Workin on something.

Will it get done by Madness Day? Probably not.

Will it get done? Probably not, hopefully I'm wrong!

I wanna upload weird Adult content but I'm afraid that my teacher checks this still

Twitter is hell, I've been out of school playing too many games, let's get back to work.

So what started as a doodle became a a 3-day project. I was enjoying the cyber-aesthetic of Madness, endless concrete walls, titanium doors, desaturated tables, and more computers than furniture. So, I started making just that. Everything but the character here is my doing.

Concrete:

I started with walls, floors and ceiling, and tried to make them look like concrete. But, how do you make concrete look like concrete at this resolution, and in this limited color pallet? Concrete's distinction usually come out of it's silhouette, not it's actual texture; the texture appears smooth if you don't focus your eyes on it, or are looking at a low resolution like this.

I did find myself studing the look of concrete while waiting for a bus one day, though. And I saw a few details that I think helped me out now. Concrete has a very subtle and fine grid-like pattern to it, looking kinda like fine knitting. Also, due to the debris that catches in it as well as just the aggregate inside it as it forms, there's usually some shiny spots embedded in it's surface. I tried to incorporate this into the sprites, even though the details are so much smaller than the resolution enables them to be.

Most of the shading is done in a weird back and forth of crosshatching, drawing with each step of shade as straight lines and overlapping them. Concrete also never appears pure white, so I was hesitant to represent those shiny spots with white. Instead I opted with a slightly pinkish looking color, #e9dbe2, which is the nearest-to-white color in the pallet that isn't actually white. I think it does it right. You might not even know it has color if you're not paying attention, it looks as bright as it could be, but isn't as obnoxious as white actually would be. Also, I made almost all of the tiles fit the 16x16 box perfectly, no beveling, which is the best I could do to give an inherently shapeless thing a "concrete silhouette."

I also did ask around on Discord what people interpreted the tiles as, despite being confident in how it already looked.

In my opinion, these elements together got me what I wanted, or something that's at least close enough to be completed with context. The concrete looks as rough as the real thing feels, and looks more geometric than our rock tiles, which is the main thing I heard people call it when asking around.

Background:

The rules are different for making the background. Strictly dark, below-half-value colors. Making the background look like concrete is a special challenge, because I don't have half the color pallet, and also was trying to make a tile that wouldn't get old if repeated 70 times over per room. I don't think I really accomplished this goal completely, and still need to revisit it. The approach I took towards the main tileset wouldn't work, but I tried it anyway, taking two different shades of dark grey and also just plain black, cross-hatching everything with the three colors. The tile ultimately got stale super fast, as should be expected when there's nothing else, but also didn't look like concrete. There's no records of how it looks now.

I tried with a similar approach a second time, but drawing larger lines, and also lining the lines up more. This got a slightly-less stale looking tile, but it also ended up looking more like metal. This time it was a little more agreeable, so I just left it for a bit, and just would let my mind sit on it while I worked on other things....

[Wow I don't finish a lot of these posts, don't I? I intend to finish this one tho, later.]

4/8/2020:

I started working on a game jam game about taking over a ghost town by putting down plants. On this day specifically, I made a lil Doll's eye plant:

Something unique to this model is that all of it's textures were made procedurally, then baked.

To do this, I had to start out with something a little more like this:

2 materials: One for the stalk, which is just the factor of worldspace-mapped perlin noise going through a colorramp between a bright red and a dilluted greenish color. The other for the eye-fruit-whatever, with the mesh purposely kept at the center of the origin of the world to use a gradient sphere mapped from worldspace to create the "pupil."

Once I had all my UVs in order, I put a new image texture in each of the materials' shader graphs, set the render engine to Cycles, went down to the baking section of the rendering tab, and baked diffuse color to get the final texture map. Then I set that texture to the base color of a new material, and set the whole object to use the newest material instead of the two old ones.

With that done, I moved the eye-fruit in it's place on the stem, then copy/pasted the stem and fruit several times around the central stalk, getting the final result that you see at the start. No pens were lifted in this process! Maybe there should've been.

4/10/2020

The them of this last week was really a lacking in self-discipline. Anyways, I made this much of a weird barnacle ladder plant thing, inspired by the ugly things in HL2. I didn't get to properly texturing it.

The process:

1: Make Cube

2: Subdivision surface modifier

3: Extrude a face, then scale down

4: Loop cut (Ctrl+L or 12th option down on the left 3D viewport menu), scroll up while using for more cuts

5: Select one loop in the series, can be edges or faces.

6: Turn Proportional editing on

7: move selection to your liking, scroll up to increase proportional editing size, scroll down to decrease.

8: Rinse and repeat for wiggly roots.

Nothing to see here. I animated this lil bit of this movie.

Note to self: Actually write this out tomorrow morning

This post isn't for Anonfilly

I made a lil health bar for A game affectionately titled "AYUG."

Having joined midway through their development, I had a weird combination of overchoice and listlessness in work to look for, as a lot of things aren't in the game but were being worked on already. The Health bars though, they were newly programmed, and nobody was working on them, so I decided I'd work on that.

The game is set in various medieval time periods, similar to how For Honor and Darkest Dungeon are, without extreme concern for historical accuracy in the plot, so that's the context of how I should make this look.

With that, I decided to mix the visuals of curvy metal and dirty vials, because that just felt right for an old timey look. Did Alchemists even use vials? I didn't actually have any references, I should probably get on redoing it.

But back to what I did do.

First, I made my canvas size 512x2048, filled it with red, and then shrunk down the red box by 75%, realized that that's not enough vertical space to draw on, and increased the height to 1024. I would use this red rectangle as a guideline to draw everything else around.

Next, I added another layer, hit "select pixels" on the red bar layer (ctrl+clicking on the layer's thumbnail works too), inverted the selection, all so that I wouldn't draw on top of the red bar, and keeping the ends of the bar visible. Also turned on symmetry. I did this so players would be able to accurately know their health even when only a sliver is remaining or a sliver from full. I drew the "metal" as a silhouette, but I just kinda guessed on what that silhouette should be. Once I was happy with the outer silhouette, I deselected everything, and drew those 3 bars to indicate 4ths of hp. I probably could've made the 1/4 and 3/4 lines more accurate. Also, to get straight lines, I just held down shift and dragged the mouse. I like those solid thick lines.

With all that done, I turned off symmetry, made a clipping layer to put on top of the "silhouette" layer, and painted on the white reflections. At first, I just scribbled white where I think the light reflects the most. Then, I used the smudge tool, and smudged the scribbles across the rest of the silhouette. FInally, just applying another lil scribble of white to make the highlight stick out more. Also, to bevel it out a bit, I set my paint brush to clear, and drew over edges.

Lastly, I made a 3rd layer, put it below the silhouette but above the bar, selected the pixels of the red bar again, scribbled around the edges of the red bar, and then smudged them inward to get that dirty look, From that, I called it done.

I need to do it AGAIN, but better.

So this boss has more than one attack. In this one, he bursts out of one wall of the Arena at incredible speed, and you as a player need to jump over him. Simple. And then I made it again, because it probably should bob up and down more, like a dolphin.

I started by making a kind of walk cycle. Two keyframes, The first with both the left legs forward, both the right legs back, every part of the tail pointing to the right, and the torso and head adjusted accordingly; Then the second keyframe, which is just the pose mirrored, but not really because I did it all manually and approximately.

Next, I took each leg, and in the time they moved forward, placed another keyframe in the middle for the leg to rise a bit, so the legs weren't just swishing back and forth. I tool the hind legs' keyframes, moved them forward a bit in the timeline, so that they would lag behind the front legs a little. Similarly, I moved every spinal controller forward in the timeline by their distance downward from the torso, and moving the head's keyframes backward on the timeline so the tail is wagging way behind the rest of the body, and the head leads everything else.

Along with the idle animation, I remade this slam animation. There's several others I haven't even started on, gotta get those done too, but today I'm talking about this one.

This boss has an attack that telegraphs for 6 frames before crashing down their front-leg and launching shockwave projectiles across the ground for you to jump over. The first animation was made without that timing in mind, with the idea of just gouging out frames to fit the timing, because I didn't know the timing when I started. This time however, I knew the timing, and it's unfortunately pretty sparse.

Unlike the idle animation, I scrapped most of the keyframes and started from scratch, with the exception of the keyframes on frame 0. I tried to break a habit by not going completely straight ahead. First, I put my playhead on frame 5, and posed the body so that his front-and-forward leg was as far up as the armature would allow, and posed the tail to sway less. I didn't manually pose the other three legs at all, but the IK inevitably rotates them anyway.

Then, the immediate frame after, I keyframed every part of the body to be completely prone. Not just the leg back onto the ground, but the nose to the tail all sprawled out. Then, I moved the keyframes around in the timeline so that the more distal parts of the body would lag behind. Also pushed back the "high" keyframes back by one each, because 1 frame was too fast. However, once I got this sprawled out motion down, I went back to my old habits and frame-by-frame animated the torso, hips, legs, and head back to the idle pose, which is frame 0. Not much too it, but this did allow me to shake the body, and communicate a kind of senescence. I did eventually copy/paste the frame 0 keyframes and put them at the end of the animation and adjust the keyframes one or two frames before them to compensate for my predictions, but they were mostly accurate, which is surprising even to me.