The User Art Topic

[DEATH_is_undead]

And color.

True. Both shall be added!
(Instead of animating sprites or drawing the wolf rider portrait)

Hey, artists need a break too.

[Kestenvarn]

Recently I began playing D&D 4E online with some friends, using the program Map Tool. It can do some neat things. From there I also ran across a forum called The Cartographer's Guild, which has some pretty impressive stuff! I nicked their idea of using lightning bolts as the base for rivers.

Here is a very basic one I made for our custom setting, to use as a world map:

Spoiler:

[kitty]

Thank you Kestenvarn! I just spent hours browsing through those forums, it has been way too long since i last did a map. Such great stuff!

And I like your muted colours and striped oceans very much, take care that some titels like »avanil« don't get too illegible.

[Kestenvarn]

Yeah, it was a bit tough both finding a spot for that and making it clear that the entire southern area was the same nation.

I like some of the techniques they use on those forums, but don't want to parrot them... probably take a few ideas here and there. Found a free book called A Magical Society: Guide to Mapping which was helpful.

Here are some of the more interesting styles:
Satellite
Textured
Atlas

The editor's choice maps are usually well done.

[kitty]

Thank you again for that nice collection!
I read through the pdf and think that it is quite interesting for world building and general map thinking but not so much for concrete map making.
And the editor's choice subforum is just awesome!

I'm tempted to take a little portrait break to do some (non wesnoth) maps. hmm.

[Skizzaltix]

Tablet arrived yesterday.

Wheeeee!

[thespaceinvader]

Not bad. SO we'll expect some portraits and animations from you in the near future then?

=P

[Skizzaltix]

...Ack.

Though, JustinOperable isn't planning to start working on the orcs for a while yet, is he? I'll give them a shot, but I make no promises about quality...

[thespaceinvader]

Give it a shot, probably starting in the Art Workshop.

[Skizzaltix]

Late at night drawing + trying to work out folds on complicated Tibetan clothing without reference* + Talking Heads ==

*I'm going for reference next time, but I think I may redraw much of this, and I don't feel like changing clothes right now...

[Jetrel]

Lately I've been doing quick animation studies to try and round out my skills. Generally I make them extremely optimized for speed. The downside of that is there's certain embarassingly wrong things about each piece, and I can't put it up on my (hypothetical) deviantart page as a finished piece of art, because a lot of it looks dumb. However, there's a severe upside to this - extremely low time spent on each piece. Like .. 20 minutes for an entire animation (!). I target one single thing I'm trying to learn, and deliberately neglect everything else, because that eats up precious time. I absolutely have to do this at a maniacal level of neglect, or this 20 minute animation could turn to several hours. Hint: the above is huge advice for anyone trying to polish a skill. Isolate what you want to learn, don't work on what you already know. Or you'll spend all night working really hard and not learn much.

So I figured I might post some of these here in case anyone wants to learn with me.

First.
One thing I've always (envied ?) wanted to know how to do is super-deformed motion blurs. Not just a contrail behind an object, but when the entire object becomes a radically different shape, and when artists use seemingly random blotches of color to represent an object in fast motion. My challenge here was figuring out how to do "that contrail when you spin something really fast".

sword-spin-study.gif (2.19 KiB) Viewed 5237 times

Moderator Jet's note: Please don't post statements about parts of the drawing I deliberately neglected to do a decent job on so I could save time. This isn't youtube, we're not dumb, and I'll delete those posts (not because I feel offended by them, but because I want to keep the noise level low for people making useful comments).

[Kestenvarn]

I remember seeing a tutorial like this that went on to describe a fighting game character called Makoto that deformed a lot in her animations to give them a smooth feeling, but I can't for the life of me find it now.

[Jetrel]

I remember seeing a tutorial like this that went on to describe a fighting game character called Makoto that deformed a lot in her animations to give them a smooth feeling, but I can't for the life of me find it now.

I wouldn't mind seeing that. There -is- a street fighter character named Makoto, and she does use that style of deformation in her animations (they basically all do in SF3). SF3 has some pretty nice sprites, but it also has some of the best sprite animation I've ever seen. Beautiful and liquid-smooth. Anyways, the sprites for all the SF3 characters can apparently be had here:
http://www.zweifuss.com/makoto/makoto.htm
http://www.zweifuss.com/

Although I wouldn't mind still seeing that tutorial, just seeing the still frames is a huge benefit. Thanks for cluing me into that.

[Sgt. Groovy]

I can't put it up on my (hypothetical) deviantart page as a finished piece of art, because a lot of it looks dumb.

Yeah, who'd want to look dumb on Deviantart?

[Kestenvarn]

I remember seeing a tutorial like this that went on to describe a fighting game character called Makoto that deformed a lot in her animations to give them a smooth feeling, but I can't for the life of me find it now.

I wouldn't mind seeing that. There -is- a street fighter character named Makoto, and she does use that style of deformation in her animations (they basically all do in SF3).

sorry, i havent been able to locate it with google. i thought it might have been part of the same tutorial and ended up deleted when he switched sites, but maybe I am remembering things wrong