It's AP Exam season, so class has been a bit weird lately. I did get the invitation in gif form, but unfortunately, in the email browser it only displays as a still image. Oh well, if people download it they can see it, and if not, they'll still get the necessary info. Then on Tuesday I helped Sam set up some basic formatting on the paper program for the High School Awards Ceremony at the end of the year. Wednesday I was gone for an AP exam, so no work was done. Thursday I started working on this blog post and helped Ryan test the point system in our game. We have a way to win now! Yay! Friday was more game testing, and I feel like even if it's not perfect, we will have a playable game. Julia is in the process of getting the updated building imported, and in just under 2 weeks we'll be presenting this to faculty, staff, and parents. Goals For Next Week:
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This week was pretty relaxed, and only 4 days long as protests split the week in half. I worked on the GAD Showcase invitations, which I reworked to look a little less like a poster and more like an invite. Erin also suggested to me that since these invitations will be sent over email, I should make them animated invites, especially since all of her work for the class is animation. It took me a bit of time to figure out how I wanted to do this, but basically I am going to use each frame of the gif she sent me, import them onto the invite, and create new frames from that which will be turned into its own gif. It sounds like a long process, but it really isn't, in fact, I'm sure that they'll be ready by Tuesday. I also added a really basic 2-frame animation of the chicken to the invites that give me some serious Myst vibes, so I just hope some people show up to see our work (and I hope that our game works by then, it seems like Ryan has been making great progress on salvaging it from where it was the week before). Goals For This Week:
This post actually comes with me asking for some advice. If you want to comment any below, please do!
I recently committed to NC State with the intended major of Art + Design, hopefully so that I can concentrate in animation. Of course I am stoked! It's going to be amazing to be going to college - especially NC State with how nice the Design School is - for something that I love. However, I know a lot of students, and especially students in artistic majors, experience burnout. I'm currently feeling the highschool burnout that people term Senioritis, so burnout has been on my mind a lot lately and I want to do my best to avoid it from here on out. So, I'm going to post some of the plans that I have to attempt to avoid burnout, but if you have any suggestions, again, feel free to comment them below. First, I'm going to try to make lots of friends outside of my major, and maybe take some classes outside of my major too. I think that if I am constantly surrounded only by people talking about art, I will get tired of it. I've always been someone who has enjoyed more interdisciplinary stuff, and luckily NC State is a great place for this. There are so many other majors like ecology and engineering that I'm also really interested in, so taking courses on them, or at least talking to others who do, could keep things fresh and keep me inspired. Secondly, I really am going to try to be way better about time management. I think that's the biggest source of my burnout right now: it feels like I have no time because I am not managing it well. To be fair, I am having 3 hours of rehearsal after school and I am in the throes of AP review, but I could definitely be keeping my schedule a little tighter and that would help me find more free time. I'm not sure if Trello is going to still be my method for this since now I am not time managing for a team, but it might still be helpful for me to just have my own personal boards. I know I will use some sort of planner if I want this to work. Finally, I will try to have some hobbies that help me recharge. It's a little weird to think art may not be my hobby any more, but maybe just drawing silly stuff or fanart still will be. Otherwise I'm thinking singing/playing an instrument and potentially coding simple games. I know a lot of people say having a hobby helps, and though, yeah, it is another activity that you have to make or leave time for, it's worth it to not be low energy and unable to create efficiently later. That's about all I have for today, but I bet I will find better strategies for myself as I actually get to college and see what's manageable. I'm really excited to be pursuing my passion, and I'm going to do everything I can to avoid bust. If you look at my art page on instagram, it's clear that I go through periods of doing a lot of traditional art and then a lot of digital art, but they aren't really interspersed anymore. Lately I've been starting to more towards a lot more digital art for a couple of reasons.
This is sort of just a reflection on my recent art, and a throwback to an old blog post I made a while back, with a slight variance. This week has been extremely busy, mostly because of my involvement with theatre, so I only have a very small amount of time for art, which means I either have to make slow progress, or...
I can make fast art! This simply means focusing on hitting deadlines is a higher priority than quality (though, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to throw quality out of the window). Doing this wasn't actually planned on my part, instead, I had deadlines approach much faster than I had anticipated and was forced to work this way if I valued my sanity. However, this also meant that I have produced 6 gif animations and another digital art piece in the past 3 days or so, most of them being very busy days as well. Sure, they aren't perfect, but I hit the deadlines I needed to hit, and I actually learned a lot about how I work/ what I need to improve on. For instance, the unanimated piece of art showed me that I'm better at lineart than I thought, but also am still struggling with making distinct shading. The gifs proved to me that animation, while it can be a lengthy and arduous process, can happen even in short bursts of productivity, and thus, even if I don't have much time, having even a little time means that I can work towards larger artistic goals. For the rest of the school year, I want to try to do more fast art, this time with self-imposed deadlines in order to improve faster. As I talked about in the blog post linked above, I strongly believe that not being so meticulous and just getting in a ton of practice definitely helps me improve more quickly. Below are two of the gifs I made. There are lots of aspects of both that could be HUGELY improved, but they provided me practice in animation, and allowed me to see what I need to work on in the future.
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. This post is going to be mostly just my personal reflection on what's been different about creating 3D games - as opposed to making 2D games - so far, as well as seeing what other people have to say about the difference in logic and production of these styles of games.
One of the biggest differences I notice is working in a 3D space changes the way you have to think about positioning things. Often you must adjust both the position and the rotation to get something in the right spot, whereas in 2D games, often rotation is only important to special effects or if a sprite got imported upside down. In 3D games however, your camera angle is important, and so are the rotations of everything else to choose which way they will be facing. On a forum about this topic, one user describes 3D as "one dimension harder". In some 3D games, the player is in complete control of the camera, which complicates things even more since objects in the game must look good from every angle. Speaking of objects in the game, now they are 3D art rather than normal sprites. You have to have the model itself and the texture map. In itself, 3D art isn't necessarily harder than 2D art, it's just different, so this will be a little more subjective. However, another user on the above mentioned forum pointed out that 3D animation requires rigging and skeletons as well as the aforementioned model and texture, so in that sense it is more complicated. Often 3D game assets will also take up more data, so a lot of times 3D games require more tricks to keep them running smoothly to make up for this - like simplifying models. This article makes some other points that I had not really thought about. It points out that generally, 3D games require more assets than 2D ones, just because of the scope of the world generally. It also mentions that 3D games are so compelling because of the realism aspect that they can bring. Then, it again summarizes my earlier thoughts on controls being more complicated in 3D and general differences in art production. 3D games...
Since we just finished our AV unit, and are now moving into a 3D unit - and just because I really like animation - I wanted to do some research on the actual process that goes into making a 3D animation and how it differs from normal film production. According to this article and this article, both types of film can still easily be split into pre-production, production, and post-production and be fairly similar to each other.
Pre-Production: Both films require planning and storyboarding at this stage. With animation, it also requires character sketches, but that isn't too different from sketches of the sets and costumes that need to be done in live-action film at this stage. Production: 3D animation requires modeling, rigging, and texturing at this point. You get to control how you character moves and control their every movement, which is very different from normal film. However, in live-action film there are people who have to design and paint sets, create costumes, and control the lighting, so those aspects aren't so different from setting up a movie set. Another difference is rendering. In 3D animation, you have to make sure everything, every movement and texture, is perfect before rendering it to be an actual video clip. Film sort of has this when actors rehearse to make sure that their performance will be good, but there is a little more flexibility there since it takes only a few minutes to shoot a shot five times, but can take an hour to render one scene (depending on computer speed of course). Post-Production: Here there are virtually no differences. Both films require editing clips together to form a coherent story, checking audio timing and quality, and adding any effects as needed. I like that there are a lot of parallels between these two things, but we're in a game design class, so how does animation in games compare? This article points out that, aside from cutscenes, when you do 3D animation in a game, it has to look good from all angles. This makes sense since the player is in control of the camera and which way they are facing. It also mentioned how you need more cyclical character animations than you do in film because of the nature of games. When the code calls up that animation, it better look nice and fluid for as long as it goes on. It seems like there is a lot of pressure on game animators to get things done in time, keep them looking nice, but not have graphics that are too challenging for the system and not spend too much time on one movement. I think generally I would like working on animated film or cutscenes more than gameplay animations, but I think it will be interesting to try out soon. Since the school year is just getting started and I'm a pretty goal oriented person, I thought I should set up some goals for my art for this year. This could be projects, techniques, or other things. Basically, they're just artistic things that I want to accomplish or try to accomplish over the year. So, here's my five main goals right now:
1. Create an animated short film. By short film, I'm not talking end-of-year college thesis film, but just a short animated piece that's maybe 10 seconds long, but has a clear beginning, middle, and end. Or, a longer film that's just sketched out roughly, but tells a story through animation. I just really want to get some practice at this and see if it's something I enjoy doing. This is going to take a lot of time and effort though. 2. Fill my current sketchbook. I started a new sketchbook towards the end of this summer, and I'm hoping that I can practice in it enough to finish it at least by the end of the school year. I'm not very far in this goal yet either, but I think it is definitely an achievable goal, and will force me to put in a lot of practice. 3. Experiment more with line and create smoother lines. I found recently that I really enjoy working with line variation, and I want to continue playing around with this throughout the year. Also, while this isn't as much of a problem in pencil, when I use pen or digital art forms, my lines get very wobbly. I want to practice drawing nicer, smoother lines. A lot of this will just come with practice and trying new things. 4. Move away from just drawing people. While I have started moving away from just drawing busts of people, I want to move away from people in general and broaden out into other subjects, like animals, bugs, and objects. Of course I know I will still draw people a lot since I want to go into character animation and still have a lot to learn about anatomy, but I want to be able to draw other things as well since people don't exist in a void. 5. Have more fun with art. My art turns out a lot better when I'm having fun, so even though this isn't an incredibly concrete goal, this is something that I really want to work towards. Art is something to learn, but making mistakes along the way is okay, and if I can be less anxious about mistakes, everything will turn out a lot better. |
AuthorHi, I'm Abi, a DSA student who likes games, drawing, writing, and acting. Archives
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