(via sattou on Twitter: “https://t.co/j8aWuGBWOL” / Twitter)

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Mike Driver
todays bird

JBB: An Artblog!
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
styofa doing anything

Kiana Khansmith
ojovivo
DEAR READER

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Sweet Seals For You, Always
Peter Solarz

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trying on a metaphor
tumblr dot com
d e v o n

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
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we're not kids anymore.

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@preplays
(via sattou on Twitter: “https://t.co/j8aWuGBWOL” / Twitter)
Making the Booburgh Cover
Now that the Booburgh book is out, I wanted to break down how I approached the illustration for the cover!
First, I did a bunch of research into mid century brochures, travel posters, and just general travel paraphernalia. I knew I wanted this to be like a travel guide for visiting the town so that guided a lot of the decisions.
Next I did a number of (very tiny) sketches. I’d always planned for the back to be a map so that was a one-and-done sketch. The front, however, took more work.
I wanted to feature a bunch of town’s shops (all featured in the book) to highlight the different shapes and such, but it wasn’t quite working. It wasn’t feeling iconic enough and so I went back to my research.
That’s when I found the two above images and realized part of what I liked about them: they communicated a collection of objects/buildings while still feeling singular. It really unlocked something in my brain and I went back to sketching.
The above sketch was still fairly loose but it did what I wanted it to do: feel complex and like a layered city, while still reading as a single block. The five shops I featured are the following:
So now that I had the sketch done, I needed to start exploring colour options. I knew I wanted to do a limited palette to contrast the full colour illustrations of the interior. I explored a number of directions.
The pinks/reds felt TOO limited in their palette and the oranges/greens felt more forestry/nordic, so they didn’t stay. I still really like the greens and yellows with the orange of the second study so maybe someday I’ll come back to it for something else. Also at this point I’ve introduced a few stylized ghosts to haunt the town.
The above colour study is what I eventually went with and it came fairly directly from the below brochures.
Since Booburgh is on the shores of Lake Eerie, it made sense to make blue the dominant palette and it had the right energy and contrast. The colours aren’t identical as I kept the cover colours within the palette used for the interior illustrations.
From there, it was just a case of setting the type and rendering!
That’s it! Like I mentioned, the book is available through my shop and is limited to an edition of 100. It collects all 31 local businesses and is full of silly puns, diverse family structures and is built around community!
Happy Wednesday!
Overshoots and Mini Anticipations lecture from my Complete Introduction to 2D animation package.
https://gumroad.com/l/Introto2DComplete or you can buy each chapters, or my other tutorials: https://gumroad.com/stringbing
I made a little tutorial for you, many asked me for the wind effect, so there you go! I hope it will help many of you considering those effects can be tricky. Details also on Patreon too, you can support me there!
Good luck and hope it will help you all!
Process viddd also since it’s kinda super condensed some of the video gets a bit flashy/eye strain-y.
Also if you feel like sitting down and watching all 4+ hours you can watch that here.
But yeah basically took the first spitpaint I ever did and painted something else with it.
A color/cropped study of one of my favorite paintings, “Ophelia” by Sir John Everett Millias. I was so nervous to do this, but I actually really like how it turned out???
I kind of want to talk about my process for this in case it helps someone else, because I learned A LOT from doing this and I now I want to do it for every master study…
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Zora is one of the two main characters in our second game, In the Valley of Gods. Quite a few people remarked on Zora’s character design, in particular her hair, when they saw our announcement trailer. Indeed, creating Zora’s hair is a challenging problem for intertwined technical and cultural reasons. I would like to talk about our explorations and aspirations so far, and why it’s important to us we get it right by the time we ship.
In 2015, Evan Narcisse wrote an important essay on natural hair and blackness in video games. You should read it. It was the first time I’ve really thought critically about hair and representation in video games, and the yearning in the piece struck me.
Hair is very personal. As an immigrant woman of Chinese descent with atypically frizzy wavy hair, my hair is, to an extent, an outward expression of my struggle with who I am and where I belong (or don’t). I want to love my hair the way it naturally is, but it’s never quite simple as that.
So when I first saw the character design for Zora, I had an understanding of what task lays before us as a team. None of us has Type 4 hair, characterized by tight coils and common among black women. In fact, none of us have even made video game hair before, but we are committed to giving Zora the hair she loves, the way she chooses to wear it, with all the care and effort we can.
Building Zora’s hair will be a continual effort that lasts the whole project. Our first milestone for the hair was getting it in shape for our announcement trailer, when Zora was first introduced to the public.
As a small team without a dedicated character modeler, we hired a couple of specialists to do Zora’s character sculpt. Their task included sculpting a static version of her asymmetric bob so we could evaluate the scale and silhouette of her whole body. We knew the static sculpt would serve only as a placeholder and reference while we figured out a longer term hair solution.
Hair is a complicated combination of geometry, shader work, and texturing, and it requires a very tight and frequent iteration loop to get right. It made sense for us to do it in house even if we haven’t created hair before. The task of modeling “good enough, first pass” real-time hair for the trailer fell to me; the shading and rendering work to our graphics programmer Pete; and the copious texture and oversight work to our art director Claire. We started by investigating what other developers have done.
Real-time hair geometry, as far as I can tell, falls into two broad categories: “hair helmets” and “hair cards.” A hair helmet is what I call completely opaque geometry, as one would see on a plastic action figure or Lego figurine—think Princess Zelda’s hair in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Hair cards, on the other hand, use many sheets of hair strands to portray more free-flowing hair —think many characters in Uncharted 4. That approach is well suited to hair types that can be abstracted into sheets, which works well for any length of straight hair. There are also hybrid approaches, such as this wonderful tutorial of a game-ready afro by Baj Singh.
Claire designed Zora’s Type 4 coily hair to have a lot of texture and volume, but it also has a “big-chunky-tubes” structure allowing fluid “floppy” movement. Neither of the two previous approaches is ideal for Zora’s hair.
The closest in-game hair reference I found is Nadine Ross from Uncharted 4, but on closer inspection Nadine has Type 3 hair with very defined curls, quite different from Zora’s tighter Type 4.
Sometimes the only way to solve a problem is… just by making something, even if it sucks in the beginning. So I started off with a variant of the hair cards approach by making “big tubes” of three cross-cards to follow the shape and flow of Zora’s hair helmet sculpted by Ted Lockwood. It was important to have some geometry that remotely resembles what we will ultimately create, to test the shader Pete has been writing.
I would work on the hair for a few days at a time whenever I wanted a break from creating the trailer’s environments. After two months of wrangling various placements of polygon tubes, flat cards, and cross-cards, as well as bending all their normals as if her hair were a shrub, we had the following result as of October 2017.
Part of the challenge of all this is that not only are we making Type 4 hair, we are making stylized Type 4 hair that evokes Claire’s distinct style. It became clear very early that the way Zora’s hair interacts with light would be a key part of the shader work.
I’m not able to go into the technical details of the shader in this post, but we ended up adding individual controls for each type of lighting we wanted the hair to respond to, based on Claire’s specific concept art: for instance, light striking from the back, from the side, ambiently, and so on. This got finicky, but taught us a lot and provided enough variation to create the trailer. It will take much more experimentation and iteration for the hair to behave according to the style guide under all necessary lighting conditions, but making the trailer gave us a lot of direction for our next steps.
Right now, we have an intensely stylized back-scatter effect in the hair when backlit, but we still lack the ability to do high-quality rim lighting without relying heavily on post-processing.
We are currently only using alpha-cutouts for the hair cards (alpha sorting is a whole different topic outside the scope of this post) and I’ve been advised by character artists that some number of alpha blend cards for flyaway hairs usually works well.
For the trailer, James rigged Zora’s hair and hand animated the movement, but we plan on applying physics simulation to the hair rig for the shipping game.
There is a long way to go before we’re truly happy with Zora’s hair, but this is a good first step. As the rest of the game’s visuals become more solidified, it will become more clear what we need to tackle next.
Here’s an early sketch of Mario in the Poncho and Sombrero outfit! They were designed to match the bright color scheme of Tostarena. The colors in the final outfit are even brighter!
The making of a comic page. This is page four of “Sistrenday”, an eight-page comic pilot that our artist completed recently for writer Mikael Lopez. In 2016, Lopez and our artist collaborated on the short piece “David Loses His Head”, published in Sliced Quarterly and praised in Broken Frontier this year. “Sistrenday” is an ambitious new step in their partnership; and, with luck, it will mark the beginning of a lengthy new series.
In order, the steps pictured above are:
Completed page
Finalized artwork
Refined colors
Rough colors
Refined pencils
Rough pencils
Thumbnail
“Sistrenday” is a fantasy adventure story, set in a magical land roamed by huge, enigmatic gods. In the page above, sister-protagonists Enh and Tuh are hired to steal from Mother Ember—the most powerful of these gods. By the end of “Sistrenday”, the terrible consequences of this decision are made apparent.
Since last month, Lopez has been posting teasers and concept material from “Sistrenday” on his blog. Those interested may find more of this project, including an unused test page, there.
Still Eating Oranges
Localizing “Jump Up, Super Star!”
Life in the Treehouse moves pretty fast, and it can be hard to remember when you did what, and sometimes even why, so I had to check my e-mail archives to figure out that we started working on the lyrics for the songs in Super Mario Odyssey back in January of this year. (…Unless it was earlier? Who knows, man.)
Faults in my memory aside, the prospect of working on some songs at work was an exciting one. As a former music and Japanese double major, the idea that I would be using BOTH my degrees at my actual job was amazing. Who does that? Besides, I mean, people who chose their majors for more practical reasons…
When I became involved, the song that would eventually become “Jump Up, Super Star!” was basically done, at least as far as the music was concerned. The song was already going to be a hit in my mind, no matter what the lyrics ended up being, and at that time, the first section already had Japanese lyrics, written by Nobuyoshi Suzuki at NCL. I translated them thusly:
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Workflow for a Bounty Hunter attack animation in The Iron Oath
Environment studies
City Mirror - Pixel art timelapse
Back to painting… 🌵#cactus #cactuslove #colorandlight #procreate #artistsoninstagram
The Infamous NES Palette
Setting out on a quest to find a faithful NES palette is a first step towards madness. Because the NES used YIQ color color space rather than RGB there’s no such thing as an official NES palette (except maybe the PlayChoice-10 palette which looks nothing like what you get on a NES hooked up to a CRT TV). In addition to that, different brands/models of CRT TVs would decode the YIQ signal differently from one another. Consequently, NES palettes you can find on the internet are either arbitrary artistic representations or have been generated using some color space conversion algorithm.
Even though there are already many great NES palettes available (like the Unsaturated-V6), I could never find one that could reproduce the vivid colors of my own CRT TV (a slick 27-inch JVC TV). So I took the “artistic“ approach to create one using my Asus tablet with my CRT TV side by side. I sampled 50+ NES games and methodically set each color of the palette manually in Nestopia. The downside of this method is that monitor calibration can affect the result, but after testing it on a few different monitors, I’m pretty happy with it:
If you’d like to try it, you can download it here:
Raw palette version (for emulators)
Photoshop color swatches
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UPDATE:
After a week of testing various games, I’ve decided to go back and make some improvements to my NES palette. This time, in order to get an even more accurate result, I used an EverDrive (generously lent by Michael Larouche, in support for my palette related obsession issues). I ran the “Palette Test by Loopy” rom on my Famicom hooked up to my CRT TV and I compared the colors with 2 different LCDs running the same palette rom through Nestopia. This allowed me to carefully balance all colors with one another. Here’s a summary of the improvements I’ve made:
Adjusted hues of the greens and purples.
Balanced brightness of all colors.
Added missing dark gray (not used in any of the games I sampled).
No pure white (NES white appears to be slightly gray).
Colors of this palette are balanced with one another, but I’ve notice that they may appear off on some LCD screens because of color temperature settings. So, for example, if colors appear too bright or seem to be shifted towards blue or red, you can easily fix this by adjusting color temperature or changing the picture mode (”cinema”, for example) of your LCD screen.
Here are the download links for pixeltaoNES palette version 2:
Raw palette version (for emulators)
Photoshop color swatches
Version 2 available!
process gif :)
PROCESS OF RANDOM ART
Hi everyone! A lot of people asked about my process so I thought I should answer everything on this post
I first get my inspiration from somewhere. Usually from movies or documentary. This time I revisited an old idea I did in school, an illustration inspired by Jonsi’s “Animal Arithmetic” taking reference from Dinka tribe from south Sudan mixed with some Klimt gold fanciness.
My very first sketch often looks super messy, loose and even abstract, trying to capture the mood I was going for.
I do a tighter sketch on top of the first rough. Here I try to place things differently(hopefully better) so that the whole composition looks more designed.
Using line of action for leading the eye and framing.
The stick and ox’s leg forming a triangle.
Separating the design elements. Rectangle-shaped cattle being dominant makes the boy with the round shapes stand out.
I do several more and value studies if the illustration is for some project but I will just jump into color for this one.
Please listen to some music while watching this or else you’ll get super bored haha. I will upload the final image in the morning.
Check out this exquisite breakdown by Celine Kim. Those lines of action, composition, and shape construction all combine to create rhythm and tension. An absolute delight.