Sew's Art Blog

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.

In a constant state of ‘behind-and-almost-done‘. I ran into some neat issues. Sai, where I do all of my drawing/painting has a hard layer limit of 256 which I was unaware of consciously. So instead of having all of my images for all animations in one big file, I had to break it up into a new .psd for each direction. It’s really way better to do things this way, I just.. wasn’t expecting the extra time sink.

 

 

 

Aside from tweaking that outfit to make him look less frumpy (trust me, we’ve come a long way in that department) my to-do list is very tiny now, but the part I’m on is killing me.

 

• Redesign out Spine is dealing with Feet (hard/hate/arggghhh!)
• Paint North Outfit (easy)
• Mirror Bases for East/West (prob easy??)
• Draw/paint East/West outfit (easy)

 

And that’s like, it. One stupid hurdle.

 

I also got frustrated and timed myself to see how long it would take to break apart one of my old concept sketches.

 

 

Took almost exactly one hour to break it apart and roughly clean it, and.. this terrible test animation took like 10 minutes. Needs work. Proof-of-whatever, though, I guess?