck at. I will talk in length about this at the end of the blog. Anywho, here is the current state of these two gents.

 

   

So next step is painting the north set here. Let’s just get that done real fast. First step is a rough lighting profile

 

 

Pay the layering no mind. From here we’ll do the basic stuff on a per-layer basis.

 

 

Definitely not happy with the intensity of the legs. After adjusting them all that is left is painting the hair and properly drawing and painting the shoes for both sets.

 

 

Still sans painted shoes (because I am tired and lazy) I’ve increased arm length of the upwards set and gave him more of a lean so he looks like he gives more of a shit about what he’s doing. All that remains is more animation tweaks* (so much arm error). Does this finish the entire set? No, actually. I now have to tackle mirroring these. No big whoop. However, I really want to see these in some sort of action and know how complicated I’ve made things for Hawk, so I am sending him this half set with very clear “skeleton flipX/Y” instructions.

 

The RealTalk

 

Slight visual tweaks and things will be something that I am constantly doing, I am sure. I am always noticing something I want changed or edited, but holding on to everything until it hits my stupid standards isn’t good, and doesn’t make for a healthy project. I constantly find myself frustrated with things that a better person would be fine with. This is an issue I’m working on in all aspects of my art-life, especially when I go and try to draw something on paper. I have developed a terrible perfectionist mind-set that is doing way more harm to my psyche than good. I’ve always had it to some degree, and I think most artists do, but I’m in danger of becoming a worse version of George Lucas and need to learn to get things out there and let them live.

 

I ignore most criticism about the speed in which I’m churning this art out. Partly because I am aware of the speed I can get things done and partly because everything I’m hearing I already know. Goddamn if I haven’t spent forever on this section of the game. I feel terrible about it, it’s a ridiculous, and unnecessary, blow to team morale. I spent too much time learning and trying to figure out how to do what I’m doing, and then just as much time actually doing it. I feel like I’ve been at the end of this animation hump forever, with something new always cropping up to slow me down. What we all need is more visual updates, in motion, in the game, more frequently like it used to be. Something I am more than capable of doing. I still have a mountain of work left ahead of me and I’ve spent a huge amount of time in the hardest area for myself.

 

Let’s finish up what we have left here and be prettier, more often.