Thursday, August 18, 2011

Looking For Schedule

One of the main problems plaguing me is this whole creative process. It's hard to get into the swing of things when your life is so turbulent, and when you don't bother to set goals for yourself in order to accomplish anything.

When I started this thing, I thought I'd have a lot to talk about (which I do). The problem being, mostly, that I write when I feel in the mood - and most of the time, I'm not in the mood. Thusly, everything suffers - this blog, my creativity, and everything else surrounding that.

So, starting from today, I am going to set a schedule - at least three updates a week, monday, wednesday, and friday. I will do my best to talk about something going on - be it one of the games I'm playing in, what I think went well and what could have gone better, or any projects that I am working on (which will hopefully inspire me to see some of those further along the lines to completion).

So for this week, things are already quite behind. I'll have to go ahead and fix that, starting tomorrow (because what better time to start than on the next scheduled day?).

Tomorrow's topic will likely be musing upon either my homebrew tabletop system, Wildly Inadvisable, or it will be musing on my Apoc game that's just started. Maybe even both, who knows.

Sometime next week, I expect to be picking up Deus Ex: Human Revolution. And I am sure I'll have quite a bit to say about that as well.

Sometime later that week, I may even have some things to say about modeling as well - because I'm trying to pick that back up again, as a means of getting better at that thing I went to college for, while at the same time trying to bone up for a project I probably shouldn't have put off for as long as I have.

Since this post has been kind of short, I'll go ahead and talk about that just a little bit. For many years, I've had an idea burning in my skull. At first, it was just a simple little roleplaying thing for me - but over time, I realized it had evolved into something quite incredible, even though I really had no clue how to properly express that awesomeness.

I tried to start things with it - flash animations that never went anywhere, drawings that never really materialized, and half-written stories that just stopped going anywhere. But now that I have this degree in Computer Animation (a Bachelor's of which I am rather proud of), I should start working for myself to start seeing some of these dreams to completion.

I want to start small, of course. I want to model the main character that this revolves around, so I can finally visualize him well. (Drawings would help this, of course). But to do it in the way I wish, I'll want to utilize cloth and hair simulations, two things I am very unfamiliar with. Additionally, I want to try to push my high-resolution texturing skills to the test - which means I've got quite a bit of work ahead of me.

So my first step for now is to continue trying to get back into the swing of things, and to get modeling people! Following online courses from the ever wonderful Digital Tutors is a great step in the right direction - but of course I need to set goals and guidelines for myself so that I can make the time to actually sit down and do the damn things.

As of recently, I've finished up the first part of a modeling humans tutorial, which has helped immensely. Now the real test begins: can I recreate what I learned by using my own reference images?

With that having been said, I'm starting where the best place to begin is: the head. I've got a rough model already sketched out for the head - a bit more work and I can move on to roughing out the torso, then the arms, hands, legs and feet. And of course the bobbly bits (since in this case I'm attempting to model a female reference).

That's where I'm at right now. Some more practice with that stuff will do me quite a bit of good - and putting to practice those skills I've learned recently will go a long way, I feel. In the near future, I hope to be going over some fur/hair stuff, and then cloth simulations once I get that far as well. The end goal here is to attempt to make a very short animation of the character in action, so we shall see just how far that gets me.

In the meantime, I guess I'll just be moseying along. Tomorrow's post: It's The End of The World (or Doing Something Advisably Stupid). We'll see which I decide to go with tomorrow. One deals with game design, the other just running games. Such tempting little topics.

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