This week was pretty relaxed, I spent all of it relearning how to UVW Unwrap, and making textbook textures. So far I've only finished a chemistry and biology textbook, but now that I have the base figured out, I could easily make other books if we want more. However, I think instead I'm going to try to work on making some bookshelves or other furniture for the new building. I need to discuss with my team what objects we really need right now, because we're getting close to the end. Goals For Next Week:
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Although this week was cut short by illness and playtesting (which I will make a seperate post about) I did manage to get the pig textured! Well... sort of... There are some surface issues, BUT! It isn't entirely my fault this time! I went back to the old, fully polyed models, and they still had some weird spots when textures were applied (though far fewer...). Anyways, I don't think it's something worth fixing at this point in production unless I can find an easy fix, or if it really bothers one of my team members. I made all of the textures metallic because I thought it made the pig look sharp and scary, but this may change depending on computer capabilities (lag) and my teammates' preferences. Goals For Next Week:
So turns out the pig is big time goofin' so looks like I have some more work to do with him. He did not transfer over to Sam's computer very well at all, many things were scaled and placed weirdly. So step one is fixing that. However, I did spend this week playing around with textures for the pig's skin. Unfortunately, our computers do not have Unity, so I am unable to currently test those textures out. (Again, Photoshop will not work for this purpose because it tries to texture every single face of the object as having the same texture.) I haven't yet made the textures tileable either, because I want to see which one I like on the model the most before doing all of that work. However, I don't think texturing will be much of an issue, I am more concerned about the export issue. This is the end of the quarter though, so I have to get moving on to modeling classroom assets. I also need to make sure that I have a plan to finish everything within the next 9 weeks so that we are able to actually finish the entire game in time.
Goals For Next Week:
I've been thinking a lot about social media lately. As someone who wants to try to make a career out of being an artist, putting my artwork out there and networking are both super important, but social media can often distract me from work. I thought that it was motivating me to make more art so that I could post more, but I reviewed my entire art account at the start of 2019, and I realized that there were entire months where I didn't make a single art post! Most of my posts came in bursts of like four pieces at once and then radio silence. I spend most of my social media time on my personal account instead of my art one, but am I really gaining anything from that?
So I'm trying to make some new social media goals for this year. Unfollow Everyone (Personal Account) This is an exaggeration, but I have been gradually unfollowing everyone who is
Post Schedule (Art Account) I don't want to have months of no content, so even if it's posting works-in-progress all of the time, I want to start having specific days that I'll post on, and I think this starts with creating an art social media trello board. This way, I can have deadlines for when to post things, as well as what I want to post (progress on project A or project B? Finished piece C?). This will also help me stick to deadlines for completing pieces since I want to be able to post. However, as a trello board, it's also flexible enough that I could always move stuff around and post random doodles if I need more content/ want to post more often. Comment on Other People's Posts More (Art Account) If social media feels more like a community and I potentially make some more art friends, I think I will feel more motivated to post. And if not, well, at least I'm letting other people know that I appreciate their work. Anyway, those are my goals, if anyone who reads this has any other tips, comment them I guess! I'm writing this post 1/14/19, but it will be posted on 1/16 because that's the day that I'm actually presenting this work to the whole faculty and I didn't want any spoilers (Hi Mr. B). So I've been one of the officers of the GSA (Gender Sexuality Alliance, or Gay Straight Alliance) at school this year, and another club was created called the Student Equity Leadership Team. I've worked a lot with the latter this year, and that has lead up to what I'm about to do in two days: present to the entire school faculty about respecting transgender student's pronouns. As a semi-closeted trans/nonbinary kid who is only closeted because they're too scared to come out (ie not because of any danger, just fear of judgement) it's a little terrifying to know that in less than 48 hours, I will have spoken to over 100 people about respecting trans kids. However, it's also incredibly exciting to know that I'll (hopefully) be impacting future trans students at school, hopefully for the better. Anyways, in order to do this, I also made a handout in the form of a zine (a small booklet), and it was a lot like making infographics, so I'm counting it as art/graphic design for the purposes of this post. We wanted to have a handout that wasn't just another piece of paper, but that was still something that teachers could keep for future reference. It was kind of scary to make, because whenever you speak on behalf of a community, you don't want to get things wrong. The artistic aspects were fun to make though, and I think that they make the document much more interesting, especially now that it's in small booklet form on lavender paper. I want to open this post up to the larger description of activism in art though. While DSA is a very liberal school, there are definitely places where this zine - and any art with an activism undertone - could be considered propaganda, and that's another reason that it's so scary to create in this way: I don't want to be seen as some extremist who is too serious about politics. This project has really helped me learn that you can create without coming off that way: sharing your opinion, even in a biased way, doesn't mean you're extreme, it just means that you have an opinion, something that you're totally allowed to have. Respecting trans people is something near and dear to my heart that affects me and my friends, I should be able to make art about it, and express my opinions about it without feeling overly political. I can't keep being so ashamed of who I am that I hide it from my creative work. Anyways, here's a digital copy of the zine.
If you've read ANY of my Advanced Studies Progress Posts, you probably know how many times I've had to redo work from last year that was not working in the game. Some of it looked bad, some of it needed to be simplified, and some of it was just acting weird in Unity so I had to at least re-export the file. Of course, there is some frustration in it, but there's also a chance to improve, and I kind of love that, so as portfolio deadlines for colleges rapidly approach, I'm taking the redo approach to some of my art as well. This idea was mostly spurred by going to the Nasher Museum portfolio day and realizing, Hey, I can do better now, but this idea is still really cute. One of the critiques I got on this piece was that there was a lot of empty space, so in redrawing it, I wanted to make the composition a bit more interesting, so I brought the figures closer, and plan to add more details in the empty spaces. Another comment was that Bigfoot's pose could be more interesting, so I am following his suggestion on making the positioning a little more interesting. So far I have also opted to make the trees a little more stylistic so that they're both more interesting to look at and lead the focus to the figures.
I think in general I should continue to redraw art as I improve. It allows me to see my progress, repolish old ideas, and get cool new art out of it too. This week was very short for me since it only consisted of Monday and Tuesday. I did accomplish two things though. I mostly blocked out the upper floor of the main building! I still need to add stairs and doorways, but for the most part we have a template, which means Ryan can start coding the NPC walking patterns soon. I also learned that my "keyboard solution" involved 105 textures (what was I thinking last year when I made all of those textures???), which doesn't really help in terms of lag. I need to figure out how to avoid the "Screaming Keyboard" Problem (where each poly facing up is a different surface, but each is a tiny clone of the main one) and simply make a single texture surface that just has some gaps in it. This way I could at least UVW unwrap, because currently that only leads to the Screaming Keyboard problem again. Goals for this Week
This August, I broke my arm. More specifically, my wrist on my dominant hand while I was roller skating with some friends and I fell. As someone pursuing animation, you can see where this would cause problems. This was at a really inopportune time for me too because I was planning on creating a comic with over 200 panels by mid September for a contest I had no chance of winning, but that I still wanted to meet the deadline for. That idea was immediately crushed (although I do hope to come back to it once college apps are over and I actually have free time again). Speaking of college apps, I am trying to get into art programs for college, and breaking my arm horrified me because I had just come back from an art intensive and I was ready to make amazing stuff for portfolios. This injury didn't allow me to make much art, and what I did make looked something like this: Just this picture took me almost an hour, I was using a brush stabilizer to make my lines more smooth, and I was really trying just to make something, so I wasn't really employing a lot of design principles. With more time and more planning, I might have been able to make something slightly better, but it would have taken a lot of effort and still not produced work that I was really happy with. So what did I do instead? I took a break. My life became consumed by D&D (which did force me to do a little bit of drawing in terms of making maps and such, but overall, I was not making visual art nearly as much as I normally do.) I could have been working in 3Ds Max a bit more if I wanted to still make art, but I think at that point, I really needed the break. 3D art would just remind me that I couldn't draw 2D art, because at the time, I wanted to do a mixed media project that combines both (which is currently in the works. Stay tuned...) So D&D, world-building and designing my own game, as well as listening to other people's content became my main hobby, and since it was summer and with a broken arm I couldn't do much else, it became most of my life.
And it was great. It took away any feelings of being burnt out and got me excited to create again once I could use my wrist. I listened to The Adventure Zone, a popular D&D actual play podcast and it made me laugh and cry so much, and that really motivated me to keep working on storytelling because it reminded me of how powerful that can really be. I think having this break was tough for me, and did set me back a little while in terms of artistic improvement and assembling a portfolio, but in the end, it's something I've very grateful for because it helped me refocus. I seem to have a bit of a problem, although I am getting better. (Slowly.)
I am bad at committing to long-term projects. It's not that I don't have ideas for long-term projects, or don't want to do them, it's almost the opposite. I have too many ideas and want to do all of them, meaning none of them ever get finished. This has been an issue I've had for many years and I know it's a pretty common one. Especially with wanting to do animations, I'll often start something, work on it for a little bit, then get a new idea, work on that, and forget about the original one. The cycle continues again and again. This happens even when I have grand plans for something, and I think I've finally figured out why. The first main reason is that I need to study technique a lot more. A lot of times, I would be so close to finishing a sketch, but then I got to the hands and no matter what I did they turned out wonky, and especially a few years ago, that would always drive me away. I've gotten a bit better at trying to face challenges rather than running from them, but if I was to study anatomy more, do more figure drawing, and just practice a bit more, I think I would be able to overcome challenges much more easily, and I wouldn't get frustrated with a project as fast. At the same time though, I'm not going to wait on developing a perfect art style to create bigger projects. Even if my art gets way better later, it's worth it to be working on big projects now to get experience, have fun and make something I'm proud of, and at least capture the idea, even if I want to recreate it better later when I am more skilled. It just means, as I'm doing these projects, I should do exercises to improve too. The second main reason is trying to plan before I've gotten a feeling for the work. I realized this one from my two most successful creative commitments this summer. For me, diving in without a ton of planning and just starting somewhere is incredibly important, at least right now while I'm inexperienced. Creating a calendar schedule for producing an animatic is pointless if I've never tried making an animatic before and have no idea what that time frame should be, or what I actually need to do to accomplish my goals. Instead, it's better to dive in (especially in digital art where there's an undo button), get a feel for what's going on, get excited about what's going on, and to THEN create a schedule. With the two projects I did this with, I actually committed! The first got cut short because of a broken arm making it hard to stick with my schedule, but the second is something that I'm still working on and have made a ton of progress in and I'm loving how it's turning out. It can be hard to commit to one idea when there are so many good ones out there, but it is really worth it to get the outcome that can only come from long periods of hard work. |
AuthorHi, I'm Abi, a DSA student who likes games, drawing, writing, and acting. Archives
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