While I still have some blogposts left to write, the semester is essentially over and there are no more exercises or days to cram into it. With that here is my reflective post:
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The brief says that the reflective post must explore and evaluate my methodology throughout these months, and so I will try to do that - as can be read from some of my posts, I did not start the semester on the best foot, namely not really receiving the verbal instructions/inspirations for the first couple of tasks, or at the very least, being unable to ask questions regarding them as they were set. Additionally, I was not in a very good place emotionally. I write this because I believe that the semester was an intense mental struggle, and being behind from the offset didn't help. I struggled to find my place, and to truly figure out what it was I wanted to focus on, because I wanted it all - game design, illustration, digital painting, character and level design, modelling, animation and so forth, but there was no time to do anything. Looking at the art provided by the other students was inspiring as well as disheartening, and I berated myself for not having practiced as much as they, and being unable to perform even the simplest tasks. I took the easy way and decided to focus on game design rather than art, something you can't really do "poorly" but, and this was perhaps because of the way I presented it, I did not feel as if I was doing the correct thing, and this was a bit disheartening as well.
As I detailed in one of the other posts I think, at times it felt like an actual fight to start working, due to it being a kind of unpleasant process. It is a strange type of discipline and confidence, and I read a lot online about that kind of loop and how to exit it. One of the great titbits I am now trying to convince myself of is to never compare my art to others, only to my own previous art. Additionally, a long process has been about not being so hard on myself, and I think attempting to stick to a set schedule, work-wise, could really help - for example, after 7 at night, never do any work, and forcibly not thinking about it either, in order to relax and recover.
As it stands now, I have gone back to the roots, art-wise, and am attempting to make simple drawing exercises a habit. I am hoping this will both bring increased confidence and of course lay a solid foundation for completing art-goals. I have also planned a "tutorial-Tuesday", wherein I each week would do a tutorial - long or short - and hopefully learning from a range of different artists would congeal into something a bit wider and more solid. Additionally, at the end of the semester I found renewed vigour in working on a game of my own - this might have been due to a set deadline for it, but it did mean that I got a lot of work done and was happy with myself for once. I will try to complete more work on game projects I will actually release, or try to encorporate exercises for class into them. (Word count: 527)
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There is more to cover but the post can only be so long. If it feels a bit scattered then that's because that is how I felt like. The stuff that was actually focused were the exercises I have detailed.
Here's to a better next semester!
mandag den 4. januar 2016
Throwback #2 - basic exercises
This is an account of some of the drawing exercises I picked up earlier in the semester.
Regrettably, I could not find the sources from which I got these tips/exercises, but I will upload them when I find them and detail the bit I do remember.
The first of the exercises was to simply draw the same thing - over and over and over. This is likely a tip repeated across many different places and persons - I remember Jazza from Draw with Jazza saying something of the like.
The trick isn't to draw something so you like it - in fact, in a strange way, you shouldn't like it, because that means you won't for example attempt to trace it with ink, or shade it or anything . something I've noticed many times in the past; stopping almost halfways through a drawing because I did not want to ruin it.
A second benefit is of course that the time it takes to make the drawing will decrease and keep decreasing - I remember reading spending about 20 minutes on the first time through, and then slowly decreasing that. Lastly, you will teach the brain to see the important shapes and focus on them.
I've misplaced my drawing book, but one artstyle I've liked for a long time is Glen Keane's, so I attempted the following drawing of Rapunzel (picked for the flowing lines).
The second exercise I've tried is in trying to trace the same line, straight or curved or circles, over and over, to ingrain the movement into muscle-memory. This is something that apparently you should never really stop doing, and it also serves as a good warm-up before drawing sessions. Additionally, I have never been drawing from the shoulder before, so the exercise serves that as well.
While most of my pages are simple straight lines and circles, I picked this because they are some of the first drawings Ive done with the shoulder - while being an exercise.
Regrettably, I could not find the sources from which I got these tips/exercises, but I will upload them when I find them and detail the bit I do remember.
The first of the exercises was to simply draw the same thing - over and over and over. This is likely a tip repeated across many different places and persons - I remember Jazza from Draw with Jazza saying something of the like.
The trick isn't to draw something so you like it - in fact, in a strange way, you shouldn't like it, because that means you won't for example attempt to trace it with ink, or shade it or anything . something I've noticed many times in the past; stopping almost halfways through a drawing because I did not want to ruin it.
A second benefit is of course that the time it takes to make the drawing will decrease and keep decreasing - I remember reading spending about 20 minutes on the first time through, and then slowly decreasing that. Lastly, you will teach the brain to see the important shapes and focus on them.
I've misplaced my drawing book, but one artstyle I've liked for a long time is Glen Keane's, so I attempted the following drawing of Rapunzel (picked for the flowing lines).
The second exercise I've tried is in trying to trace the same line, straight or curved or circles, over and over, to ingrain the movement into muscle-memory. This is something that apparently you should never really stop doing, and it also serves as a good warm-up before drawing sessions. Additionally, I have never been drawing from the shoulder before, so the exercise serves that as well.
While most of my pages are simple straight lines and circles, I picked this because they are some of the first drawings Ive done with the shoulder - while being an exercise.
Throwback #1
This post is based on notes I took during the first couple of months at the school, I just havent gotten around to writing it yet, so the following post should be filed under those months if possible.
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The first couple of months at the university were a really trying time for me. I had to return to Denmark for personal reasons, and thus from the start were behind on pretty much everything - I struggled with knowing what was required of me, and what I really wanted to get out of the education, as well as what options of attending bachelor-level classes were available to me. Couple this with being woefully undertrained compared to my classmates, and I had created a situation for myself where I almost disliked working on anything due to the level of quality of the results. I tried focusing on the Design of games for each of the weekly tasks, with the result that while the the game might be designed in its core game-play, I had very little to actually show during the presentations, something that led me to think I was even further behind, all leading to a 'catch-up'-mentality, which is not really good for motivation or creativity.
I was (and am) convinced I have not mastered, or even semi-mastered, the very basics of art and, in the case of digital drawing/painting, digital techniques, and so this is what I tried to focus on, all the while falling further behind in stuff I could actually show.
It was a trying time, and I sometimes felt like my body was actively fighting against even trying to do any work, because I would not like the result. Furthermore, having to spend time on theoretical subjects rather than practical did not exactly help.
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The first couple of months at the university were a really trying time for me. I had to return to Denmark for personal reasons, and thus from the start were behind on pretty much everything - I struggled with knowing what was required of me, and what I really wanted to get out of the education, as well as what options of attending bachelor-level classes were available to me. Couple this with being woefully undertrained compared to my classmates, and I had created a situation for myself where I almost disliked working on anything due to the level of quality of the results. I tried focusing on the Design of games for each of the weekly tasks, with the result that while the the game might be designed in its core game-play, I had very little to actually show during the presentations, something that led me to think I was even further behind, all leading to a 'catch-up'-mentality, which is not really good for motivation or creativity.
I was (and am) convinced I have not mastered, or even semi-mastered, the very basics of art and, in the case of digital drawing/painting, digital techniques, and so this is what I tried to focus on, all the while falling further behind in stuff I could actually show.
It was a trying time, and I sometimes felt like my body was actively fighting against even trying to do any work, because I would not like the result. Furthermore, having to spend time on theoretical subjects rather than practical did not exactly help.
--
lørdag den 2. januar 2016
Animation 'blending' in Unity
Work continues on my game-project, and today I arrived at an interesting issue which I hadn't been presented before - namely how to get two (or more) different animations to work together.
For example, a character walking while firing a bow, or jumping and swinging an axe.
This issue (and writing this post) brings to mind my bachelor-thesis on my previous education, where I created the graphics for the product - we had a soldier with a run animation and a shoot animation, but the animations were not blended in that project, so shooting and moving broke the animations/immersion.
For this project, what I needed was for my character to walk and spew a sort of breath-ability (essentially a shooting attack) at the same time. When a part of the GUI was clicked, the function would be called to start the animation, and the animation would at a same time trigger an Animation Even calling another function which would instantiate the particle effect.
The standard transitions from Unity did not do the job of blending the animations, so after some research online I found that a new animation layer must be created under the Animator component, and the 'priority' animation, which should cancel out part- or all- of another animation should be put on this layer, and the Weight of the layer should be set to one.
With this setup, the character would indeed walk and 'breathe' and the same time, and the animations would blend adequately, but the animation was looping continuously. This was disabled under the animation component, but the animation was still playing once at the beginning of the scene. As the animation State was on a layer of its own, the only transition was from Any State to "Breathing", with Breathing being the default state. To fix this final error I created an empty state and made that the layers default state, and the animations worked as they were supposed to.
This was a bit of a victory for me, because it opens up the opportunity for creating all sorts of animated stuff in Unity. I quite like the Mechanim-system, once you get used to it.
Here is a screenshot for the game. The frostbreath has not been added to the official release yet, but will be soon. The game is called Jingle Hells, the same game as I have mentioned before.
For example, a character walking while firing a bow, or jumping and swinging an axe.
This issue (and writing this post) brings to mind my bachelor-thesis on my previous education, where I created the graphics for the product - we had a soldier with a run animation and a shoot animation, but the animations were not blended in that project, so shooting and moving broke the animations/immersion.
For this project, what I needed was for my character to walk and spew a sort of breath-ability (essentially a shooting attack) at the same time. When a part of the GUI was clicked, the function would be called to start the animation, and the animation would at a same time trigger an Animation Even calling another function which would instantiate the particle effect.
The standard transitions from Unity did not do the job of blending the animations, so after some research online I found that a new animation layer must be created under the Animator component, and the 'priority' animation, which should cancel out part- or all- of another animation should be put on this layer, and the Weight of the layer should be set to one.
With this setup, the character would indeed walk and 'breathe' and the same time, and the animations would blend adequately, but the animation was looping continuously. This was disabled under the animation component, but the animation was still playing once at the beginning of the scene. As the animation State was on a layer of its own, the only transition was from Any State to "Breathing", with Breathing being the default state. To fix this final error I created an empty state and made that the layers default state, and the animations worked as they were supposed to.
This was a bit of a victory for me, because it opens up the opportunity for creating all sorts of animated stuff in Unity. I quite like the Mechanim-system, once you get used to it.
Here is a screenshot for the game. The frostbreath has not been added to the official release yet, but will be soon. The game is called Jingle Hells, the same game as I have mentioned before.
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