TOE week 39: Learning to Draw With Seth Meyers

I probably have aspirations that are larger than I can chew. Again I thought I could finish my metal title set and again I only got about half of it done. It is most likely a time management thing. There is a lot of time during the day but much of it is spent in Kindergarten. Actually I haven’t even gotten to preschool yet. When I’m not singing about tiny spiders and wheels on buses I get to paint. I need to factor out that time in my day but for whatever reason I don’t. 

The good news is I have one of the tile sets finished! I just have to do the second part of the metal tile set then it will be all done. I did lose a day when I wasn’t happy with the starting metal beams. I revamped them a day later and was much happier with them they read visually much better. I learned how I wanted to properly draw them from Seth Meyers of all places. Yeah that dude who tells jokes on late night Television. 

The thing that was crammed into my face when I was in art school was learning to see. I remember fighting against it a little bit. Like I would draw an arm or car wheel and the teach would come over and basically tell me to look again. “The wheel it doesn’t look like that.” I would then stubbornly claim that, it did. More than likely it didn’t. I mean what is college for, if not to go to school pay a boat load of money to tell a teacher how you think the world looks. Then I remember teaching my brother in law this same thing and when he didn’t ‘see it’. As an older wiser and more okay with being wrong my eye for seeing have sharpened over the years. 

When I was struggling to draw my metal beams and I saw the metal beams behind Seth Meyers. It didn’t take much for me to look and say ‘oh that it how you make a metal beam look like that.’ That is another thing that is a must for any aspiring artist reference photos. If you’re an actual paid artist you probably already know this. So I downloaded a photo from Seth Meyer’s show and got the metal beams done right. 

I also got to go to my wife’s school this week and talk with her physics teacher buddy and find out the missing 15% of the facing on a parabola. He gave us an equation that he thought would fix the problem. Turns out when I got home and looked at what we already had, we already had that part of the equation. Something else to ask on stack exchange I suppose.

Other than the metal set that was all that happened this week. I think this week I can actually finish the metal tile set.

TOE week 38: There is no week 38... Maybe?

I didn’t get a lot done this week. Hold on I’m going to let my producer know.

Me: Hey I only drew one picture this week!

Also Me: Do better next week you lazy bloke!

Me: kthxbai!

It wasn’t so much that I didn’t work. It is that I don’t really know what to say about it. I didn’t get the other title set done this week. I thought I could knock out the second set by Friday. I only managed to line up all of the pieces with the line art. I did manage to make a titleable brick texture. So onto next week and trying to again finish my metal texture. 

Current metal:

The room with a view:

Free cartoon brick texture:

TOE week 37: Painting to Avoid My Problems

I can’t seem to fix my input bug so I basically stopped looking at it this week. It isn’t really a problem right now. I put a pretty good band aid over it. The game plays slightly more sluggish as far as melee attacks go but this is not what I am shipping with… I hope. It will actually be fixed in the future at some point. The strange thing was that I looked at my sub weapon attack that works pretty much exactly the same as a primary weapon but it did not have this problem. I even tore out the primary attack function and duplicated the sub weapon function and replaced it with the primary attack and input bug still happened for primary but not for secondary. Then I increased the animation speed of the sub weapon attack and wouldn’t you know the input bug then popped up. I quickly UNDID all of this work and then grabbed my stylus and got painting another title set. 

I’d like to think that I know a thing or two more about painting than I do about coding. There is always room to learn something new. Like the edges of the UVs are more important than what is in the middle. Learned that this week. It is probably exceptionally obvious to anyone who does texture work on a daily basis but before this year I don’t think I had UVed in years. Making tileing textures is something that I find really fun. Filter> Other> Offset and then clone stamp GTG! Except that doesn’t work as well when you have varying edges and six different ground pieces that all have to line up with every other piece. To boil it all down I am trying to make modular art. 

I might have mentioned it before but I will again. I worked on a game where the designers made 3d collision levels and the art team had to paint 2D backgrounds for all of these levels and it was kind of hell for them. I am trying to avoid that for the bulk of this game because I am one person. I am also trying to use this method for other objects in the game.

For example, this one lamp:

Is legion!

I can rearrange this object to have various different appearances. One of the obvious problems with any title set is that it can look repetitive this can’t be avoided but it can be minimized.

I also got around to animating my sub weapon grenade’s area of effect and my knife weapon’s  traveling animation. Wife said it looked like electricity or a sperm… Damn it! Not sure how to minimize that off of the top of my head. I’m not a great animator. Hopefully the player animations I have now are not the ones I ship with. Fingers crossed. 

By the end of next week I hope to have this current title set done along with another one! The current one is pretty close. I more than likely would have finished it if I wasn’t working on this blog.

TOE week 36: Flawed Logic

Last week was a dog staring at a computer kind of week. This week was a dragging my face across the keyboard kind of week. 

A friend comment on my blog that I should add in a timer that prevents the player from attacking again to prevent the problem I was having with the User jamming on the attack button and getting stuck in the animation… Well I did that and nevertheless the problem persisted. (Long story short I actually did that wrong but at the time thought it was right.) 

I basically again spent most of my Wednesday trying to get this programming demon off of my back with no luck at all. I threw my hands up and said ‘fuck it’ and went to painting another title set because I was making no progress. It always seemed like this next new attempt would be the one. The one that killed the problem but nevertheless the target remained.

I also didn’t have a lot of time this week. Not an excuse more of a reality. So after fighting with this problem on four different days. I caved and asked my FaceBook unity group if I was handling melee attacks incorrectly in Unity. The response was basically silence. Then on Thursday night I asked the same question at stack exchange and also got basically silence… Cool…. #forEverAlone. Then this morning I realized why my time check was basically failing. Fixed it and now I have successfully plugged the hole. I mean it works correctly now, but only because I put a band aid over the problem not because I fixed it.  

Yay! I think. I have looked for a melee attack tutorial and I haven’t been able to find a lot. Basically this experience has made me think that the way I’m doing this is flawed. 

The Stack Exchange question I asked.