I don’t mean to sound whiny, but ever since my new job at Plastic Piranha working on a game title called Rikochet, I just haven’t had time to publish any of the cool things I’ve been working on in my spare time. Hell, I even have a UnrealScript Editor with real auto-complete and some really nice features not found anywhere else, but I’m not happy enough with it distribute it yet. I’ve even made progress on writing my engine, but that is another story all on its own.
I’m trying to schedule some time in to update my tutorials, but we’ll see. For those who keep coming back, thank you!
For those of you followers of the Allar’s Awesome Blog, you are in for a treat with a Savvy created hot key tutorial. The hot keys I cover in this tutorial are ones that I use on a regular basis, but there are many more hot keys that you could find useful for yourself. Using hot keys might be a bit foreign for you at first, but I suggest writing down the short cuts you think you’d use the most and make yourself use them until it’s second nature. Using these keys help cut down on time, and promotes focus on your illustration, concept, or texture.
So folks, this video pertains to leather. Painting leather, especially different types of leather, can be difficult and confusing. To make it easier for you humans to master, I have a two-parter to help fellow artists learn ways to create a nice leather look. In this video I cover sexy shiny leather. Cat Woman’s tight fitting, very snug leather suite might come to mind. The soon to come 2nd leather video will be a way to do a flat leather.
These styles of painting can also be crossed over into texturing characters, or even prop models, so give this video a go even if you’r not a 2D artist.
All of the ways of painting that I suggest in my tutorials are techniques that I go by, but you might find a way that works better for you, and by all means go for it. It’s about the final piece being AWESOME, not necessarily how you got there. As Tim Gunn says, “Make it work”.
You can check out the original post on Design3 here, or view the montage embedded at the end of this post. Please hit up #gamedevinoneword on Twitter if you’re also a tweeter or whatever these newfangled kids are calling themselves now. Side note, this post is my high score for links-to-total-text-density, whooo.
To make sure that my site has a steady stream of content to occupy your time between my tutorial postings, I am looking for asset creators and authors who want to share their tutorials or write articles based on things they have done… basically to blog about their stuff on my blog. I would like to keep the writings geared toward game development and the game industry but if you have some topic that you think might be of interest to me, feel free to leave a comment below and I’ll consider it. I’m hoping for some artists and level designers to step up, but I’d also like a few team leaders working on things to possibly share their trials and tribulations as well.
Just recently I have enlisted a few friends and colleagues to help generate some content. The first being Savannah (Savvy) Cortez, current roommate and concept artist / 2D painter for various things, to help expand my blog to more than just programming. She has a few tutorials up, and you can check out her YouTube channel for her videos which hopefully she’ll be adding to and sharing with us here. Here is a link to her first post here as well.
Next up, level designer friend and colleague Kyle Bardiau, has decided to give some blogging a try with some of the level design stuff he is working on. Hopefully over time we can see some of his designs come to fruition. You can view his first post here.
We also have the privilege to finally get some content on sound and music, more specifically David Mason‘s article about getting into the games industry as a composer. I have worked with David Mason in the past on the Unreal iOS game Warm Gun for which he has created a truly stunning soundtrack. Hopefully he will continue to write and share some information about sound and music that the game development world desperately needs.
Finally, as an incentive to get some new authors on the site, approved authors get all the web hosting space they need to share the things they write about (aside from putting a whole development project on my server…. for now).
So I was able to get some forums and a fancy new feature suggestion box thing that I’ve wanted to add for a while now, fix some formatting issues on some pages, and hacked a bunch of PHP to get WordPress plugins talking to each other so you friendly people can log in via a social network platform instead of being forced to create a new account (but you can still do that if you like on the left hand side bar). The site still has a way to go before I can start pushing my planned content out, but its taking shape.
Comments can still be made on articles without being logged in, but forums and feature suggestions need you logged in. I’m hoping to do some cool stuff with user accounts as time goes on, maybe even offer subversion hosting? We’ll see. In the mean time, suggestions are welcome on the feature suggestion page. Every account gets 10 votes a month that you can use to vote for something you want to see done on this site. Cool stuff abound.
Also, within a day of setting up the donation button on the People Who Are Awesome page that allows you guys to donate directly to my web hosting account as well as my personal microphone and pizza buying account, a Steven from StevenAshley.com donated $15, so here’s a shout out to him. I am greatly appreciative of those that help to make this possible and I thank you very much. I’m not really sure what this Steven does, but you should go click on his website anyway. If you’re feeling kind, feel free to give too!
Right now I’m digging through some word press themes trying to find one that looks nice for reading code upon and that will support some new features I’m trying to implement. If you have any suggestions, whether good or bad, or links to word press themes you want me to check out, please leave a comment!
Enjoy