For the past half year, I have not really touched any bit of scripting in game design. As someone who has been primarily pursuing art both in and out of class, it makes sense that I wouldn't do much coding, but as someone whose second choice of career would be programming, it does not make sense at all.
And I can genuinely say I miss it. My current work in CTE advanced studies is - while pretty fun to me - pretty time consuming but simple work. I mostly simplify polys of models Julia has made. There's no art in that. But I do enough art outside of class to still be creatively fulfilled. However, though poly simplification often is like a puzzle, it's an easy one. I am not fulfilled with challenges involving logic. Obviously I can not expect this fulfillment to come from class at this point though. That would mean asking people who are currently way less rusty than me to sacrifice the quality - or at least speed at which said quality is made - of the game for me to just have fun. Then, though I would have enough logic-based work to be happy, the lack of progress/working game would make me unhappy. So, this means it's time for independent, outside of school coding time. I haven't decided what I want to do for sure yet, but I think I'm down to three options
Basically, I'm hoping to get back into coding, and though I don't have an exact plan for how to do that just yet, I want to get there by Christmas so that I can start working on a project to sharpen my skills again.
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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. A lot of the time, when I'm simplifying the amount of vertices and polys an object has, that object starts having issues with shading. After simplifying so many object though, I've started to realize the pattern of when it happens, and I made a little diagram that helps explain it. (If you're colorblind, it's probably useless to you, sorry.) Basically, getting rid of vertices still attached to an edge that you have not gotten rid of is risky business. Even just getting rid of vertices that line up with other vertices where there COULD be an edge but there isn't has given me issues before. Basically, not freaking out immediately over bad shading, and instead continuing to simplify the object might be your best bet on solving this problem, because once all parts are simplified the same, it usually goes away.
Of course, it doesn't always work, especially with more complex objects, but it's good to know not to freak out immediately if the shading gets funky in the process. 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. This post is supposed to reflect on the process of design a game in VR. I don't have a lot to say about the actual designing of the game since most of the work I did was more about 3D modeling, so this will actually mostly reflect on that. Let's just say, this has been one of the most stressful projects of my life, I'm freaking out a little bit. Deadlines are very difficult to hit, and learning as you go only slows down the process. However, I feel like I have learned a lot and created decent work.
You can go to my selected works page, or even my VR DSA page in order to see what work I have actually done, but basically it was a lot of modeling of objects around the room. One of the main things I learned is every model needs to be as low-poly as possible. You'd be amazed at how many objects really are in a room, and how much lag it can cause. Moving into modelling the whole school, I definitely need to work on making lower-poly models, and learn a lot more about how textures and bump maps work. Though I have not seen the finished product yet, I am very proud of what we were able to accomplish in terms to making a VR model for the first time. I hope that the process will be a bit smoother next year because of all that we have learned as a group and with better scheduling and organization. It's been a while since I made a post about, or have even thought about VR, but next year (and for the rest of this year) that is going to be our main focus. I wanted to review what I have learned so far about VR/ things to remember, while also looking into any other tips that I can find.
First I'm going to recap what I learned at ECGC last year, which I made a blog post about a while ago. That post focused a lot on the specific features Unreal Engine 4 had, and unfortunately, our computers at school are probably unable to use this engine. However, my interview with Hurley did give me some more general tips for VR. For starters, keeping your frame rate high so as not to cause nausea. This shouldn't be a huge problem for us, but is something to keep in mind. On the same track of not making your player feel sick, we need to be careful in how we do movement. Sudden, uncontrolled movements, especially with non-steady accelerations can really make a player nauseous. The last thing Hurley said is very different about working in VR is the fact that there are two, oddly shaped screens, and your design now has to accommodate that, usually by using special meshes or slightly different rendering. Now to the new stuff. This article talks about getting into VR by experiencing it and just playing around. It also mentions giving the player a horizon line to look at to keep them from feeling sick, making sure everything is scaled correctly so that your player doesn't feel lost or claustrophobic, and it goes on in detail about designing a UI. It emphasizes not having your player have to do crazy things (ie look down to an uncomfortable angle) just to do basic interactions. Most of the interactions should be easy to achieve without putting stress on the player's spine or neck. The Unity website has some other things to say about VR as well. Basically, it's simple to set up a VR project in Unity. You have to do some extra set up at the beginning, but then it's just a matter of changing the product settings to enable VR. While earlier I said we probably didn't need to worry about frame rate that much, the website pointed out that since it has to render everything for both eyes, frame rate will likely decrease. It also says that if you have a VR camera in the scene, you can't move it alone. It has to be the child of another game object, and then you move the parents and the VR camera will come with it. It also unfortunately will not set up different cameras for different eyes, so you have to do that part yourself., but the website does give an example of how to do so. It suggests not using visual effects since they are often unrealistic and costly to rendering time. Overall, I'm glad that there don't seem to be many differences between VR in Unity and VR anywhere else, but since I haven't done VR anywhere else, I'm sure it's still going to take a lot of learning. Trello is a free program that lets you plan projects out. While it is not something we've ever really gone over in class, it is a tool that Mr. B highly recommends and that I've used for two different projects in the past and will be using for this upcoming year as we create a VR model of our school. I wanted to talk about some of the things I really like about it, and some things I struggle with.
I have earned the title "Queen of Organization" simply for being able to press a few buttons. Literally. The program is incredibly easy to use, I just happened to be the one who put the time in to use it, and for that, I became "the organized one". You make a board for your project and then you can make multiple lists of different things within that board. Each list has cards which can hold information, checklists of things to do, pictures, and more, and you can put due dates on each card. This is my first qualm with trello. Each card can hold an entire checklist, but yet, you can only put one due date per card instead of being able to put a due date on each item in the checklist. Usually this isn't a problem, but if you have a team who is really bad with time management it would be really useful to give more specific due dates for little steps. The best alternative to the checklists would be to make each item on the checklist its own card, and use the sticker feature to put a sticker on each card when it's done. That way, they can each have a due date and still get checked off. The other thing that I wish Trello had was an easier way to share files through it. It is a free program so this may be a lot to be expecting from it, or maybe I just haven't found how to do this yet, but every time I've used Trello I've also had to have a Google Drive folder set up for us to share assets. The nice thing about this is that the link to this folder can be in a card on the Trello so that it's easy to find, but it still would be easier to have everything in the same program. Another feature that I think would be nice is a "calendar view" type thing. If you have multiple lists, it would be easy to miss things. With a calendar view it would be much easier to see which due dates are the closest, and then go to that card. I could always set up a separate calendar, but again for the sake of convenience, it would be nice if it was in the same program and just automatically set up. Overall, I think I would recommend Trello to others though, because for a free program, it is very good, and I don't know of any better free tools (though I may start looking into some other ones just to see). It has been very important in past projects, especially for our Durham game, in keeping everything organized and making sure we were getting things done in time and not overlooking any necessary components of the game. Over the past few year, my feelings on fanart have changed a lot, and I kind of just want to ramble about that here. Obviously, this is just my opinion on the matter, but I wanted to summarize it here. By fanart, I am specifically talking about art inspired by other pieces of media, or things that other people have created.
Like anything, I think it's good in moderation. It can really be flattering to the creator of the thing you are a fan of (assuming they see it), and can help you find a community of other fans. It is a pretty easy way to get attention online as an artist since people are likely looking for fanart of things they enjoy more than they look for random studies of coffee cups or the like, and there's nothing wrong with that. Fanart can challenge you too. If you're making a comic about Indiana Jones, and using reference photos and doing studies along the way, your action poses are probably seriously going to improve. It also lets you draw ideas that aren't from your own head, so it can push your limits a bit. This is also great for people with art block or just low motivation at the moment, because they don't have the be the most creative person on the planet and can still get results that makes them happy. However, I have two problems with fan art. The first is that it can lead to a lot of copying and tracing. I said earlier using reference images is great, and I do stand by that, but you shouldn't always try to exactly copy whatever you're making fan art for. If that's what you're doing, then people will ignore your art and just go experience the source content. Obviously, if you're just doing studies, then it's fine to copy as directly as possible, and there's a lot to be learned there. However, if that isn't your goal, then you have to add something of your own, be it putting old characters in new situations and environments, or just stylizing it in your own way. For instance, using real life pose references and then some references for a character will help you get better at poses and putting any character in different poses much more than just copying straight from one reference image. Also, the whole point of fanart really is to make something based on the original content, but that takes it further, and just copying does not do that. The other problem I have with fanart is questionable copyright usage. I don't really know how to feel about this one, other than that people need to respect what creators say on the issue. With events like comic cons, tons of artists make money off of fanart related products, and I think that, as if mentioned above, their art goes beyond just the original media it's based off of, then I think they definitely deserve to profit from their work. I just think it's also important to respect the right of the original creators to decide whether or not they are okay with people selling art based on their ideas. A lot of times fanart can create a bigger audience for creators, so I think generally that alone makes them okay with it, but it's just important to listen to the creators. Overall, I would say fanart should be fun, but just to remember to push yourself artistically if you can, and learn from it. Creative new ideas should always be valued and expressed in art, but that doesn't mean that you should never draw fanart either. Basically, just be careful that you aren't just copying things or making art based on them for popularity, but actually are enjoying the art you make and are challenging yourself as an artist. |
AuthorHi, I'm Abi, a DSA student who likes games, drawing, writing, and acting. Archives
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