Official OT-Creativity Thread 2

[Helm]

Grimsane, that's nice playing.

On the subject of direct input guitar tone, I've been doing stuff like this for a decade sans real amps and I can give you a few tips. The reverb and flange and stuff are all fine, there's no problem to their quality and it's mostly a matter of taste how much wet/dry you want to pump out of them. But as to the distorted guitar tone, yours feels kind of weak. If you're going direct into a soundcard, the first thing I would suggest running though a good soundcard or at least a good analog-to-digital converter you can buy for a modest sum. Make sure you're not pumping too much volume in the pc to avoid digital clipping. Then, in your host DAW, put in the VST you're using for amp simulation and the very first thing you should do is either directly +12dB your signal input to the VST, or if you want more fine control, put a compressor very first on the chain and pump up the initial signal. You'll find that this gives you a bigger tone to work with as you move then through to distortion pedal, amp and cabinet and then out to your effects.

You should check out Guitar Rig (which I guess most guitar players know well by now), Revalver Mark III (great for hi gain, sustained note stuff) and Amplitube and see which of these solutions sound best to you as long as you pump enough dB in their inputs as I said. There are freeware solutions too.

[Grimsane]

thanks helm, that's really helpful, that's the specific things I've been trying to sort out, the tone is so much better on my amp, and I was going to get a Xonar with a quarter inch jack (I was told by a tech guy here there was models with that) and have heard about converters, because the Line-In is horrible there is so much crackle and static, just intergrated sound and I'll definitely look into what you've suggested

I've been using guitar rig a bit, but my input has still been the limitation I gated the signal to get rid of the unwanted feedback and it killed the tone, and the feedback isn't present on my amp so it's definitely the input. It's been quite frustrating actually because I've wanted to record some things and I'm never even close to happy with the tone I get, now I have more idea of a definite direction to go in to attain it, much thanks

[Helm]

no worries. Check out my quasi-undead band's history at locustleaves.com to see the evolution of direct input hi gain guitar tone, more or less. As I record at home all the time, I try to be on the up and up. Some stuff near the root of the tree are literally recorded with a tiny computer mic pressed up to a busted cone of a 15 watt practice amp and gradually most if not all the gear is replaced with vsts.

I use an m-audio firewire 410 now, comparably cheap and good conversion.

[leroy]

Very basic 3D modeling. It's hollow so that's something. 



Now to figure out how to make it transparent and how to use the fluid modifier.

[Grimsane]

been digesting your aural tapestries, quite fond of a lot of it the highly frantic moments and heavier vocals aren't entirely my thing. your guitar work is quite awesome and those instrumentals are great, quite progressive too I believe,  I've been seeking musical friends to jam with especially lately, but no luck, got invited to a thing recently and was commended on my guitar playing but it was semi folk pop sing along stuff I wasn't into it at all  

how many band members in Locust Leaves? and yeah I can clearly see the profound difference in tonal quality from demo tracks to re-recordings alone, love the site design and illustrations within each track too btw

also you've just brought to my attention through searching for info on the m-audio firewire 410 that there is alot of troubles regarding audio on the motherboard I have, ironic considering I didn't include my mobo model in any searches, and unfortunately it's not only exclusive to the on-board sound but also through fire wire and USB which Kinda sucks for me, there are some work arounds for the issues I skimmed over, but hopefully it won't be much of an issue if I get the right kit, once I get the funds I'll do some more research and see what I can put together, might even resort to just getting a high quality stand alone recorder of some description, they have one on campus which has great record quality I inquired how much it was and they said $800 on sale btw hadn't heard of  "Revalver Mark III" before you mentioned, I'll probably try get my hands on an interface or internal/external sound card at least

meanwhile I'll continue pushing the settings around and try and pursue a tolerable tone on what I have, I got a BOSS multi FX pedal with USB input but i believe the signal gets processed through the sound card, that and with amp modelling it's analogue to digital to digital to analogue back to digital a really messy chain, gotta do some funky routing to get live VST playback, and I think there is a bit of a feedback loop going on too, and that there could be a large part of my problem. but I usually isolate and record the raw digital signal and then after finishing the recording apply said VSTs to that but it never sounds quite the same, rather perplexing

got loads of track ideas and audio bytes but the clarity I want is eluding me, might try setting up some things and start taking some art commissions to get the money I need, don't have much in the way of 'disposable' income

*did you hand model that leroy? or like icospheres and hex-sided cylinders some strange edge flows, is that amongst your first attempts? quite impressive then   and there are several ways to do transparency you want VideoGame style transparency or raytraced?  if you want some help pm me I'll be glad to point out some blender interface for you  

[leroy]

Just started with the icosphere and extruded from that, then I selected the icosphere but not the bottleneck and scaled it down to make the insides. The lighting is making it look weirdly shaped in some places.

I did follow a tutorial about a T-Rex which turned out okay, but I didn't feel like posting something I basically copied.   Here it is anyway. http://s216.photobucket.com/albums/cc14/tuaarita/?action=view&current=untitled-3.png
As you can see I got bored and sloppy in the legs and arms.  

I gotta look into that raytraced transparency now.



Updates on that potion. Same but with subdivison surface modifier. Should have made the goop inside an UV mesh and not use the modifier on it.

[Grimsane]

well not bad for early beginnings, and with the subdivided one you should do smooth shading over flat (faceted) maybe you should try a real easy one a cube, but use UVunwrap on it, my tip would be UV reset (not necessary in new versions as it automatically initializes the UVs) and use an entire texture map square for crate texture, easiest way to practice and get your head around and practice texturing

haha found this old one of mine:

thats the texture to the right one texture with 2 face variants
I'll probably do a new one to offset the shame of posting that 

oh hell I've been meaning to post this somewhere here so I will now, Rings of power start zone remake, did not too long after starting 3D, game engine friendly too

the garish pink they used was horrible  especially when there was much better colours within the megadrive/Genesis's available colourspace to choose, tried rom hacking it at one point to no avail found what seemed like the colour indexes though but I had no idea what i was doing still wouldn't

[Helm]

My heart skipped a bit when I saw that image (I adore ROP). But if you were to remake this, you should give it a bigger viewport than 9x9 tiles. The game needs something like 32x32, not huge tiles!

[Grimsane]

yeah it was more of a faithful homage  (I adore ROP too, it was amongst my favourite games when I was younger played on the real hardware, I love how you could play NTSC games on the PAL system, haha just remembered the red monk XP exploit I figured out and exploited to the max to level up everyone, get a new party member travel to the red monk get a few level ups, significantly less getting brutally killed in random encounters )

I've actually considered doing a fan game for ages because I have a few cool ideas, either a remake or a new game, and would definitely approach the play field differently but just a pipedream unless I had equally passionate collaborators might pick up doing an actual mockup of how it would/could/possibly should be remade

If I can find them I'll post a couple other random RoP artworks I've done over the years, but I fear I lost them with my past PCs

more random creativity from the past, hope it's okay to spam all this stuff in this thread, I can create a seperate thread if you guys think it's worthwhile:


some stuff from early '10 I basically started pixelling seriously on and off since mid to late '09, besides pixelling a tad in RPG maker back in 04 or something, that green one was for the Green challenge at PJ but lost net access that week so never got finished or submitted and idk did that blue one for some reason



old crazy clunky custom mouse cursor







think I was influenced by something for the style of these guys, that game was looking nice yeah I actually had to fight for time on my own PC before I moved out so I could never dedicate enough time to making the games. messed around with mixed res sprites and environ, I believe those tiles on the right are edits of RPG maker tilesets but can't remember


*NES restriction Advance wars type game mockup, custom palette I think, and I made sure to adhere to the sprite limit I think it pushed it to the limit can't remember the whole flicker causing paradigm but it probably would be a flicker fest



managed to get this off an old hard drive various stages of my first ambitious game project which I am still quite driven to develop, had a thread here and uploaded these via really bad mobile phone photos 




messed around with AGS for awhile too

probably alot cluster banding in some of that earlier stuff but oh well. I'll stop for now

[blumunkee]

This. It looks yummy. You could even drop the palette restrictions for the backgrounds and go full blown CG.