Early Results with Artboard

I've started using Artboard, a fairly simple vector graphics program for the Mac, to do some of my in-game artwork.  Basically I put my room render in as a background so I can get the scale and perspective right, then draw the artwork for the items and props in the room over the top.

I have been using Anime Studio and Manga Studio for this, at various times.  I use Anime Studio as its the vector graphics based animation package that I use for doing my characters, and I need that same look for the in-game items.  Trouble is since its an animation package its not well suited to just doing static graphics.  I therefore was using Manga Studio which is my comic drawing software - it gives lovely pen strokes and cel shading as per Manga comics, but unfortunately the resulting look is not really a match for the vector art that comes from Anime Studio.

Hence I have picked up Artboard, for $35 from the AppStore.  I would have looked at Illustrator but its very expensive and over-featured for what I want.  I also tried Inkscape and that would have been my preference but the performance going through X-Quartz on the Mac was just awful.  On bigger drawings that pen lag was just killing me.  Artboard is a nice combination of features and for price, and has great performance on my laptop.

Here's some of the things I have done with it so far.

Alarm Clock to wake our hero up out of bed

Handy screwdriver

Room render with Artboard drawings on top

It's not perfect, but there is a lot to like here.

I particularly like the expert styles - I used the ability to create copies of the stroke and outset each one to create the sort of "bevelled-in" look on the dial face for the clock.  This stroke was stacked on top of one of Artboards pre-packaged styles, a glossy black which was just right for the face of the clock.

The point editing mode of Artboard is very good too - you can quickly go from shape manipulation mode over to path mode and back again, just by double tapping on the object.  In Inkscape its not so easy to go between treating an object as a path and as a shape.

I have come across a few bugs, but the authors of Artboard - one of whom is an Australian software engineer - seem to be quite responsive, and they're producing new releases so it looks hopeful that these will get dealt with soon.

If you're looking for a simple but relatively powerful and fun graphics editor for your game work I recommend giving Artboard a try.

Resting and Seeing

No posts for a week or so because I've been having a nice restful holiday to New Zealand.  It was a chance to rest my brain, and allow myself to really see stuff again.  To see stuff, I draw - photographing stuff is good, but you don't see what is there or get your mind working on it until you draw it.

When you make a game you need a premise.  OK - we're shooting a bunch of bad guys - and why are they bad again?  They're evil zombies from a scientific experiment gone wrong?  OK - that is a premise, and without one even the most obvious game idea won't work.

My game concepts are all driven by fairly rich premises and I need something to work from to build those.  Bad guys need a back story, and good guys need one too - if players are to care at all about your game characters they need some dimensions.

Sitting in a cafe is great - I find I can easily make up stories about the folks having a coffee two tables over.  But travelling to another country, sitting in airports and travelling on ships and helicopters: hell, it doesn't get any better than that for topping up my creative reserves.

Here's some images from my trip and a few words about each - maybe it will give you some insight into how my imagination sees the world and creates a story out of it.

I flew into Wellington, NZ and started there with a trip to Weta Digitals "Weta Cave" for their "Window into Workshop" tour.  This was an absolutely amazing insight into the creative people behind movies like "Lord of the Rings" and "District 9", and I have only my memories of it as we were not allowed to take pictures.  As it was a guided tour doing drawings was not possible either, not that Weta would have been all that keen on my "taking notes" of what they were working on.  

I went to the Southward car museum and managed to strike up a conversation with the curator there.  The Corvette Stingray and Jaguar E-type next to it were pretty nice too.

Clearly you need to lend me this De Lorean so I can save the universe from evil

I went up on the Wellington Cable Car to a great vantage point and checked the harbour views.  In this picture I'm in front of an older cable car in their cable car museum.

From Wellington I went across to the South Island on the Interislander: a large roll-on, roll-off ferry.  It was a few hours so I got to relax and sketch.  My favourite activity is ninja sketching random people and making up stories about them.  I hold my sketchpad down out of sight and draw them quickly hoping I won't get sprung.

Guy on the Ferry

Guy on the Ferry: he was sitting a few seats over and had a very game-worthy face.  Strong potato of a chin and kind of a solid demeanour.  He could be like some kind of SAS guy, trying to get away from the memories of his last tour in Afghanistan.  He actually smiled a lot, but when his friends pointed at something out the Ferry window he kind of got the "thousand yard stare".

These guys were clearly spies travelling to complete an assignment.  I'm not convinced they really were human.  Maybe SAS guy was going to take them out.

As the Ferry neared the South Island there were some lovely views of the peaks of the fjords reaching up out of the water, and a few tiny yachts gliding across the water.

View out Ferry porthole

There was something about the way portholes framed the views that made them more poignant, more dramatic.

Queen Charlotte Sound

I think it is the way whoever is watching the view becomes part of the frame itself, their black silhouette and that of the ships window being a surround for the scene sliding past.  Ninjas and assassins are like that - you don't see them because they become part of the darkened frame.

Coming into Picton

The ferry itself was pretty enormous - and as it approached the South Island terminus of Picton the buildings seemed tiny compared to it.  One of its sister ships was tied up at the wharf.

We spent a few days in Picton doing the wine district and driving around the Nelson & Marlborough area, then headed down to Franz Josef Glacier.

 Our cabins in Franz Josef were right next to a miniature horse place and one of the cute little guys stuck his head all the way through the wire fence to where I was set up on a chair with my sketch pad.

The goal of Franz Josef was to get up on the glacier itself which was acheived by helicopter.  I would love to own one of these things.  Lots of game memes here.  :-)

Landing up on the glacier we met up with our guide who took us through the ice caves and crevasses.  Glaciers are very very big.  And powerful.  This is a shot of me carefully listening to the safety briefing - "Don't fall into the ice caves as we won't be able to get you out".

The ice caves can go all the way down through the glacier to its bed, but they quickly get too small for us crazy humans.  Here's me doing my best Bear Grylls/Crocodile Dundee impression as I head down into one of the crevasses.

The mountains of the Southern Alps - which featured prominently in the Weta Digital enabled "Lord of the Rings" - were pretty spectacularly beautiful too, swathed in dense green from sea-level and soaring up to snow capped peaks.

From Franz Josef it was back via the scenic Arthur's Pass national park to Christchurch.  This city of 300,000 people has been plagued by earthquakes for the past few years.  Locals have responded by deploying shipping containers as makeshift barriers to prevent rocks from nearby mountains plunging through their houses.

Post apocalyptic doesn't get any better than this.

The city itself is amazing too - shop owners have moved their businesses into shipping containers and a new cafe district is thriving in the container mall called "Re:START" in the city center.

Here a once proud landmark of Cave Rock is fenced off due to earthquake damage and this rather inexplicable steam-punk pumping device is playing some role in that.

After a couple of nights in Christchurch at a rather Agatha Christie style guest house called "The Grange" it was time to head back to Australia.

Character rushes

Rushes from the studio floor.  This is a still frame from my current work, animating the main character Erin.  She looks a bit grim, but I suppose you would be if you woke up with the headache she has in the game.  :-)

I use Anime Studio Pro which uses vector art in layers; and the above is actually around 30 different layers, one for each of the moveable parts of the body, and another one in some cases (switch layers) for parts of the body that have different appearances.  The hands for example have a "grasp" position as well as the above relaxed position; and the feet can either be straight on (as the left foot) or aside (as in the right one).

When the camera zooms in the vectors scale nicely which gives a good result.  The shading is done with a single polygon defined by another unstroked vector.

Anime studio lets me export to PNG sequences, which I then texture packer down into sprite sheets for use with Cocos2D.

Now to work, doing the walk cycle, idle animations (scratch eyebrow, twitch feet to different stance) and a few others.

Update: mov export of first walk-cycle animations.  Going to refactor this a bit.

The Solo Gig

Last week or so I've been finishing up at my last full-time paying work, and now I embark on the solo gig.

Today was my first day where my time was not dictated by a clock and a timesheet.

I want to do some drawing every day, doesn't matter how much of it is teh sux - it just gots ta be done.  Here's some rushes.

Its the only way to free up the hands, and get the mind & eye really looking and seeing.  So as painful as it is getting back into it - has to be done.

Between doing some grocery shopping and checking the mail I stopped in at a local cafe for a coffee and BLT.  I sketched a couple of things around the coffee shop.

Now back at home, I had this old shot of me (from just outside the coffee shop a few evenings ago) shot at a funny angle with my cell-phone, and I thought I'd try doing a freehand sketch loosely based off it.

Drawing faces and heads usually follows a formula but for games and comics often the characters are in a strange perspective with the camera or eye positioned underneath (as in this picture) or above - with the character jumping or flying toward it.

When this happens instead of the eyes being positioned exactly half-way down the oval of the face as is usual for a front-on depiction, you get the eyes right up around a 1/3 or so from the top of the head.  That's where you have to use extra care to make sure the perspective and proportions are right.

I didn't like my real hair in this photo so I have gone for a more manga sort of thing, and the result is that the line-work for the hair doesn't look right.  Even though I wanted a "hair falling in my eyes" look, its too heavy over the forehead.  I think from this angle you'd kind of see up under the fringe: and that's quite hard to do.

Also in the under shot like this the tendons and muscles of the neck are more prominent and occupy much more real-estate in the panel.  The jaw & mouth is also more prominent, while the eyes - usually a focus - are smaller and further away.  Here I've made the eyes a bit too small and close together tho' that may be because the hair is framing the top of the head as being too wide.  For the from down-under perspective the head winds up being more egg-shaped: getting narrower at the top, and I haven't really done that here again because of the hair.

I'm using Manga Studio here so I could easily do some work to improve the proportions by grabbing chunks of the line work and moving it round, but as its just a drawing exercise for throwaway purposes there is no point in putting that time in.

I'm hoping this will be a baseline and future posts will show some improvement in my drawing.

Oh, and welcome to 2013.  :-)