AuthorTopic: Official OT-Creativity Thread 2  (Read 811323 times)

Offline Helm

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Re: Official OT-Creativity Thread 2

Reply #1330 on: December 21, 2010, 10:25:40 pm
Window > Arrange > New Window for ___________

Offline PixelPiledriver

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Re: Official OT-Creativity Thread 2

Reply #1331 on: December 21, 2010, 11:47:58 pm
nice! :o thanks Helm. thats really useful.

So I just completed my first semester of an RTIS degree. In game class we had to dev a small project by ourselves using a pre-built engine and function libraries. so i made:



For me part of making games is letting other people play them. And hopefully they enjoy it.
But legally I am unable to distribute the game publicly. However I can share it with friends and family in a private manner.
I have a small presence on this board but I'd still consider you guys friends, so it should be all good.

I can't post the link directly. If anyone is interested in playing the game send me a PM and I will send you the link. if not no biggie. :(
Feel free to give + and - feedback. tho the game is complete and turned in I could use comments to make my next game better.
Dev time was 6-8 weeks (with plenty of other homework to do). Some bugs still exist.

enjoy!  :)

And knowing that it is, we seek what it is... ~ Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, Chapter 1

Offline Doppleganger

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Re: Official OT-Creativity Thread 2

Reply #1332 on: January 08, 2011, 09:53:28 am


My first ever full composition illustrator piece done strictly for personal reasons. Spent somewhere between 12-20 hours on it probably, hard to say how many for sure. There are parts that still feel incomplete to me, but at some point you gotta call it done, right?

Done for a girl I met this new years whose birthday happens to be on new years. Her facebook page says she is a capricorn, water pig, ninja kitten, chameleon, red resonant skywalker and a synner. So my goal was to incorporate all of that into a composition. Red resonant skywalker is actually a spiritual, celestial body walking the earth sort of thing, but I threw in the jedi with the red light saber, because let's face it, jedi's are cool. Plus the red light saber and deviation fits into the synner archetype, which I chose not to represent physically on account of not really knowing how I'd do it or how it could add to the piece.
« Last Edit: January 08, 2011, 09:55:32 am by Doppleganger »

Offline miascugh

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Re: Official OT-Creativity Thread 2

Reply #1333 on: January 15, 2011, 06:24:13 pm
made myself a hat today. paper, crayons and yarn:

Offline Mathias

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Re: Official OT-Creativity Thread 2

Reply #1334 on: January 15, 2011, 09:58:44 pm
Dopple, that's a heck of an illustrator project. Bet it was maddening to do in vector.

miascugh . . . WHAT

Offline Argyle

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Re: Official OT-Creativity Thread 2

Reply #1335 on: January 16, 2011, 11:57:36 am
Hahaha, miascugh.  Purple Tentacle destroys worlds.  I never actually finished that game, I should get on that - Been playing it on gamebody DS with ScummVM off and on over the last two years.

Doppleganger, that's just rad!  Hope the girl liked it :P The wing lineart's my favorite part I think.  Gotta side with Mathias that that must have been crazy to work in vector for.  It might be because I'm pretty ignorant about refined ways of using illustrator to, you know, illustrate, but I've only recently been comfortable using illustrator more heavily for things I draw lineart for simply because of the new blob brush tool.  Before that, I only used it for stuff like ad and poster design with photoshop being what I painted and did anything having to do with hand drawn, then brought it back into illustrator and used live trace, haha. Maybe I should do more tutorials to find easier ways to illustrate in illustrator, cus this is pretty slick!

Offline 2hackx

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Re: Official OT-Creativity Thread 2

Reply #1336 on: January 18, 2011, 12:35:49 pm
I bought a cintiq.  I have 15 days to decide if I want to keep it for good.  So far i'm impressed with the workflow, but disappointed with the contrast/saturation of the screen itself.

Quick dabble:


Good art! but this looks like a Zenorc from Ragnarok Online.
Architecture is basically a container of something. I hope they will enjoy not so much the teacup, but the tea.

paintings for sale | artwork for sale

Offline Doppleganger

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Re: Official OT-Creativity Thread 2

Reply #1337 on: January 21, 2011, 05:18:22 am
Thanks Mathias and Argyle!

I've spent the past 3 years or so working predominantly in illustrator as a profession, so I've had a lot of time to work up my skill level as well as establish a sound work flow. Because of this, that level of madness one would expect from working on such a piece is not really there. One thing I've learned about working in vector is that a lot of the techniques you learn from pixel art still apply. This is especially true when working in fine detail where things can get muddied very easily. A strong grasp of pixel art translates perfectly to these scenarios, because even though the shapes are vectors the laws of pixel art stay true. Meaning that you have to understand how complex shapes are going to be translated on the pixel level when the image is fully zoomed out. With this knowledge you can do some pretty cool stuff with shapes that operate on the sub-pixel level, for instance a triangle that ends in a very narrow point which is maybe 2 pixels at its thickest will create a smooth gradient that seems to extend from a small 1 or 2 pixel base. In the face on this piece especially I applied that knowledge to get a very painterly effect although zoomed it appears nothing like that. Here's a zoomed image of the face so you can see what I'm talking about.



The secret to getting fast and efficient with illustrator is 1) obviously knowing shortcuts and 2) becoming intimate with the pen tool as well as the direct select tool. When you can draw faster with the pen tool than you can do with your hands, then you know you're getting somewhere. Here is a rundown of my most commonly used shortcuts and their application.

[P] The Pen Tool
Absolutely the most important tool you'll ever use in Illustrator

[A] Direct Select Arrow
Extremely useful for fine-tuning your initial line work that you've laid down with the pen tool.

[-B-] Brush Tool
With this you can sketch out the basic foundation of your line work before you even start using the pen tool. This is actually very valuable and can save a lot of time if you rough something in on a lower layer before you start drawing the lines with your pen tool.

[Ctrl + G/Ctrl + Shift + G] Group and Ungroup
Another critical command. Nothing speeds up your work better than being able to group and ungroup specific areas as they become the focus of your efforts or not.

[V] Select Arrow
Just putting it in there so you don't think it's not important. Great for moving around grouped objects. Selecting an object or group of objects while holding shift will either select or deselect them based on their current state. If it's selected it will be deselected and vice-versa.

[ctrl + 2/ctrl + alt + 2] Paste to Artboard
Not sure what the actual term for this is, but I only learned it recently. With this you can make whatever you have selected unselectable by pressing ctrl+2. Adding alt into the mix releases it form this state of non-editability. The funky thing is that you can make all sorts of things uneditable, but everything gets released at the same time no matter what. Very useful when there's just too many lines and objects in your way.

[-I-] Eyedropper
Of course there is much value to be had with this tool.

[Ctrl+F] Paste in Front
This is of exceptional value when dealing with so many shapes all on the same layer. With this you can select an object in the layering hierarchy that is in a position you'd like another object to be in and then paste in front. Now that shape will be just above that object in the layering order. Even cooler is that you can direct select an object within a set of grouped objects, paste in front, and the object you pasted will automatically be part of that group right where you want it to be.

[Ctrl + [ and ] ] Bring Forward/Backward
This shortcut is used to send objects one step forward or backward. Using this with shift will move them all the way to the front or back. This is great to use in conjunction with paste in front, specifically when you have transparent objects that cover the entirety of the objects beneath it, but want to send something just below that transparent object. Just cut/copy the object you want, select the transparent object that's in your way, paste in front, and then send backward once. Learning to manipulate paste in front and bring forward/backward is one of the greatest ways you can increase your work flow. In illustrator there will be countless times where you have to deal with layering issues, and these few commands basically solve all of them. The direct select tool is also useful in this regard when dealing with grouped shapes that you want to incorporate objects into.

Hopefully some of that was helpful for whoever is interested in improving their work flow in illustrator. Illustrator can be a really fast and friendly program, but it is more important than most programs to best know how to navigate it and the art board as so much relies on the layering and grouping of objects and the ways they interact.
« Last Edit: January 21, 2011, 05:20:18 am by Doppleganger »

Offline Argyle

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Re: Official OT-Creativity Thread 2

Reply #1338 on: January 21, 2011, 04:58:28 pm
Well that's encouraging to hear, because that end product looks really impressive yet it's so roughly done on the detail side of things.  I always felt that I was never able to achieve the smoothness I assumed everybody else achieved so easily unless I doing everything vertice by vertice, so I assumed it just wasn't the medium of preference for me  :lol:

Although a lot of the time I am using Illustrator for more mixed media results, the way I typically have always utilized illustrator was for making PILLOW SHADED MONSTERS- er smooth gradients.



That one above was made probably 4 years ago in flash, which was the only thing I knew how to use to make vector art, by separating everything into big planes of blobs and tried to align radial color gradients inside them until they were smooth. Not the fastest way to do anything, haha.

Within the last year, though, I've learned some really cool tricks, such as shading with the Mesh tool - you can add more points to the object you've selected, even internally, and it creates a warpable grid.  Every point you select can be assigned it's own color information, and they will create a smooth color ramp to meet the surrounding points' color needs.



Same goes for the blend tool, except that's probably even faster when you need to do something in a pinch. Put a solid color object on top of another solid color object, select them both, and blend them either through the menu or through the blend tool which you can change the settings of how it will ramp the objects.



The snowman's highlight coloring was done with the blend tool, and the mouth with the mesh tool.

I know you said you just recently learned about the paste to artboard command (I just call that locking it down haha) so I figured maybe either you or somebody else that read your last post might have been interested to find out about those two different ways to blend.  I know I was totally excited when I accidentally stumbled across both of them while making something, wanted to share the joy!  I'm also a fan of Ctrl+B (paste in back) which is the same as Ctrl+F (paste in front) except it puts it one level lower in the stacking order it was copied from instead of one level higher.

Hooray for vector art on pixel boards <3

Offline Jad

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Re: Official OT-Creativity Thread 2

Reply #1339 on: January 26, 2011, 10:46:02 am


I painted the sky and how it related to the snow colors on the ground, one beautiful morning. So happy I got it down onto a picture * U *



I made this today! I wanted to throw down a general color scheme and then this happened * A * oops

you can see that it's actually super sloppy but it's got atmosphere so I'm very happy with it
' _ '