This week was for a bunch of modelling and for improving on what I'd already made in prior weeks! Let's have a look!

The upper clothes are more or less all done! I added a big ol' oversized zipper on the side of the jacket, and shifted around the zipper bits to actually make sense in terms of how a zipper works. The work on the upper clothes was mostly just refinement with what I already had. A little bit of moving vertices around, a few extra bits, that sort of thing.

We've finally got pants and a belt now! I quite liked modelling the belt. It involved getting a curve to follow around the pants, then extruding a mesh along that curve. After that, I added some holes and a buckle and it was ready! Thank goodness that I wear a belt almost everyday. It really helped getting the buckle correct in a way that I wouldn't be able to otherwise from just using an image online. A belt buckle is surprisingly complex! There's a bunch of little bits that you don't see when you normally look at a belt. The loops around the pants were simple to model, but the positioning of them was something that I had to double check. In a previous attempt at making a character, I simply just made a belt loop with an equal amount of them going around the pants. This was a good attempt, but it just made the overall shape boring to look at. Basically, the lesson of this was that I should use reference for even the most mundane things lol! This is pretty evident by the pockets. I definitely think I can improve on them, since they don't really look all that much like proper pant pockets. The problem comes from the geometry of the pants, however. I could probably rearrange the faces in a way that would get me a more convincing pant pocket, but I would have to experiment with what I can get away with. I would much rather just alter what I have already than having to go back and redo something.

Next, the bottom half! This is where the pants in particular shine! I said in my previous post that I might try using Zbrush to create the shoes, but I instead used it to make the folds in the pants more believable. Zbrush has a very useful tool called TransposeCloth. This allowed me to easily deform the mesh for the pants in a way that could mimic how clothes fold and bend when they move around and settle. I focused on the knees and ankles in particular because that's realistically where the body moves around the most when walking. You will also notice that there's some snazzy looking shoes! These were quite a challenge to make. My first attempt to make them were based off of my Dad's work boots. However, Maya crashing thwarted my attempts at making those. I figured that a more stylish option for shoes would be better instead of work boots. I based them off of a classic Converse Hi-top sneaker, since that's close to what someone would see when they think Shoe. I modelling the main parts of the shoe on top of a duplicate of the model's foot, and making it a live object. In Maya, this allows for new meshes made to stick to the live object. This made the task of conforming the shoe to the foot very easy. A modeled each part separately and eventually combined them together and extruded outwards whenever I needed to. The sole was as simple as extruding the bottom edge outwards. I originally planned on making the shoes have laces, but those seemed really finicky to model, so I opted for a velcro strap instead. I've been wearing a pair of velcro shoes for a while and I figured it would help me connect it me personally.

The last big piece of modelling I did this week was...

Wow, a gun! Hell's Horses!

This model actually turned out really well, to my surprise! I fully expected this to look like complete doo-doo, but it turned out pretty good. I think there's some more that I can do with it, but as for the whole shape, iI'd say it's done. I tried out a new method of modelling when I was making this. I started out with an 8-sided cylinder, and extruded the edges and followed along the contours of my reference image. When I couldn't go in any one direction, I would split the extrusion and go a different direction. It was a very spur of the moment idea, and I hope that I can replicate it again If I need to. This is based off of the MP-412 Rex revolver. It looks a little familiar, but I can't put my finger on it. I think there was something about a 60 million double dollar bounty? I set out in particular for a modern looking break action revolver, and luckily, this one fit the bill quite well. As well as making this gun look particularly unique, I also wanted to add a little personal flair for the model. My character's trusty hand cannon, Stardust (name pending), technically has infinite ammo. The only stipulation is that the gun can only fire shots in quick succession a couple of times before it overheats. When overheating, the gun can't fire and needs to be vented by the break action mechanism. This version of the gun fires Cosmic Rounds (fancy!) which would be evident when venting heat, with a colourful looking nebula seen on the back of the cylinder. The overheating can be circumvented by firing slower, but that isn't fun in an intense firefight. When firing, you can see a burst of cosmic energy erupt from the barrel and speed towards an enemy, slowly accumulating more and more smoke until it cools off itself or until vented.

That's all for this week! I certainly made a lot of progress this week, and I'm very proud of that! I think I might keep working on this until it's done. I actually found out that I got accepted into my graduate course! The e-mail for my acceptance should be going out within the next week, which is very exciting! The course starts in June so if I get this done by the end of the year, that would leave me with 6 months to work on my animation skills. I really hope that I will be able to learn a whole bunch more from this course!

Thank you and good-bye for today!

I messed around with Marvelous Designer a whole bunch throughout the week! It was pretty much the only thing that I was using. I'm very happy to show the progress!

At first, it was mostly just messing around and coming to grips with the majority of the tools that Marvelous Designer had to offer. Luckily, Marvelous isn't some obscure program with no body using it, so finding tutorials for stuff was very easy. Once I figured out how to actually make shapes, it simply became a matter of finding a pattern to trace over and sewing together. I would say that my experiments with the t-shirt payed off quite a bit. However, the pants are still something I'm struggling with. For the time being, I've got a simple substitute and a belt for roughly how I want the pants to look. The only problem is that I intend the pants to sag over the shoes, which have been a real pain to try and make. Shoes are much more complicated that draping some cloth over a model, and any attempt to make them in both Marvelous and Maya have gone bust. I'll try and take another crack at them once I finish up some other parts of the clothing that I'll show later in this post.

I did try out making a sleeveless turtleneck at one point. And to be completely fair, it fit the model quite well! Sadly, it just wasn't the vibe that I was attempting to make for this model. I also did originally want to give them a large coat, but I opted for something else. I wanted to make it a sort of Vash the stampede kinda thing; A huge encompassing coat with a bunch of trailing bits on the outside of it. But I simply couldn't find a pattern of coat that I liked the look of, so I scrapped that idea in the end.

I eventually got a t-shirt that I was happy with (sort of). Every other attempt to make a t-shirt was okay, but wasn't as good as it could be because of how the edges of the arms interacted with the sleeves. There would just be an annoying dip that would make him look almost bony in a way. To remedy this, I added some positive pressure to the sleeves to inflate them a bit. While it still didn't look perfect, I had an idea to fix it up.

I got far enough with the sleeveless turtleneck idea that I imported it into Maya and started cleaning it up. What I had found is that Maya's retopologise tool worked really well for the application that I was using it for. For every other piece of clothing since then, I've used the exact same method for the clean up process. This makes the mesh for the clothes very easy to work with and gives them clean geometry to work with. As an extra step of the process, I usually cut the clothing in half and mirror it to get rid of any asymmetry that might have happened in Marvelous, and extrude outwards to give some more dimension to it.

And this is where I'm at with the clothes now! After some changes to the t-shirt, and adding a coat, it's very looking very stylish if I do say so myself! The coat itself is based off of the TF2 item The Tyurtlenek for the Heavy, and was something that I wanted to add as a little tribute to one of my favourite games (and as a compromise for not finding a longer coat design that I liked). There are still a few parts that I need to touch up, but I would say that the upper half of the model is very close to being done. I'll have to tackle the shoes in the coming week to be able to work on the pants. I think that I might try to use Zbrush to make the shoes and see if I have any luck with that. I do have a little bit of experience with Zbrush from college, but it's fairly limited and I didn't really wrap my head around the more complex tools in that program.

I would say that I'm still on my animation hiatus. This is because of the fact that I am obviously on a roll with model at the moment, and also because I should get a response back on my application to my post-graduate course and I want to let that get sorted before heading back into animation. I also haven't really been looking for a decent series of videos to follow along with. It shouldn't be too hard, but I haven't had much time to do that (see model above!). I'm still very anxious about getting into the course, but I'm remaining hopeful.

Thank you and good-bye for today!

Did a gaggle of modelling, and a little bit of animation! I'm very excited with what I've done week, so enough preamble!

Up first, a little bit of a pendulum animation that I did. I want to try and post in here, but I'm not sure if it will work. I will edit the post elsewhere in case it doesn't. From what I've heard, it's a bit of a problem with other users and I'm not quite sure if it's been fixed yet. (Edit: It did not work.)

I didn't particularly put too much time into this animation, but I'm still proud of it. I have yet to have a search for a decent series of videos that help teach animation, but I'll get around to it sooner or later. I was more focused on finishing my post-graduation application last week. I'm very worried that I won't be accepted in. It might be the imposter syndrome, but I feel as though I don't have a good enough grasp of the basics yet. Fingers crossed that they might teach me some over at the course! I think that I might give animation a bit of a break for a few weeks, though. I got pretty stressed out from sorting out the application.

Some exciting news on my persona model that I'm working on! It finally has legs!

I am very happy with how the proportions are looking! The legs are from another base mesh in Maya that I just so happened to scale in just the right way. I quite like how the calves connect to the rest of the lower body. It really helps to add a nice silhouette and helps to make the appendages appropriately and consistently large. I reckon this part of the model is effectively done. I still need to rig it and make some expressions on the eyes, but that's for later. The next step of the process is to create an outfit for the model.

Which I have started messing around with!

This is a screencap of me figuring out the basics of a program that I'm using called Marvelous Designer. This will allow me to make a cool outfit without having to rely on poly modelling it all. I think I'm starting to get the hang of the program, so I think I will have something more substantial to show next week. Stay tuned for that!

Finally, I was able to submit my art for the Bzzt contest! If you'd like, check it out in my art section!

Working on the ZX8000 fan art was a blast! It helped me to re-accustom myself with working with a deadline and to finding solutions within a short time frame. I did not expect the amount of attention that it was going to get, though! The people commenting on the art are all amazing and had such kind words, which certainly made me feel fuzzy on the inside! The last thing I expected was to get Frontpaged! That came as a complete shock to me! I seriously did not expect it to get more than a few votes, but it was such an awesome surprise! Congratulations to everybody who submitted something and congrats to whoever wins! As of writing the winners haven't been announced, but congrats to whoever they are!

As a little thanks, I'd like to share the creation process of making the model!

First off was the head. Making it was surprisingly easy. I would attribute that to how I go about making edges. Instead of making loops around the model to make sharper edges, I would simply use the crease tool in Maya to get a curvature that I liked. This is basically the same feature as edge creases for Blender users. This allowed me to alter the curves if I wanted to with a non-destructive workflow. This meant that I didn't have to go through the hassle of retracing my steps and getting all the loops and vertices gone before making another loop. I have another model on an indefinite hold that could use some crease tool TLC....

Fast forwarding a bit, here's the model with it's original hand look. The hands we're from an alien arm base mesh that I fidgeted with and messed around with until I got a half decent result out of it. However, it was at this point during the creation process that I came to realise something: I absolutely would not have any time to rig the model at all. Upon having this revelation, I knew that I had to change how the hands looked. I would not be able to pose the hands in an efficient way if they remained the same. I then started to experiment with some different hand shapes, and started to put the toon shader onto the model. Hand experiments included: Wavy box with tube sticking out of it and box with really gross looking fold on the fingers.

(Pictured below: Aforementioned wavy box with tube sticking out of it)

This was also the point where I started to pose the model. Luckily, I don't need to rig anything to be able to move things around. A large majority of the model are separate parts, allowing for easy adjustment. I went for a simple hands on the hips with feet facing outwards pose in the final thing.

I eventually plugged in the shader for the model and started to get the arms in the correct position. The shader is relatively intuitive to work with. A feature that I quite like is the ability to assign certain instances of the shader to specific lights in the scene, allowing me to alter the direction for specific parts of the model without affecting other parts. One gripe that I have with the shader is that the outlines are annoying to properly incorporate into a render. When the model moves around, something happens to the outline and it becomes warped. I was thinking of having a turnaround for the model, but I was tired and didn't want to make my own nice looking outlines, so I stuck with a single frame. Curving the arms was also a bit of the challenge, but it became pretty easy once I found the solution. At first, I tried just moving the vertices about to bend them. That was a hassle, though, and would cause some annoying deformation in the mesh that I didn't like. But after remembering Maya's lattice deformation, it became a lot easier. It basically just envelopes the mesh in a box with movable points that can shift the verts on the mesh in a more intuitive way. After getting through that, I simply fixed up the colours on the model, added the eyes, and put a nice background on it.

I think the length of this post more than makes up for how short the one the week before was! Once again, I would like to thank all the people who commented on, voted, added to a collection, or simply viewed my artwork! It really does mean a lot to me.

Thank you and good-bye for today!

I've done some animation! Thank goodness. I also got a bit of modelling done that I plan to finish the coming week. Let's peek a gander.

First, the animation.

While I'm happy that I was actually able to get some animation done this week, I'm starting to see cracks in how I'm going about this. For one, the exercises are more intended for those who already have a firm grasp of the animation techniques. This is something I believe is not the case for myself. I tend to walk away from these exercises without much new found information. This is getting me a little bit nervous, as I recently applied for a post-graduate course and I need to send over a showreel. I have a decent amount of stuff from last year, but I haven't gotten back the type of work I was making. I've heard good things from a friend that's in another post-graduate course with the same people, and he said that he has learnt a lot within the time he's been there. I'm just worried that I won't be accepted in the first place to be able to learn more. I think I might try and follow along with actual lessons in animation rather than exercises for people who already know them. I'm hopeful that I will get in, but there is that nagging feeling in the back of my head. I am definitely trying my best to get that out, but it's a slow process.

Up next is the model that I've been working on!

Obviously, this is for the Bzzzt art contest that's on here. This has been a very fun model to work on! For the time being, I've been modelling with the intent of just keeping it in the one place. That's why it's got it's feet spread out like that. The hands have been a real challenge. I'm trying to go with something that's between what's shown on the reference material. The shader that I'm using is a toon shader that I'm sure I've posted a link before. If not, I'll post it in here later. Something that's really annoying me with my laptop is how inaccurate the colours look on the screen. They seem very washed out compared to the screenshots on my PC. It won't be a problem until I actually have to publish something, so I'll cross that bridge when I get there.

This isn't really a long blog post. Apologies! To be completely honest, it isn't too much to showcase this week (and also it's a bit late in Australia right now haha). Hopefully if I find some decent tutorials for animation I'll have more to show in the coming week.

Thank you and good-bye for today!

As the title implies, this week I focused on modelling pretty much entirely. I know that I should probably focus more on my animation skills (which I will try to do in the coming week!), but modelling can get a stranglehold simply because it's just so fun! I know I quite literally just said that I'm going to focus on my animation more, but that Bzzzt art contest is looking very enticing. And I bet a model of that little robot guy wouldn't take more than an evening to make.

I focused on the persona that I showed last week, but this time it's actually coming together instead of just a simple base mesh.

Because I only worked on a single model this week. I figured it might be fun to show the process of how it's gone so far.

The image below is around the start of the modelling process. I amputated the base mesh that's built in with Maya and enlarged the hands and fingers to get the style that I want out of this. I sort of want to go for what someone might do with a 2D art style with exaggerated proportions. However, the legs have so far been a little bit of a challenge. I simply can't get the look that I want with them. The torso was taken from an alien mesh that's also in Maya. I liked how that looked compared to the human mesh. I'm considering not combining the torso and legs, but that might change in the future for the sake of making the body look more full. The head is where it starts to get a lot more interesting. I want to give it a sort of black hole looking aesthetic, which is why its got those rings and the void. The texture is made using some ramp texture's in the hypershade, so it doesn't look all that impressive in this image. I also opted later down the line for pill-shaped eyes instead of what I was going for initially. Because....I mean......look at it....I can't believe I was thinking of putting eyelids on this as well...

You can see in this image I got the outer rim to look more nebulous that the initial one, and I swapped the eyes for the pill-shaped ones. Also, a cool trick that I tried out was to make the rim follow the camera. I wanted to make sure that it would be visible from any angle that I would point the camera from if I ever wanted to make some animations with the model. I did eventually scrap that idea after I tried out something that I think looks better in the long run. I had the rim parented to the rotational value of the camera so I could this trick done. However, this caused a few problems with it clipping through other parts of the model as it rotated, which is why I decided against it. I also added half of a sphere on the back of the head so that the eyes disappear from view when seen from that angle. This was so it can more easily be told which side is the front and back of the head.

You might have also noticed that the outer rim looks a lot different in this image. This is actually because I decided to try out a program called Material Maker. This is more or less a free and less sophisticated version of Substance Designer. It was honestly a lot of fun tinkering with this and trying to find out how things worked so I could get the effect that I wanted. As a sidenote, there's also a similar program that I wanted to try out called TOOLL3 that I wanted to try out. I kind of overloaded myself with that one though, so I don't know if I would try that out again. I went too deep into the tutorials that they had built in. That one involves way more math than Material Maker too, so that might be why. I think in the end I was able to get a really cool effect (with some extra UV editing).

For the body and limbs, I'm reusing a shader that I made in college for fun. It's a simple shader where the camera's facing ratio (I'm not going to act like I know what that actually means) is used to make some cool effects that are dependent on the angle of the camera. I also have another version of this shader that allows me to have a texture in the blank space of the shader, independent of the movement of the camera. Think of it like that effect that they used on clothing in Chowder, but in 3D.

Finally, this is where the model is at right now. Like I said, I changed the outer rim and give it more of a collar look. You can also see that I've started to make a jacket. The clothing is going to take a long time, I think, so I might leave that to much later. The texture for the rim also looks different. This is using the material that's in the screenshot of Material Maker earlier, but with some extra details. Instead of a 4 point plane as the mesh like I did during the beginning, I instead used one with 8 points and with a hole in the middle. This allows me to get better control on how the texture looks like in 3D space. A neat trick that I used to make it look more swirly was to unwrap the UV of the mesh in a straight line and just tilt the top to one side. Because the texture is infinite, it doesn't make any seams and still keeps the effect that I'm going for. Of course, the texture is also animated, so it looks really nice in motion as well.

I'm really happy with how this is shaping up! I don't know how long it will be until I finish it, but I'll be sure to give updates for when I make any progress on it. My plans for the coming week is to whip up a model for that art contest, and to work more on some animation. I've been neglecting animation for a little bit to be honest.

Thank you and good-bye for today!

I am posting this a little bit later than usual, but I'm sure that isn't much of a problem. I was reading a graphic novel that I borrowed from the library last night that I needed to return soon. I got to tired after reading it to post yesterday, so I'm doing it now.

This week I didn't do any animating or drawing, but I did do some modelling! I wanted to take it a bit easier this week, and modelling is a more chill and relaxing thing to do for me than the other two.

Here's what I've been working on!

This doesn't seem like much, but it's slowly coming together. I'm trying to make a 3D persona to represent myself online. I don't feel comfortable posting my face online all that much, so having a little guy to be my face would be much better. I've got some ideas on how I want it to look, but I don't have anything down on paper to show the final concept. It's all in my head for the time being. Working with Maya's content browser is honestly a godsend. I'm not really the best at modelling organic things, I'm more comfortable modelling robots and stuff like that. With the content browser I just grab a model and change it to suit my needs. There's a little nagging feeling that I have to make everything by myself by hand, but I there's limits to what I can do. Besides, people make base sculpts for ZBrush, so there's no harm in using any of these for my models.

This one is a little bit more interesting in terms of the more technical side. I'm obviously trying to recreate a Madness grunt in 3D, flash style shading and all. The modelling isn't too tricky, but getting the shader down is a but harder. I'm using Kamone's Maya Toon Outline Shader for the shading, which gets the problem of me not knowing a clue on how to make nice shaders out of the equation. That only really leaves the problem of making it look as close to 2D as possible. Even for the head, it's surprisingly tricky. I have to tell the shader how much of the model needs to have a shadow, what colour and from what angle the light source is coming from. I do eventually plan on using this model in animations, so I'll have to find a way to keep everything consistent while in motion as well. The shader is a bit finicky with how it handles outlines. When I would zoom the camera out while using the shader's outline, it would scale relative to how far away the camera was. In the end, I just ended up modelling my own outline by slightly inflating a duplicate of the head mesh, reversing the normals, and then turning on backface culling. Backface culling is just a special way of saying that the program will just not show the back side of a polygon. The grunt's face is also a model, not just a texture. When I tried making the cross a texture, it simply didn't look how I wanted it to look. It was too low resolution and I didn't want to bother getting the UV scale right. I think that the model looks better anyway, since it can scale nicely and doesn't look out of place on the model.

This is all that I have to show for this week, but there's something that I want to talk about before ending it off.

On Sunday, I watched a video by DeadlyComics on Youtube. It starred a little crocodile/alligator making jokes about an Easy Bake oven that they had. The video shows them making jokes, and also them having difficulties making up some more. I felt like that I related to this video quite a lot. The plight of an artist trying as much as they can to make something they like, even if it's discouraging at times. There is one part a the end of the video that really puts things in to perspective for me. At the end of the video, it shows the little reptile is in a room completely filled with tapes of their previous recordings. Shelves upon shelves filled to the brim with these tapes. It finishes with a quote that I have really taken to heart.

"If it's easy, then it ain't worth doin'. If it's worth doin', then it might be a little hard."

The line might be underselling how hard that thing might be, but it's hard regardless. It's something that I think I need to teach myself to understand. I'm sure I've talked about this in another post, but I have a tendency to quit something after only barely starting something. I think I really need to get it into my head that I haven't been doing this as long as I think I have. While it probably won't get rid of all of my problems, I'm hoping that adopting this mantra will at least alleviate it a little bit.

I'm not sure if I'll do more animation or drawing in the coming week, but I'll certainly have updates to show. I'm quite excited for how the persona is going to turn out in the end!

Thank you and good-bye for today!

As mentioned in the subject for this blog post, I sadly was not able to get anything of note done in this week.

When I said that I was "still recovering" in my last post, what I apparently meant was: "ramping up". The cold definitely got worse during the week, so I really wasn't able to get much done at all. However, I've now ACTUALLY recovered enough to the point where I will be able to get some stuff done.

So in the meantime, it might be cool to simply talk about what I got up to this week in general.

While I certainly wasn't feeling the best for creating anything, I was still well enough to get out and about. All the fresh air and walking I did definitely helped out with getting better. Something that I was very excited for was the opening of a new arcade in the city. Me and my brother had been keeping tabs on it as they were nearing opening, especially since they were going to have rhythm games that nobody else in Adelaide had (Beatmania and Sound Voltex).

While it was certainly fun to play Beatmania on actual hardware, I've had a hard time justifying going there a second time. First off, the cabinet was definitely worse for wear. While I usually wouldn't mind when something is beaten and battered, it becomes a bit of a problem when almost all of the decals on the cabinet were worn off. This meant that I wasn't able to know what any of the FX sliders on the cabinet do, which I was interested in fiddling with to a certain degree. The Voltex cabinet wasn't in any better shape either. While there were less decals to be erased by greasy gamer grabbers, the knobs were worn out and seemed to have an uncomfortable grip to them. I didn't bother playing Sound Voltex at all. Something that also was confusing was the fact that, according to one of my friends, none of the cabinets are actually running on official servers. This is because they are apparently unofficial imports, and Konami want arcade operators to get the most recent cabinet. I'm all for using whatever you can get, but what irked me about it was that there wasn't anything telling the average consumer that this is the case. The only way that I found out was from word of mouth from a friend. Because of this, scores from the cabinets wouldn't carry over at all, which might come as a shock to some people if they ever tried to play the game again on a cabinet somewhere that had official server connections. The rhythm game section of the arcade certainly felt rushed, as the arcade seems to be more interested in selling people on their VR stations. On top of all of this, I already have a "copy" of Beatmania on my computer, so there isn't particularly a reason for me to go back to the arcade again. And to be completely honest, I could probably have a more enjoyable experience at home anyway. Unlimited plays, an aesthetic that I actually enjoy (The version I have, 27, has a more unique style compared to 30, the one the arcade was running), and it simply being more affordable in the long run. While I certainly think that it's cool that Adelaide has these games when not many others do, I wish that there was a bit more thought put into them.

Another thing that I got to go to this week was Big Cheese 5! This is Adelaide's resident major FGC meetup, with tournaments running for all the major fighting games!

And Smash Bros.

I didn't compete in any games, but it was an absolute blast being able to hang out with some friends and check out some of the awesome stuff that was on offer. The Artist Alley was chock-a-block with amazing artists, and it was so cool seeing how many different fandoms and interests were being represented there!

I even got a few cool stickers!

One of the biggest highlights for me was the wide array of rhythm games that were on offer to play. I know that I said that a new arcade had recently opened, but this is a different situation. This was a private arcade, owned and operated by a single person. Which is......cool. I'm not a big fan of keeping so many games to a single group of people for 99% of a year but whatever. What I'm confused about is how they manage to afford all of them. In no particular order there was: Groove Coaster, Sound Voltex, Nostalgia and Wacca. The Nostalgia and Groove Coaster cabinets don't seem to be too expensive, with each being roughly $3000AUD, but the other games are a bit wild. Wacca costs about $6000AUD, which is quite a bit, even without the price of connecting to official servers. But the most egregious one was Sound Voltex. I believe it was the 120Hz model so that would have set this person back roughly $23 THOUSAND AUSTRALIAN DOLLARS. Where is this person getting that kind of money??!?!?!?!?! That certainly doesn't sound like the kind of cash a single person can spend on just rhythm games?!? Regardless of how I feel about the spending habits of unknown rhythm benefactors or the validity of party games as fighting games (and some miscellaneous stuff about cost, spectator etiquette), Big Cheese and everything there was so much fun. Meeting up with friends from interstate and friends I haven't seen in a while was great. Playing new rhythm games was also super cool (Gitadora seems to be right up my alley!), and I hope that next year's Gargantuan Cheddar 6 can be even better!

I didn't get much done this week in terms of animation or drawing, but I'm hoping I can show something cool next time I give an update!

Thank you and good-bye for today!

A few updates about what I got up to!

Week number two for animation and drawing! Sadly, I wasn't able to get as much as I wanted done this week because I got down with a nasty cold. I'm still recovering from it, so the amount of stuff I get done in the following week might not be a lot either and this blog post might be a little less coherent. I do however have some stuff to show!

First off, though, I would like to talk about something new I decided to try out!

Usually, one day during the week, my brother and I go to Costco to get some cheap lunch and head into the city to have a look around some stores. This time, I brought my gear with me and decided to hang out at the library for a while. It was really nice! The library I went to was astoundingly quiet, contrary to what I thought would be the case. I expected at least some loud noise, but it was practically dead silent. It wasn't my first pick, as I tried the city library first. There wasn't enough space for my things there though, so my brother and I went to the state library instead. There was a really nice double story area in there that had a great atmosphere and was a stark contrast to the rest of the library. Once I got to the study area, I was able to focus on drawing and animating for a whole two hours without any distractions. I was honestly super proud of myself for it! Even though I use my laptop at home instead of my PC, there's still a bit of a chance that I get distracted and get off task. Not at the library, though! Super nice and quiet, really relaxing, it was amazing! And I implore anybody that has access to such a place to use it for studying or whatever activity.

Let's peek a gander at what I got done this week!

First off, the animation!

The trickiest animation that I made out of these three was the brick falling off of the shelf. When I was animating it, I had to constantly re-adjust the landing animation because of the angle that I made the brick fall at. Making it fall flat makes a very different bounce compared to if it's on angle, and that's what took up most of my time animating. Something that I also started but didn't get through far enough to show is a head turn with some anticipation. This is sort of where I'm starting to hit some snags with what I'm doing, with both animation and drawing. This is also something that happened when I was still in college.

I have a habit of quitting on something when it doesn't look exactly like what my lofty expectations that are in my head. I am trying to knock this habit, but it's a very difficult one to get rid of. It's also sort of hard for me to focus in general when I'm at home, which is why I went to the library. I don't particularly know if it's some sort of undiagnosed ADHD or something, but it's something I'm going to power through whenever I can. It does make me wish that I had the structure of classes still. I'm not particularly good at teaching myself things. Sure, I can look up tutorials and whatnot to try something out, but actually having the volition to get through something via my own planning is something I have trouble with. I think this is certainly something that I need to deal with for animation. I have the lessons for drawing, but I don't really have that much structure for animation, only those somewhat vague exercises. If anybody has any free (or..."free") classes that they can recommend for 3D animation, that would be very much appreciated.

Lastly, some drawing!

(Top image: using emotional language to dictate what lines can look like (calm, angry, sad, etc.). Bottom image: goblet drawing using already learnt techniques.)

It was fun being able to actually draw something instead of drawing a bunch of lines! However, something that I think is a bit of a problem with the course I've got is that some of the videos that are in the playlist are a little bit out of order than what they should be. For example, the video that I followed this week referenced some measuring techniques that I wasn't familiar with, but the video for the measuring techniques show up later down the line. While I am considering switching to another course that I've found that gets in to the meat of what I want to learn (drawing figures and humans!), I'm still willing to give this one a chance just so I can get some of the fundamental ideas in my head first.

I reckon I'm still making decent progress on everything I'm doing so far. I'm hoping that I can keep the willpower to continue doing it all and to continue making these blog posts. Writing these blog posts help me to see the progress that I'm making, even if it is fallen upon deaf ears. I don't mind that at all. Fingers crossed that I can get more stuff done for next week's post!

Thank you and good-bye for today!

I thought that it might be a good idea to keep track of what I've done the past week so I can track my progress as I go!

I'm going to make these blog posts weekly to the best of my abilities. To me, posting a few second clip of animation or some scribbles as I learn don't have much merit as a separate post.

Since my first post was on Tuesday, it's going to be a bit shorter compared to when I get a full week of stuff done next time. I'm thinking of putting together a list of what I want to do during the week, but I have some reservations about doing so. On the one hand, having a itinerary of things that I want to go during the day will more than likely get me started on it much earlier than just whenever during the day. But on the other hand, having a set task for a certain day might not work out well (for example, if I feel like doing one thing when I scheduled another).

My original plan for scheduling during the week was to have a type of random number generator that would determine what I would do for every day of the week, with 1 being animating, 2 being drawing, and 3 being sculpting. I would then roll numbers and see what I have to do (I was thinking of having a bit more bias towards 1 and 2 because sculpting isn't really high on my priorities right now). However, I found that just doing alternating days works decently well for me if I mostly disregard sculpting. As much as I would love to have custom 3D models of my OCs to animate with at my own pleasure, actually getting a job in animation and learning to draw are things I want to do more at the moment. I'll certainly try to focus more of animating, especially since I was able to get some drawing in later at night on a day that I did animating.

I'd say it's enough preamble, and I'm ready to show you what I got up to this week!

First, some animation!

(I originally had a GIF embedded of my animation in this post, but I don't think news posts like that, so I'm uploading it to Imgur instead)

In terms of animating, this is incredibly simple. A bouncing ball is not particularly much to gloat about, and I can see some problems in the timing of the bouncing (unless I'm going crazy!). I wanted to simply get back into the groove of animating with this one. I haven't been animating for the entirety of this year, and I definitely felt rusty while I was doing this. It feels like I'm starting fresh more or less because of the aforementioned lack of animating, but I think this is a good opportunity to re-learn some of the basics that I didn't nail down the first time around. When I was animating last year I had a pretty big problem with getting my animation to look nice after splining, especially later in the year when I started to use more complicated rigs in class. I would attribute this simply to my lack of practice and understanding on the core fundamentals of animation and my lack of a lot of animating as a whole. I have been using these before, but I'm going to try and stick closer to these animation exercises to hone my skills more. (btw, this rig was found here, with a bunch of other free rigs to use for learning and personal use)

It was certainly disheartening looking at all the amazing stuff that some of my classmates were making compared to my own output during college. Obviously, I have no ill-will against any of them and I wish them all the best, all of their stuff was amazing. I suppose I'm just a really jealous person when it comes to creative fields that I also want to excel at. There's something that I've been hearing online that's something along the lines of "Comparison is the death of creativity" or something like that. That's certainly something that I have a problem with, simply because of all the great artists that I follow on social media. I think I also need to understand that I simply haven't been doing this as long as they have. I've really only been animating for about 1-2 years, so I still have a lot of stuff to learn. I'm also not particularly in a rush in life in general. I think that something that soothes me is seeing a lot of posts online talking about how people have pivoted their careers into 3D or animation or programming at age 30 or 40 even. I have a friend that was doing architecture for a long time after they initially left Uni who started college for 3D at about 25. I especially have a lot of time in terms of my life, I'm only 21. My life has barely started. I won't make that an excuse to be a layabout, though! I think I've had enough of that.

The last thing to show is some drawing!

(This is very difficult to see, but this is some practice on making very light lines)

Attempting to take drawing seriously is a very interesting undertaking, but it's interesting in a good way! Starting from the basics, I had to even learn how to hold a pencil properly for drawing. It's strange learning to use a pencil in a different way than what I'm used to, but it certainly feels like that it will help me out in the long run. It definitely feels like learning to draw is going to be a much slower endeavour compared to animating. Considering that drawing is such an old practice, I'm not surprised. I'm incredibly happy that there's a lot of tutorials online for what I want to learn. What I'm using in particular is Alex Huneycutt's Internet Curriculum. This PDF has the benefit of having assignments for the user to go through instead of just dumping a bunch of videos on them, which I certainly think is a part of why I prefer to be in a proper learning environment than learning on my own. Having set tasks to do helps me to have structure in my learning instead of just trying to follow along with a video.

(Experimenting with different types of lines. Using different lines can help guide the viewer to what you want them to see.)

I'm very hopeful that this course I'm using will assist me in learning how to draw. I used to draw quite a bit when I was younger, but I think I stopped sometime in my early teens simply because I found more satisfaction in video games. While I don't think play video games have been detrimental to my learning, I think they've certainly impacted it in some way. I was the type of kid to leave my assignments in high school to the last minute, which I wouldn't be surprised was because of my gaming habits. However, there was a feeling that I knew that I had to get something done but I just simply didn't have the initiative to actually get it started, and I would feel bad for myself when I didn't do it. I don't know if that's just how my brain worked or if it had something to do with my habits as a person, but I really hope that I can get out of that habit in the near future.

That's all that I have to show, and I quite enjoy posting online like this. I will certainly try my hardest to make some interesting stuff for next week's post.

Thank you and good-bye for today!

Hello to any and all that read this post!

My name is Sam, from Australia. A pleasure to meet you! You might be wondering as to why I'm making an introduction of myself on Newgrounds.

With the constant enshittifiction of other social media sites and the evaporation of old school forum websites, I thought it appropriate to start posting on Newgrounds. The site's staunch opposition to genAi is something that I really admire, and I feel that meeting new people would be really fun on here! In the spirit of my first post on the site, I would like to give a little background on who I am and what my intentions are on the site.

I created an account on Newgrounds in 2012, but I'm certain that I used the site even before then. Like most children with unrestricted internet access in the early to mid 2000s and 2010s, I spent a large majority of my time playing Flash games on here and many other sites. While these other sites had games that I would play, none we're quite as impactful on my psyche as NG (a notable memory involves a certain Plumber clad in Black....), simply because of the vast amount of community and fan-made works on the site. Growing up, I watched more animations on here than I did on Youtube, Super Mario Bros. Z was my favourite, and I'm sure there are many more that I loved that have been lost in the annals on my mind. While my ambition to become an animator started with older TF2 themed Garry's Mod machinimas (I am credit card......charge me!!), I think the catalyst of seeking out other animations started here. Now 12 years on from the creation of my account, I have gone through primary school, high school, and college. I have diplomas for both Visual Arts and Screen and Media (and an advanced diploma for VA!). However, my output has been lacking since I finished up my tertiary studies last year. While I could blame plenty of personal issues for this, but I hope to catch up on time lost with this (relatively) untouched part of my internet history (I hadn't ever changed my profile image here until today).

"What do you plan on using this account for, Sam?", I hear the imaginary person reading this shout from the void. I am happy to oblige.

First and foremost, I want to post any new 3D (and maybe 2D) artwork that I create on this platform. With Newgrounds' focus on community-made things (made by everyone), I feel that I could entertain and find more of an audience here than other websites. While I do intend to eventually become a professional animator, posting here would be a good start. With the amount of people on places like Deviantart, Bluesky and Twitter (currently X), I suspect that reaching people on those sites would be near impossible unless you're incredibly lucky. Comparatively, I assume that Newgrounds has a much smaller userbase, and I could find more people on here than other sites.

Secondly, I also hope to use this site as a personal blog, posting on here from time to time. I've loved the idea of making a blog, but there are simply not many sites that actually allow or facilitate someone to do so, and I think this is a real shame. Somewhat related to this is my distaste of forums and personal sites being relegated to Discord servers. I don't think that Discord servers don't have a purpose, but attempting to find information or solutions to obscure problems has become more difficult because of them. Being able to type a vague outline of a problem and having a thread of people also having the same problem can be comforting, and having a public place to access the solution is much more convenient than having to join a server that's cut off from online searches.

Finally, I would just like to use this account for interacting with people in an environment that helps to do so in a welcoming manner. I feel social media has devolved to a shit-flinging contest on who can be the most mean to each other. While I'm sure that isn't the case with all sites, it seems to be the default state that many turn towards.

If you have read through this entire post through your own volition and weren't strapped to a chair, I thank you! I hope we can interact with one another once I start uploading on here. I hopeful that I will be using this site more now that I have a bit more motivation to start doing 3D stuff again, since I recently got a replacement charger for my old laptop. I should be able to get more stuff done now that I can get away from my desktop PC and all the distractions that it holds (Deadlock has me in a bit of a choke-hold at the moment).

Thank you and good-bye for today!