Scrubby Zoom No More.
I’ve been quiet again, but for good reason! I started really thinking about how to better my workflow and I decided that I would try Photoshop without GPU acceleration for a couple weeks. While my computer isn’t a Photoshop dedicated rig, it isn’t a a push-over either.
Everything works faster, and I mean everything. In a way, I have been screwing myself by using scrubby zoom because I was trading off brush responsiveness for a faster zoom that really wasn’t helping me all that much. If you want to do anything with the smudge tool, you probably need to have GPU acceleration off. You wouldn’t think GPU acceleration would involve making compromises, but it does, even with the snappy CS6 beta.
I’m pretty sure this isn’t new, but I’m fairly convinced that GPU acceleration on most computers does not involve a gain in performance. It might just be the fact that the GTX 275 doesn’t like Photoshop, but I doubt it’s just exclusive to me.
For standard zooming though, the default keys are Ctrl + Space + Click for Zoom In and Alt + Space + Click for Zoom Out. Ctrl + 0 for Fit to Screen.
Webcomic Alpha, haha.
Step 1: Make a joke
This is done mostly in MyPaint using a modified Brush tool (I changed all the tracking options to 0.00 so it responds quicker) Photoshop for moving and text-stuff.
Doing this is a little difficult. I know that backgrounds, good compositions and plentiful uses of differing angles makes a good webcomic, but I am terrible at ALL OF THESE. Like, seriously. I draw faces at one angle.
Nevertheless, much like Questionable Content, (Seriously, look at that progress and persistence. LEGENDARY.) I start at where I’m at with nothing but passion to carry me through. Hopefully this webcomic will be more than just something to read, but will be a guide for you, dear reader, to start your own creative endeavor.
On a side note, I’m looking for free webcomic hosting resources. WordPress isn’t particularly good at displaying nexts/previous’s like most webcomics would like to have. I’ll probably have a small little research page done by, uh… next week? Hard to tell with a cold on my shoulder t_t.
MyPaint
I’ll be honest. I’ve been spending all the time I had between the last post and this one trying to find a quick way to summarize how to use the program. I’ve sorta’ failed on that end. Know this: It’s the best free art program out there. No questions asked.
Right now, I’m still a novice at the whole thing, but I thoroughly enjoy the sketching freedom it brings. I mean, you can scroll forever-left and you don’t hit any document barriers. It’s freaking awesome. The brush engine is good at capturing tons of levels of sensitivity, but it is a little cryptic at first glance. (Luckily, somebody wrote an AWESOME GUIDE for it.)
Anyway, basic tips that will help you get started.
1. Edit > Preferences > Buttons : Remap actions to your stylus pen, or unmap them if they conflict with the settings you have on the tablet driver software.
2. You can define tools like it’s Starcraft: Ctrl + 1-0 binds your current tool to that specific number key.
3. EVERYTHING IS REBINDABLE: Just open the menu, mouse over a function and press a key. It will rebind itself to that key. (Even the above, if you so incline)
4. Eraser mode (default E) changes your current brush to act as an eraser and increases the radius a bit. Press E again to revert it back to its normal function.
The Faux Scratchboard Tool Part Deux: A little about flow.
I’m still unabashedly bad at inking, but I incorporated the Faux Scratchboard Tool brush into my workflow that helps get my ideas on the canvas as fast as possible. Granted, it doesn’t act 100% like the scratchboard tool anymore, but it’s really comfortable for people like me who practically scribble on the canvas but also want something to look semi-finished. (A.K.A. Can’t visualize past the blocking phase)
The trick was to turn down the flow. Actually, that’s the solution to pretty much everything regarding brushes.
Opacity for painters is a weird mixed bag. Generally speaking, opacity doesn’t happen all that much in the natural habitat of traditional medium, so when I started out scaling opacity back in, what, 2006, I’d get that tacky transparent effect. Opacity is also very, very concentrated in terms of effect. Even with high pressure sensitivity on your tablet, you’d be hard pressed to make a strong stroke with 10% opacity.
Flow’s a lot different. For tools like the Faux Scratchboard Tool, it allows you to keep a sort-of-matte application while giving you uniform softness. Decreasing the flow doesn’t compromise color information as much. Even at 10% flow, you’re going to still have a pretty close cousin of the color on your brush. For me, 20% flow turned out to be a great place to be at with my brush for marker-sized strokes. When I got to tinier detail work, 30-40% flow was sufficient.
Most of my brushes are on airbrush-mode. You might be wondering what it does. I did too for a while. With Airbrush mode on, the number keys set flow rather than opacity. (You can still scale opacity with shift+number keys.)
Anyway, if you have a hard, non-opacity jitter brush, I’d give flow-scaling a try. It’s hard to explain, and since it’s early in the morning, I haven’t found a good visual metaphor for it just yet. I will, someday, but seriously, give it a whirl. You might be surprised at how it makes things magically work.
It’s V-DAY.
The Elder Scrolls foretold his return.
A wild contest appeared too!
Photoshop – Inking via the Faux Scratchboard Tool.
Corel Painter is a really good program, but I really like how you can completely control Photoshop’s hotkeys and interface. However, as an anime-esque artist, it’s really hard to deny how unbelievably amazing the scratchboard tool is.
I took a look at the tool and I came to the realization that it’s basically a rectangle with size jitter set to pen pressure and angle jitter sent to direction. I gave it a try and, sure enough, I got something that worked pretty similar to the scratchboard tool. It’s a little rough, but giving it pen-pressure roundness jitter helps smooth it out some. Overall, it’s not nearly as versatile as the standalone scratchboard tool, but with a little flow adjustment on the fly, it’s actually quite comparable.
Anyway, here’s screenies of the brush. It’s a large 1:2 rectangle with 5px of feathering and 10% spacing.
Guild Wars 2: Speculation About Skills
Doubtless you’ve heard that dragons are coming around again this year. If you haven’t, know that Guild Wars 2 is going to emerge this year. GOOD. I DON’T HAVE TO BUY SW:TOR ANYMORE.
Sorry, I had to get that off my chest. Ahem.
Arena.net has stated before that they wanted to break down the trinity. Some MMO gamers probably can’t imagine how this works and automatically assume it’ll be a button-mashing fest of nothing but DPS. It won’t, because it’s entirely possible to create a game without a dedicated healer or a dedicated tank, yet still have a dynamic, active game.
The core problem with the trinity is that it bottlenecks player enjoyment by forcing people to wait for the specific role to be filled, but the existence of a tank and healer are not inherrently bad in game design. They are unfavored because tanks and healers traditionally level slower than the other classes, and therefore there’s less of them by the time endgame rolls around, creating a bottleneck for successful team compositions. It’s a problem that is almost universal across all MMOs, and it needs to be fixed. It shouldn’t be ignored.
In the case of Guild Wars specifically, random arenas helped impress the negative image of the trinity into the player conciousness. If you did not have a dedicated healing/damage mitigating support in your composition, you likely lost. Normally, this is a sign of good games design because it emphasized the importance of team composition, but in MMOs, team composition is not easily adjustable without a large pool of players because of how classes gravitate towards one or two roles.
Final Fantasy 13 comes to mind. For all intensive purposes, the game does not force you to play with a dedicated healer. When you blur the class lines with flexible class-changing opportunities mid-fight, the emphasis changes from strategic team composition to tactical thinking. Most MMOs don’t have a lot of strategic choices overall becuse you control yourself and only yourself most of the time, so class flexibility is a small price to pay to remove the inevitable team-composition bottleneck.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that players will overcome composition problems, as many of them will likely assert that they perform the damage class better and therefore do not need to switch, but it helps alleviate the stresses involved with being a certain role yet requiring another. Rift: Planes of Telara saw plenty of this. Despite the fact that a player could hold host to three completely different roles, there still was a healer/tank bottleneck in the overall community. Giving flexibility isn’t necessarily enough. Healers and tanks need to be fun, and they can be.
League of Legends has a lot of examples of how supportive characters can be aggressive despite their roles. Sona is a support champion that provides a small heal, speed boosts, a safe means of poking with damage and a large AOE stun. That sounds like an offensive mage DPS, doesn’t it? It’s because it sort of is, and yet she still falls into a well-understood area of support. She’s fun to play for plenty of people. Even Soraka, who is the closest champion to the prototypical healbot, can be played aggressively. The primary reason why these characters are aggressive is because they cannot constantly spam heals, whereas in Guild Wars, entire bars are dedicated to healing. If you have a class like this, they will likely focus solely on healing because it is always efficient to do so. If you limit the potential for such a character to exist, you open up tons of variety for different kinds of supporting roles.
What is likely to set Guild Wars 2 apart from other games with class flexibility is the combo system. I imagine that Guild Wars 2 will not have a strong spike heal skill, but there will be ways to create a spike heal with player coordination. Someone setting up an AOE heal and having the rest of the team fire through the field at the wounded ally. Conversely, I could see a water elementalist contributing to DPS by passing her projectiles through an offensive aura while providing a small, but necessary amount of support for the front-line. This’ll prevent zerging because attack rotations will vary and will be based moreso on timing to be effective. Positioning will likely determine whether a strong party-initated heal will work as well.
Either way, I don’t want to get too ahead of myself. The baseline is that there are real examples of what Guild Wars 2 has been talking about in the wild, and if there aren’t, they make sense in changing the formula.
Remembering CES: Wacom Cintiq 24HD
Before we jump in, keep in mind that CES has really, really bright lighting and the tablet was facing upwards. The glare is a natural consequence of those two elements. When working on it, there was some glare, but definitely not a deal breaker in the slightest.
To put it short, the Wacom Cintiq 24HD device is amazing. There is no better tablet screen out there, period. Can most people afford it? At $2,600, no, but do I want it? Yes. A million times yes.
I played with the Wacom Cintiq 24HD for at least 4 hours (And the video is of me doing one final drawing), which was enough time to get settled into a reasonable workflow. Much like it’s 21 inch sibling, the 24HD is basically a huge Intuos4 with a screen behind it. It has the same exact functionality as a normal tablet and the skills you acquire from using a tablet translate nicely over to the Cintiq.
Personally, I don’t use the express-keys on the side, mostly because I prefer keyboard. The buttons seem a little hard to press, but since you can rest your entire arm on the side, using the buttons was surprisingly easy and pleasant. It’s a clever way to reduce fatigue and I definitely appreciate it.
One of the key issues I had with the previous Cintiq model was its size and how it is difficult to get it into a comfortable position in relation to a sitting person. The 24HD does not have this problem because of the stand, which allows the screen to extend out beyond its base and over the edge of tables. This is the feature that makes it better than everything else.
There really isn’t much more to say about it. It works, is easy to use and makes plenty standard art tasks much more tolerable.
Back down to earth. Don’t feel bad about not having one of these. When I started drawing on it, the product did not immediately fix most of my workflow problems, but everything I knew and understood about tablet drawing transferred over to the experience. You’re not wasting your time if you have a Bamboo or an Intuos. In fact, you’re probably training to get better with a Cintiq. As a hobby-artist who has seen a lot of superior illustrators work with normal tablets, having a Cintiq is not a necessity, but it is one hell of a luxury. The bottom line is that if you can’t do something on tablet, the Cintiq will not magically make your weaknesses go away, so don’t sweat it.
Playing with the Cintiq really illuminated the importance of learning your program of choice and having a strong art-understanding in general, as opposed to being shackled by hardware limitations. While, yes, that 24HD is the best thing I’ve ever played with, it doesn’t necessarily improve your skill or comfort proportionate to the cost of Wacom’s current entry-level products. For the longest time, I thought if I got a better tablet, things would improve. This was probably true back when I first played with the Graphire back in the early 2000s, but now, Wacom’s products are surprisingly close to one another in quality.
Anyway, it was a pleasure working on the Cintiq 24HD, but it’s not a necessity as a hobby-artist. I’m glad I had the opportunity to cleanse myself of my morbid art curiosity.
After CES: Remembering the Playstation Vita
I LOVE THIS THING.
Here’s something simple: The PS Vita is basically a PS3 in a handheld. At worst, it may be in the hypothetical realm of a PS2.5, but even then, it’s an amazing device. Out of all the things I saw at CES 2012, the Vita is by far the most exciting and impressive piece of technology of the show.
Frankly, I’m a surprised that the Vita hasn’t sold more. For once, there seems to be an emerging product that is under-hyped. Before I got to test one at CES, I was under the impression that the Vita was less spectacular in person than what was demontrated when it was first released. I figured it would either run slowly or look terribly compressed in live view. I was wrong. I feel like a fool. The Vita is the dream machine I’ve wanted since the PSP was announced. It feels like an actual miniature PS3. No, I’m not over-exaggerating. I don’t want to spend $250 in the next month, but I can’t deny that Sony has actually taken a full-fledged next-gen console and made it portable with some mysterious magic.
Before I go too far, I better talk about Super Stardust Delta. It’s basically asteroids with tons of gorgeous clutter and plenty of things to blow up. One stick to move, the other to shoot. The game showcases use of the front and back touch functionality along with the ability to tilt the camera based on the orientation of the Vita. Basically, everything short of the front-and-back cameras are utilized in the game’s core design.
When I fired up Super Stardust Delta, I quickly came to the realization that the game plays just as well as it did on the PS3. To my amazement, the experience was actually better than the console version. The framerate stays at an amazingly stable 60 through the craziest of clutter. The front and back touch are used for two different kinds of bombs, which are placed where you drag your fingers on or behind the display. At first, I thought it was a little clunky because I had to move my hand away from the right analog stick, but I soon acclimated to the new experience after a few tries. The gyroscope gives the game an unusually powerful sense of immersion while simultaneously showcasing the crazy viewing angles the display is capable of supporting. It felt three-dimensional without the gaudy, blurry effect that the 3DS is notorious for.
Granted, not every game is going to be as good as Super Stardust Delta, but that game really is an amazing showcase of the potential of the console. House Marque did a tremendous job at incorporating everything the Vita has to offer, and now I want one. BAD.
Pre-CES doodle.
I had a rogue desire to draw something. Inspiration later ganked me.
