Black Torch Kickstarter!

 (thanks to Robert Iza for this drawing)

I don't expect a whole lot of people actually visit this blog, but

HEY would you look at that, it's another Kickstarter!

 Black Torch - Comic Anthology


Black Torch is a project I contributed a short story comic to, but it also includes the work of some legitimately good artists, such as much of the main art team of Skullgirls.

 (see more samples here)

By now they've hit their goal, but they'll need a little more help to actually break even.

...

Yeah that's my sales pitch.

(I really really suck at sales pitches.)(Also at being timely with blog posts.)

(also one of the reward tiers is a commission by me, i-if that interests y-you)

Thanks for reading!

sketches

Photoshop something something- If you want to run a filter on something but your canvas is large and it's taking forever to run something like motion blur on a layer that's only 1% of the total canvas size, you can speed it up by making a selection around your object before running the filter. Make sure you leave room for the effects of the filter!

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Friend and former classmate Claudia Sutton made an animation called Fuzzin's Black Cat. It's the sassiest cat.

http://claudiasutton.blogspot.com/2013/02/fuzzins-black-cat.html

Also, that picture I drew of Adora and Brancusi's "Bird in Space" got mentioned in an online article woo

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Daily Sketch Group- rock climbers discover rocky alien face

I didn't like this first one so I tried some more sketches

Daily Sketch Group- synth worm

Nothing really synth-y about it so I made up the excuse that they're engineered to be transportation after they pupate

Daily Sketch Group- walk cycle of alien beast

Uhh...it's a pigeon...thing...

Also, I've somehow gotten involved with 3 new projects for the next couple of months, which means that the 3d modeling stuff has to go on hold. On the other hand, one of the new projects is Skullgirls and is PAYING WORK WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

(OMG I'm not useless yay. Also not going to become homeless and have to commit seppuku out of shame yay.)

On the other hand it's going to be pretty regular crunch from here on out.

This is the 3rd of 3 sketches for the new Casino-themed stage. They picked the one I thought was least likely to be picked, haha. Had some additional time so I did flat colors and a lighting test on it.

Alex had me try mermaids in the pillars and the little cartoon whales around the king whale. The octopus fountain, game tables, huge blackjack sign and slots are from the original sketch.

asdf

Back after getting my ass kicked by some kind of bronchitis/bird fancier's lung/copd/etc.

Stupid Photoshop Tricks (CS5.1)- (not sure if any of the other things I wrote were specific to CS5.1 but I might as well state my version) If you alt+click the visibility icon of one of your layers, you'll hide all the other layers. If you alt+click it again, all the layers that were previously visible will revert to being visible again. Be careful about toggling visibility of layers after doing this hide-all-but-one-layer thing or else you won't be able to revert it. You can Step Backward to before you started messing with other layers, though, and you'll be able to revert as normal. It can be helpful if you're working with a ton of layers, or maybe if you need to sample the color off a layer that's set to a non-normal blending mode.

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A while back I was asked to do a quick background mockup for a brawler video game pitch and spent approx 40 hours on this.

I tried to handle it like an actual level and made a bunch of elements (trees, rocks) and pasted them everywhere. EVERYWHERE. I did a few things that would probably be impossible for production like individually shading or editing elements, but since it was a quickie mockup, all's fair.

The brief stated that inspiration would come from games such as Legend of Mana and Odin Sphere, and since Legend of Mana is aesthetically one of my favorite games, I was way into it. The requester definitely wasn't expecting a stupidly long pan montage of a bunch of levels. Stylistically it's a bit of a failure and I wish it could have been all chunky, all poofy, and all designy, but there was just no time. If the pitch gets picked up hopefully they'll contract me and I'll be able to design poofy chunky designy trees all day.

Stupidly long pano HERE (warning 1000kb image)

Daily Sketch Group- Fluffy Dragon in winter

Daily Sketch Group- Orbital view of alien planet

Daily Sketch Group- Worm Wrangler

Not really a sketch, I got carried away with it. Tried to bite off some more of that cartoony-yet-somewhat-ornate Legend of Mana style, found that I had made something that could have been misconstrued as being off-topic, and felt like I had to make explanatory drawings. That's probably a sign of bad design when you need extra drawings to explain what it does, but I think they liked it...

Walking sprite

Stupid Photoshop Tricks-
 ,   .  : cycle brushes
 [   ]  : cycle brush size
If you hold shift and then press the shortcut key for a tool, you cycle the tool's alternates. Ie, Shift+L cycles between Lasso, Polygonal Lasso, and Magnetic Lasso.
Speaking of Lasso, if you're in the middle of making a lasso, you can hold Alt to add features of the other lasso tool. That is to say, if you're making a polygonal lasso and you hold alt, you can click+drag to draw a lasso as if it were the regular lasso tool. You don't have to let go of Alt, you can click click click to place polygonal lasso points also. It works with the regular lasso tool also, giving you functionality of the polygonal lasso tool.

Learning Flash is slow, so I'm making elements in Photoshop until I figure out how this blasted software works.

Works alright in "pixel" style too I guess.

 The background I'm working on for this character's animation.

Updated site

Spent a total of 27 hours updating the site, and that's kind of embarrassing considering how little new stuff there is. Uploaded larger versions of almost all the pics, added some pics, removed some pics, added that strip at the bottom with my name and url because apparently that's something I'm supposed to do. 27 hours. I could have learned Flash by now.

Oh yeah, I'm trying to learn Flash. God help me.

http://venimarolka.com/

Stupid Photoshop Tricks- Hold down Ctrl or Alt and Backspace to fill the current layer with color. Hold Ctrl for the background color, Alt for the foreground color. I don't know why it is this way, those keys are the wrong positions relative to the swatches on the toolbar, unless you use the right-side Ctrl/Alt keys...but then it is reversed for the Mac; the left side keys are in similar orientation while the left is opposite. I don't know, maybe someone is playing a joke on me.

Anyway, you can hold Ctrl/Alt and also Shift and then hit Backspace to fill just the pixels already there in your layer, so you preserve transparency. Or you could just lock transparency first.

Speaking of transparency locking, you can toggle the lock with the / key. It toggles your last selected locks, so if you had transparency locked, it'll toggle that, or if you have the lock all thing locked, it'll toggle that instead.

Anyway here's a thing-

Concept for a friend's in-development sidescrolling action platformer that probably won't see the light of day but one can hope (for paying work). Characters blacked out since those are his IP.


Also some Skullgirls cutscene work since I finally got around to uploading those.

Did the paint.

Did the line cleanup and flat colors.

Not much was indicated so I was free to add in whatever I could think of.

I think the character hoards through space and time or something.

And something from that SCP thing

I think that's either a very large bromeliad and rose bush or a very small ficus or I'm just really really tired

Oh, I think I forgot about this. I got contacted to do a portrait of their daughter Adora, which they have been asking many artists to do and they keep the results on a blog. They had a list of themes going so I picked "Adora standing next to Brancusi's Bird in Space" and proceeded to draw something not really related to Brancusi's Bird in Space but I think they liked it. In exchange they donated to Charity: Water, which I know nothing about but seems like a good thing.

I've never been a part of something like this but it seems like a neat way to use the internet.

Misc sketches

Stupid Photoshop tricks- You can reorder your brush presets through here. Click the little circle with the triangle in it. You can click-drag your presets around in the Preset Manager.

Three sketches I started more than a month ago. I worked on them whenever I had a bit of free time. Started them after watching the Feng Zhu tutorial video on Multitasking and decided to try that for myself. Of course, it takes me way longer than it does him to sketch out something like that, which is pretty darn humbling.

 

I think I need to do more fantasy-oriented stuff. Lost a job opportunity because I didn't have that in my repertoire.

UDK stuff:

Finally finished that cart

Sinks, complete with reflection and running water.

Plants- a bamboo, a dracaena, and a palm

Admittedly this is my first time making vegetation but I think I understand the basics...

I'm still trying to figure out the InteractiveFoliageActor setup to make it move aside when you touch it, but it's a little difficult to understand the material setup and there is not much documentation or tutorials. Ahh I'm so new to all this ugh.

A toilet flushing.

The water was done with morph targets and overlapping panning detail normal maps, the splash with a particle effect stolen from the UDK link gun.

Just like real automatic toilets, it flushes all the time whether you want it to or not and saves a negative amount of water. But basically a trigger volume checks if you're in range and waits 5 seconds to enable flush action.

Standing Fountain

Wow, it looks almost decent from the un-lit side!

The same panning detail normals that enable the water animation is plugged into the distortion input in the material for a refraction effect and, well, I hope it's cheap enough.

I give up trying to understand how Blogger interprets a carriage return.

Black Torch

Dumb Photoshop tricks- I think I'm out of dumb Phonograph tricks...here's one that's more of a parlor trick for you Windows users, though. It feels neat but when I was working with Macs, I ended up not really missing it.

If you press the Alt key, the menu bar lights up, right? Usually the File menu. Sometimes this gets in the way, like when you're trying to Undo but your menu bar is activated. Anyway, you may notice that many of your menu items have a letter that is underlined. Well, you can press that key to move to that menu item. By stringing together a memorized sequence of keys, you can quickly get to your favorite actions if you don't want to do something smart like, say, reprogram your shortcut keys. (That's Ctrl+Alt+Shift+k for Protonshoppe CS5.1 and probably a similar mishmash for Macs)

Yeah, kind of a dumb trick. Mac users, you aren't missing much. Just reprogram your shortcut keys. Better that way.

These keys might be different for your Photoshop.
[Alt t b Enter m] goes to the Motion Blur filter (in this case, the first letter of the filter is the key to press, but there are multiple "b" entries so you need to activate it with Enter)(also, some of the keys are linked to specific actions so you can't use, say, "r" because it's linked to Lens Correction. Unless you hide that item in your preferences)
[Alt i g 1] rotates the canvas 180 degrees (I think in older Photoshops it was Alt i e 1)
[Alt l f] flattens all layers, although you probably have a shortcut for that. (I don't for some reason...)

I used to be super-fast with those keys but these days all the menu bar does is get in the way when I want to Undo. : /

Anyway, Black Torch. Black Torch is a comic anthology that some friends of mine started more than a year ago. It was supposed to be finished much sooner, but life got in the way for everyone, and some new people hopped on, and now it's coming out some time early next year. It took me the better part of half a year and I would have never been able to finish it if I hadn't been unemployed. So YAY for unemployment! (no not really)

 Anyway, here's some pages out of 23 total:

The original gimmick was to reuse the same shot many times in order to save time, and it would just keep accumulating corpses in a non-sequitur way. (it's not a dark story, maybe it's a dark comedy or something. I just wanted to make something silly since my previous stories had been more serious drama/action stuff)

Well, it sort of saved time, and I even have a master corpse file with all the corpses arranged where they should be so I can just move the whole chunk into the document. Still, I had to match colors and lighting and the background needed to be created each time, so I'm not sure how much I really saved. Still, I think it was effective for the non-sequitur gimmick.

I miss Gary Larson. : (

Also got to practice using photo texture overlays, which is still something I have not got quite down but it seemed to help.

Here's a progress gif of one of the pages:

(I don't really find these helpful, but they're neat to look at and also I need to justify my stupid iterative backup system that I wrote with DOS batch files. 1038 LINES OF DOS BATCH  akusdhfkjshakdf. On the plus side, it's automatic, it backs up (to external drives) near all my files every 30 minutes (only the ones that change aka have the archive bit set) and reaches back almost 3 months. On the negative side, all the time wasted writing BATCH and debugging and more debugging and it will only work on my system and only if the moons are aligned.)

Random UDK prop stuff and blathering

All I have is some 3d stuff. I wish I knew whether I'm just really slow/inefficient or that 3d props just take a long long time to make.

Conference Phone, based off of a Polycom soundstation ip6000/W2

First time in a long while I've modeled a complete high-poly. Learned a lot. About booleans. MAYA BOOLEANS. (and then I discovered boolpro, which hopefully will be more reliable)
This prop is overdoing it by a lot but I thought I needed to get practice at making some higher definition props. Can reduce and re-bake if necessary, maybe discard the specular texture and shrink the other textures.

I hope to texture the high-poly someday, but I'm going to have to learn about maya's hypershade beforehand. I guess I'd apply details with projection cameras.

(It was kinda nice not having to use the nvidia photoshop plugin to render normal map detail)

More props. That transparent exit sign is kinda nice.

These next few are still in Maya. 

Various cleaning propys.

Usually a graphic designer does the in-joke packaging labels but I guess it's on me, now.

The bucket was my first time using floating geometry to bake holes using xnormal. I have got to get over this fascination with normal maps already. Even though they are so much cooler and shinier than bump maps...

I'm still a little torn about how to balance vert count. Like I hear that modern graphics cards/engines can handle millions of verts and you shouldn't worry about doing things like beveling hard edges, but some of the more recent games I've looked at were optimized for consoles (Rage) and the vert counts are pretty darn low.

I guess, as always, "it depends."

(I'm pretty sure this would not pass if it were for a commercial game instead of a free mod)

(Hmm...yeah, I think I overdid it. 7000 tris is something you'd reserve for an npc.)

I think I'm still having problems with prioritization. Certainly I wasted a lot of time trying to find good photos to use for the graphics when the final will be a tiny blurry texture on an unimportant prop, but I don't know how I could have modeled the mop wringer on the bucket without researching how the lever is hooked up to the squeezing doohickey whatchamacallit. I'm probably going to have to keep an eye out for that in the games I check out, how much the artists fact check and how much they make up, and probably try to match that.

I still don't see many wired keyboards/mice/monitors/desktops in games these days. Too much PhysX I guess. (it was nice being able to yank a television's power cord out of the wall in Half Life 2, though : )

Still trying to figure out how much of my life I want to give over to 3d. It seems to fit me better, but I'm behind in so many areas. 

Illustration Friday- "Zoom"

Blegh.

Wish I'd made the field glasses much bigger...

Illustration Friday- "Tree"

(We're going to need a bigger SportKa.)