2D Graphics – The Stupid American Tourist

Raise the Mast!

News, Site Maintenance Comments Off

Aug 092013

I spent a few hours creating a new masthead for the site today. I’ve been wanting to do this sort of old-fashioned mechanical arrival/departure sign motif for a long time, but hadn’t found a good way to make it work. I came across this tutorial on how to make a flip clock in Photoshop.

Applying it to make a mechanical signboard wasn’t too difficult.

The only problem for me was getting Suffusion to line it up, center it, and link it to the home page properly. I spent about 2 hours wrestling with it, trying to find answers, because Suffusion’s control panel is a bit disorganized.

Setting a Clickable Linked Mast in Suffusion

First, have an image ready for your header. I needed a 1000 x 85 pixel image for mine. I also created a 1000 x 85 pixel blank image, too.

Step 1: Go to the Dashboard>> Appearance Menu>> Header. (Not in Suffusion yet, we’re still in WordPress!) DON’T select an image. Go down to Header Text. Check “Show header text with your image.” Why? Because this will create an anchor tag in the header for the image we wind up using. Also, make sure that a text color of some kind has been selected.

Step 2: Go to Suffusion Options>> Skinning>> Header. Select “Custom styles” in the first box (otherwise nothing will change.)

Step 3: For Header Background Image, select your BLANK header, and upload it.

Step 4: Set your tiling. I set mine to “Do not repeat.”

Step 5: Set the background image position. I used “Middle of the Page.”

Step 6: We’re STILL in the Suffusion >> Skinning>> Header menu. Go down to Header Foreground Image, and upload the image you want to use.

Step 7: Click on Save, and save the changes.

I added a few other things to my header, because I like it this way:

Step 8: Go to Suffusion Options >> Other Graphical Elements >> Header. For “Header Layout Style,” I selected “Header is outside the main wrapper, its background and contents are aligned with the main wrapper.” Because I like how it looks.

Step 9: For “Blog Title/ Header Alignment,” I chose “center.”

Step 10: For Description / Sub-Header Alignment, I chose “center” again.

Step 11: For Description / Sub-Header Vertical Alignment, relative to header, I chose “Below the header text.”

Step 12: Finally, to get rid of the Search box that always shows up in the header, go to Suffusion Options >> Sidebars >> Right Header Widgets, and select “Hide the search.” Voila! The search box is gone, no longer cluttering up the header image.

More importantly, when you click on the image at the top, you’ll go back to the home page! Just like a normal website!

Suffusion does some things that annoy me a bit, but generally it’s been a good template system to work with. It just has its own quirks that require some learning and experimenting with.

Progress Report

Art, Japanese Language, Music, News, Photography, Technology Comments Off

Jul 252013

So I start a lot of projects on this blog, and some get finished, some don’t. I use David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” approach to constantly examine what I want to do vs. what I can do. GTD is a lifesaver in that regard. It helps keep me focused when sometimes it feels like I’m being torn apart by ducks.

So here are some short updates on projects I’ve been wanting to work on/finish.

The Grammar Songs

I discovered that in order to make it work, I need to improve both my Japanese and my music production skills. I studied music from 4th grade all the way through college, so I know a lot about performing music, but I don’t know as much as I should about composing and producing it, which are two entirely different skill sets.

I’ve been using Coursera to work on the production side, and now I need to work more on the composition side. And when it comes to writing lyrics, that’s the result of daily writing exercises.

My Japanese is pretty good, but it’s not quite at that level yet, so I’m working on it. Same goes for melodies. I’m looking for a way to get more music theory under my belt.

Japanese Studies

Those are going pretty well. JOI makes it easy to load up on classes for grammar, conversation, and vocabulary when I need to, and they meet my level, which is a godsend. Being an advanced student in a room full of beginners can be helpful sometimes, but it’s hard to make progress that way. So I’m glad JOI has classes that meet my needs. That’s going well so far.

Also, because of work, I work with Japanese people on a pretty regular basis. The only downside is that since we’re in the US, we mostly speak English and follow US business customs. Not all the time, but a lot of it. Those times when I need to slip into Japanese Mode it comes in really handy.

3D and 2D Art

Well… that had to get put on the “I’ll do it after the JLPT” pile. There’s just too much going on right now, and too many projects require my attention, so I find it’s best to whittle it down to what I can handle. I still want to get into it, but I need to find the right time/place to do it.

I sketch whenever I can. I’m not very good at it, but it’s relaxing, and it’s fun. It also helps me with my photography, and my eye for how I want to compose photos.

Where ARE the Photos?

That’s another thing that’s being put on the shelf for now. I have a giant pile of photos to edit, and just no time to do it. Editing requires big chunks of time for me, and unless I’m getting paid to do it, I just do it when I can. I’m going through the older stuff and gradually adding it, though. I don’t know of a good way to bump old posts up to the top of the site just because they have new material. Maybe I’ll create a new tag?

Calligraphy/Shodo

Well, ever since my class in Raleigh ended, I’ve been going to my usual calligraphy classes. Before the classes in Raleigh ended, though, I spent some time studying Edo-moji, and that was a lot of fun. Now I’m trying to decide what to do next in calligraphy/shodo.

Other Site Stuff

I recently moved the site over to Suffusion, and I like it as far as CMS/frameworks go. I can’t really call it a template, because it’s more like a framework you have to set up and tweak yourself to get it to really sing. My current design is a little Spartan, but I’m from the Jakob Nielsen school of web design. It needs to be easy to read, and accessible first above everything.

3D and 2D Resources for Blender, Metasequoia, Inkscape, and Sketchbook

Art, Japanese Language, Technology Comments Off

Mar 122013

As I’ve been messing around with Metasequoia more and more, I realize that DeviantArt tutorials, while useful, will only get me so far. There are some really great tutorials out there, but it takes time to find the ones that apply to what I need to know, or the things I don’t know I need to know.

Things like how important it is to have a good set of references before I even start 3D modeling. It’s the sort of thing I knew, but didn’t really grab it until I had a few consecutive failures.

So I decided to double-skill-up (or maybe even triple/quadruple), by getting some books on 3D character creation in Metasequoia and Blender in Japanese.

I wound up buying all three books in the 3DCGæ—¥å’Œ (3DCG biyori) series, as well as a book called 3D Character Animation Manual (it’s also in Japanese.)

3DCGæ—¥å’Œ

Volume 1 of 3DCGæ—¥å’Œ covers the basics. And I mean it. It goes through everything you need to know to get up and running with Metasequoia, and explains why you need to drop the $45 on licensing it. (Plugins like Keynote don’t work without it, and you can’t save in other formats!) The tutorials are pretty easy to follow if you speak N2 level Japanese, or can handle N3 if you don’t mind looking up some stuff.

If you stick it out, you’ll make 5 or so models of varying types, from the dead-simple-easy dice-head guy to a big bad demon-type character. The exercises ramp up in levels of difficulty. It also covers UVs as well. The book covers low-polygon to mid-level polygon count figures.

There’s also some info on designing characters in Paint Tool SAI, a program I don’t have much experience with.

All of the illustrations are in color, so it’s easy to follow. One downside, it’s a 2009 book, so it covers an older version of Metasequoia, but I haven’t really run into any problems with it.

Volume 2 … I haven’t worked with yet. All color illustrations, though, and it takes you through building a model, adding clothes and bones, and animating it. It came out in 2010, so it should have some updated info on the first book. Also, make sure to check the publisher’s website for errata in volume 2.

Volume 3: To be honest I haven’t worked with it yet either, but after spending an hour reading it, it looks promising. It’s devoted to building 3D characters in Blender, which is a powerful (and at times frustrating for me) program. I’m looking forward to improving my Blender skills.

You learn by creating two characters: one low-poly, and one high-poly. It covers skinning and boning and animating as well. It came out in 2012, and covers Blender 2.6. (The current version of Blender is 2.66, so it’s pretty close.)

None of the 3DCGæ—¥å’Œ books comes with a CD/DVD, for which I am grateful, to be honest. I’m tired of keeping track of all the coasters I get with books these days. You can download everything you need from the websites in the books. All three books are in full color, and for computer books, aren’t all that expensive: around 2500 yen a piece. That’s about $27-28 per book, plus there’s shipping, but you’d probably pay $50-$60 for similar books in English.

The 3D Character Animation Manual

The 3D Character Animation Manual is a good all-around book for learning the process. It starts from the design phase, where the author introduced me to Inkscape, which is an awesome freeware vector graphics program. (Think open-source Illustrator, but just as powerful.)

One thing he pointed out was the importance of having a good design and locking it down before you start modeling. That’s actually really good advice. ISAO gives similar advice in volume 1 of 3DCGæ—¥å’Œ. I’ve been polishing my drafting skills, because I’m out of practice. Ugh.

The 3D Character Animation Manual also covers the process of building a model, designing clothes, creating the graphic skins for it, and adding bones. It also goes into how to use Keynote, which is a plugin a lot of Metasequoia users are interested in using, but sometimes folks have some frustrating results.

Like volume 1 of 3DCGæ—¥å’Œ, it’s a 2009 book, so some info may be a bit dated, but I haven’t seen anything better than these two books on Metasequoia that’s any more current. If you’ve seen anything newer, let me know.

The 3D Character Animation Manual goes for 2800 yen new. About $30-31 these days.

The tutorials are pretty straightforward, and are in N2 level Japanese. N3 if you have a dictionary handy. It comes with color illustrations and a CD-Rom with the model data on it, an old version of Metasequoia, a plugin for handling UVs, and some extras. It’s about 100 MB of data. Most importantly, it has the X and Z guide image files for creating the face/hair/accessories for the tutorial character. You might have to dig a little to find them, but they’re all there.

Sketchbook Pro 6

So as part of learning how to make my own 3D stuff, I have been working on my 2D graphic arts, and wow, are they rusty. Fortunately, with some work, they have come back pretty quickly. Having a good sketchbook, a good eraser stick, and some good, sharp pencils helps, but so does having a good graphics and illustration program and a tablet that doesn’t suck.

I’ve been using Photoshop since version 4.0 in the mid-90s. Yes, I’ve been using it that long. And there are parts of it I still don’t entirely get. In fact, Photoshop is probably one of my least favorite programs for about 85-90% of what I do. But for that last 10-15% it’s vital.

I was getting frustrated with Photoshop and was looking for a good sketching program, and started looking.

A lot of people recommended Autodesk’s Sketchbook Pro, version 6. It’s not a bad program. It has some useful features, like an ability to mirror across the center line. That’s handy for drawing things like eyes, eyebrows, ears, and other things that need to be symmetrical, but it only works if you draw head-on all the time.

It also has some useful tools, like a circle that you can plop down, and no matter how you draw, it comes out as a circle, or as a segment of one. It also has a set of French Curves, which were fine until I wanted to flip them over and use the reverse side… that irritated the hell out of me, because there was no way to do that without using mirroring, which I couldn’t use.

The brushes also irritated me. I’m a fan of Photoshop’s pencil. It’s a mighty layer of hard pixels. I want a black pixel there, I get it. No anti-aliasing, just pixels. I love that. But in Sketchbook, it requires setting up a custom brush, then futzing with it ad nauseam, and I still didn’t like the results. I suppose if you want that watercolor or marker look, it’s great. Heck, it even comes with a set of virtual Copic markers, so that can’t be too bad.

But it’s probably not going to see much use from me.

It’s about $35 for the CD version on Amazon, and $60 if you buy the download version from Autodesk. Yes, that’s correct. The disk is cheaper than the download. I don’t recommend dropping your money on it, unless you have to have a raster graphics drawing program. There are better programs out there.

Like Inkscape.

Inkscape is Inkredible

I discovered Inkscape when reading The 3D Character Animation Manual. The author was discussing how important it is to create a front and side view of the character you want to create that is in perfect proportion. And he was showing how he did it in Inkscape, and it looked really good.

The best part about Inkscape is that it is open-source. Free. As in beer and in speech. I had some bad experiences with the GIMP a while back, so I was a little hesitant, but Inkscape is a better Illustrator than Illustrator. It’s dead simple to use, has easy-to-understand context menus, and it’s easy to wrangle the panels. (It is always a chore in Adobe products to get those things out of my sight. I hate little context menus covering my artwork all the time.)

Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit. You do need to read some tutorials on Inkscape before you start using it. It’s not 100% intuitive. But it only took me 3-4 DeviantArt tutorials before I was up and running. Look for microUgly’s guide and White_Heron’s tutorials. Both are very useful.

I never really liked using vector graphics, probably because I didn’t like Illustrator. I like them now. Inkscape has given me all kinds of ideas for things I want to try.