#aka I watched a render tutorial

[batfambrainrotbeloved]

"One often meets his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it." 

I finally charged my tablet and now im unstoppable. So have a little off screen scene from chapter 1 of TDSB

[penskecar]

top 5 art tips/brushes/techniques, etc !

hi here's a little bit of all of that

1. brushes

im an ibis paint warrior and also a strong believer that brushes can truly improve your art!! they wont give you skill but they'll gjve your art a totally different vibe, "blurring marker 1" is what i use for sketching and "render" is well the render one lol

qr codes + examples

2. use the reference image, its not cheating

just just aAUGGHHH photo bash even it looks stupid BUT IT WORKS

3. three layers max

okay this is probably insane but this is just how i do my art, maybe dont take my advice on this- THREE LAYERS MAX!!!!! excluding reference images. I have 1 for a sketch, one for ALL coloring, and one for a background. this is "per item" so if im drawing like 2 people, each person would have that 3 layers max. i feel it helps with canvas management but what do i know man

well 4 max i guess, i like having my signature on a separate one

4. listen to professionals

OKAY!!!! put the pitchforks down and let me speak my truth first,,, PERSONALLY i found most of my growth through art classes and watching art videos on youtube! i mostly watch Drawfee and not a lot of "tutorial" videos but just watching how they draw had an impact even when i wasnt copying exactly what they were doing. they draw fun prompts, i definitely recommend!!!!

5. have fun its art

i have a more semi realistic style and people think thats boring but its what i like and thats all that should matter lol, just do art how you want!!! put that grown man in lipstick, put that other grown man in a bright pink color palette off of pinterest, and draw that grown man as a woman!!!!! (aka mitchell penskecar's tuesday routine)

[bananasbb]

My art Curriculum to become amazing at art

Table Of contents

Portraits Anatomy and bodies Hair Clothes Perspective Lighting Color Backgrounds

Portraits

Practice the side view and 3/4 view. I use chommang to learn 3/4 view, and I find 3/4 view the hardest to do. Try to find your problem areas. Mine is the chin. I also want to practice the features by themselves such as the lips because they always look quite wonky. I also practiced drawing both eyes but not the entire face. To practice the gaze of the eyes so where the eyes are looking. The trick is the ratio of the white of the eyes to the colored part of the eye. Draw teh eye and then see where the eye is looking, if it's looking too much to the left, then shift the pupils to the right.

Chommang Mmonexx Proko Loomis Michael Hampton Morpho Angel Ganev

Then use the asaro head to learn how to draw from below and from above. And then I can do different angles from below and above like 3/4 above. After that I will practice all angles from real references. A great challange to do is Almed Almoori's 100 heads challange.

Then I'm going practice stylized faces such as manwha (aka hot men 😎). But first I found some videos on how to draw anime eyes so I will follow those. I will also learn how to paint eyebrows and eyelashes and lips from tutorials on tiktok, youtube and pinterest. Since they can draw super pretty eyelashes. I will go around finding references from different artists and their artstyles, also webtoon. I also want to practice rendering faces by using references of arcane and miles morales and kooleen. There's also a bunch of rendering tutorials on tiktok and on rendering eyes, so I will follow those.

That's going to do it for the face unit, if you want to do some more, you can try to go for likism so making your drawing look like your human reference. You can also learn different lighting for the face using the asaro head. Or finding your own face artstyle.

Anatomy

Proko Stonehouse Bridgman Taco Chommang Akihito Yoshitomi Tomfox Morpho Anatomy for scultors Dan Beardshaw Kaycem Pinterest Gvatt's workshop Love life drawing Anatomy for Sculptors

So the way I learned how to draw bones, was that I read some scientific website on how to draw bones. Maybe not most productive way for an artist to learn but nonetheless I was able to learn and obtain a very comphrehensive knowlegde on bones. But you can just watch proko hehe. Lemme know if you want an anatomy tutorial where I actually teach you the anatomy. Dan beardshaw also has some videos on bones.

There's 2 parts to drawing bodies, figure drawing and anatomy. If you only want to be able to draw cool poses, you really don't need to learn anatomy. But if you want to draw hot men and plan on painting and rendering bodies, then I really recommend learning anatomy.

So for figure drawing, you simply just draw the body. I found a lot of poses on pinterest and practice like so. Start with very little clothes references. Start by finding the easy curves first. You can also start with chommang and akihito Yoshitomi. This is just something you have to practice a lot but you'll quickly start seeing patterns in poses, like the same hand pose or the same leg pose. The 2 biggest mistakes you can make is incorrect proportions and not using loose lines. Incorrect proportions is what made my drawings look awkward and was my biggest mistake that I kept making. A hand that is too short compared to the legs is what's going to make your figure drawing look bad. The 2nd one is not putting in those loose curves first which will make your drawings look stiff. I'd recommend looking into the youtube channel love life drawing to learn more about gesture drawing. Also another great thing while not necessary is to use a fountain pen instead of a pencil, this way you won't be able to sketch and focus on details and instead you will have to make confident quick lines. You don't want to spend a long time on each pose, you're not making a finished illustration, don't focus on the details or you'll hamper your progress. After you draw your body, compare to the reference and find out how to improve it, such as proportion or still too stiff. Lemme know if you want a tutorial on figure drawing.

For anatomy, the best way to learn is to learn the bones first and learn the bony landmarks. When you learn the bony landmarks, you will know where and how to place the muscles. So look at references and notice where the bony landmarks are. Next you want to learn the muscles. Using proko is a great way to learn the muscles. To learn anatomy, you want to get references of non-clothed or barely clothed people and identify the muscles and then draw them. This is the best way to practice and that's how I practiced. You can also trace the muscles on the reference on at first if you want. Something that helped a lot was writing down my problem areas and addressing them. Like I didn't know how to draw boobs, I had trouble drawing forearms, or how to draw the armpit muscles, or the arms raised. I also mostly learned everyting off of pinterest.

Hair

I use rinspirit or aeyoops to learn how to draw hair. You can also look at webtoons to copy the hair, or search lineart or manga lineart, you can also look at shoujo manga to learn to draw hair.

Clothes

Learn about all the clothing folds. Find sketches of clothings from pinterest of books below and then draw the folds and identify the clothing folds, keep in mind the tension points. When you get better, you can try to draw from real references. A tip is after a while of practicing, try to draw without references and from your brain, then check your work using a reference, this way you can look at your gaps in understanding and address them. This will also help you to start drawing clothes by yourself naturally instead of using references. You can do this procedure for drawing poses aswell. If you're interest in fashion design to draw non-basic clothes then pick up some fashion design books that teach you all sorts of details to add to clothes such as different types of sleeves and necklines and ruffles, frills such as fashion design book by Gina Dunham, you can also check out zoe hong.

Marco Bucci Morpho How to draw clothing for manga - Naoko Date

Perspective

I haven't learned much on these but here are some resources.

Framed Perspective vol 1 and 2 How to Draw - Scott Robertson Draw a Box (free course!)

Lighting

First read about lighting so you can understand them, then do the below practices and think about how and why the light is behaving (based on the lighting information you've read.

Value Studies First is to do value studies, which is to draw black and white references, instead of doing real life references go for statues or 3d digital sculptures instead. Using sculputres are better because the lighting shadow information is much more clearer and easier to read than in real references. Also adding color to it adds another unessacry level of complexity so black and white is best. Try to understand (by reading materials on lighting) where the shadow is and why, and also the highlights. Then after blocking in shadow and highlights, you can add your midtones. If you're interest in faces, you can use the asaro head instead.

Still life Search up still life on pinterest and draw them. Things like vases and stuff. You can draw them in color or black and white.

3D Forms Practice drawing simple shapes from all different lighting scenarios. Such as different angles and the light being farther away and closer. This might seem lacklustre but everything is made of 3d shapes, if you can shade squares, cylinders and spheres, now you how to shade the body, because eyes are just spheres, limbs are just cylinders and EVERYTHING IS A SQAURE. The face is made of 2 spheres for the eyes, a half-sphere for the mouth, and a trapezoid prism for the nose. If you get a bit advanced, you can try combining some shapes together, like merging a circle of top of a square, or subtracting a circle from a square. I found a good reference pack by geoartref. You can also just use pinterest.

Marco Bucci Color and Light - James Gurney Color and Light - 3dtotal publishing Light for visual artists - Richard Yot

Drawing is just bascially observation and perspective. And drawing realistic, lifelike and 3d is just learning lighting and shading. If you learn perspective and lighting, your art will level up by 500x and this isn't an exaggeration. If you learn lighting, you can paint all sorts of materials such as glass, metal and gold.

Color For color, just become a graphic designer. JK haha, but it's a great way to learn color. The best way to learn color is to expose yourself more to it and to experiment and explore using it. Find exsisting pretty color palettes you like and create a simple drawing such as a heart and make it into a pattern. Then experiment with choosing different colors for the backgrounds and the heart patterns. You can also add a third element in like a third shape such as circles. The other way to learn color is to find images with pretty colors and to draw them. You can find movie stills to learn how to use color and lighting to create an atmosphere or mood.

Background To draw backgrounds, there's a lot of tutorials on youtube for specific mediums such as acrylic or oil pastel. If you want to learn digital drawing backgrounds, I'd recommend to practice each element seperately such as rocks, trees, grass, flowers, clouds. There's lot of tutorials on those. You can find backgrounds on pinterest and draw them or you can draw anime backgrounds like studio ghibli!

For hands and feet, get the taco book and follow along with chommang on youtube. Just practice a little each day instead of a lot. Like 30 minutes and you'll get good in no time. Use proko to learn the anatomy of the hand. You can also learn animal anatomy, composition and facial expressions.

[skitskatdacat63]

Ramble abt stupid online shit :)

Every once in a while, aka often, I think about how toxic people on tiktok are. I guess mainly how different it is to how I remember the internet general vibe being, before the pandemic I'd say. Of course people have always been toxic but. The way bullying and brigading is encouraged and commonplace there really freaks me out! Thinking today about one particular drama I remember, because the person involved just posted after a while, and it got dredged up from my memory. It goes like this.

This artist who randomly got very popular/became a tiktok darling posted a tutorial on how they render. Neat! Some random person literally copies it point blank, literally the same exact drawing. Understandably, to me, the op gets pissed off, because again, this person is literally copying their art piece directly. Basically almost the whole entire "art community" starts piling on OP. "You made a tutorial, what did you expect!?" which then, of course, turns into: "op's art was never really good anyways" "your art is ugly and unoriginal," "oh wow you think your style is unique??" Etc. There even was a trend of everyone copying and making fun of their art style. Basically end up bullying op offline. And forcing them to apologize over and over again. For god forbid, not wanting people to directly copy their art!?!?! And even now, when they're back after a while, there's still comments shitting on them and their art. Even though I don't think they should've had to apologize for what, in my opinion, was valid, it's like even though they did, it still doesn't matter to some people.

From my perspective as an artist, when someone posts a tutorial on rendering or coloring or any other thing. That doesn't give you full license to directly copy their art piece??? They are literally just showing their process, in hopes that someone might learn something from watching it. Sometimes I'll see tutorials, and see that people do some minor, little thing, and I'm like OH *writes down.* Not, oh let me copy their entire drawing, and literally not think for myself. I don't think it's bad necessarily to study someone's art style, right, but at the same time, I feel like it's understandable the op might be a little uncomfortable with it??? Someone posting their exact same drawing, not even minutely different??? I'd probably be extremely put off 😭

But yeah. The way people turned on the OP so quickly was crazy. As I said, now suddenly shitting on their art and style, that had been so praised before. I wish I could come in, as an adult, and be like....guys. I guess I feel like I always remember there being soooooo much drama over people accusing literally everyone of copying art styles. Even just little simple details. But now suddenly it's a sin to say, uh hey, this person copied my art and I'm not comfortable with that??? Idk I feel like people have no boundaries or courtesy or manners online these days. *cue old man Catie shaking fist at cloud* But no yeah, I feel my eye twitching when I think about how people took the tutorial as full license to directly copy that op's art. It would've been one thing if they drew something of their own, in a similar style to OP's, like wow Inspiration! But to directly copy the same drawing point blank? Insane to me. TUTORIALS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE A GUIDE, A LITTLE HELPER, NOT SOMETHING YOU DIRECTLY COPY. At least, that's what they are to me! Cause you should at least try and think for yourself!!

Anyways. I am never posting my art on tiktok, that's a hell I never want to voluntarily put myself in.

[theworldbrewery]

Plot Build: Murder Mystery

This is a plotline built to be adapted to your own own campaign or for use as a oneshot. Feel free to change names, NPC races, etc., or adapt by adding or removing enemies, traps, etc. to increase or decrease the difficulty of the adventure. This build assumes a 4-person party at 8th level.

Want a customized plot build for your party? $15 Ko-Fi supporters can leave a private message with their tumblr or email contact information to request a personalized outline.

One-sentence hook:

The war with the Republic has decimated Empire forces and left the Crown Prince desperate for more troops; this could be a profitable business move for your adventuring company--assuming that something or someone doesn’t sabotage negotiations.

The outline will be available under the cut at the end of the post, just in case your players follow your blog 👉😎👉 (pro-tip: if you’re not a DM or prepping to be one, don’t look!)

Groundwork to lay before the plotline begins:

You’ve been assigned to protect Guildmaster Ryker as he negotiates a contract with the Ellywick Empire to supply relief forces for the war effort.

Conflict between the Empire and the Republic of Drexia has been going on for decades, but exploded into war after the late Queen Donella passed a few years ago.

Recently there’ve been attempts on the life of Crown Prince Theodore and so Ryker has been pressured into taking bodyguards to make sure the negotiations aren’t compromised.

See the rest of the build below the cut.

Whodunit - All The Answers - 

What: An attempted assassination of the Crown Prince of the Ellywick Empire

Who: A local weapons manufacturer, Antaeus Cloudstrider

Where: During the announcement of the Empire’s contract with the party’s adventuring company

How: Antaeus casts dominate person on Guildmaster Ryker, forcing him to kill the Crown Prince

Why: Antaeus has been ordered to sabotage the Empire by a cloud-giant who has made a bet on the outcome of the war

Major Locations + NPCs:

Antaeus Cloudstrider, the big bad

Cloud-Giant/Rakshasa

An emissary for the Cloudstrider clan of Cloud Giants who has been posing as a wealthy and eccentric weapons manufacturer for the past few years. He plans on getting Guildmaster Ryker to assassinate Crown Prince Theodore through mind magic. Half cloud-giant and half-rakshasa, Antaeus has inherited both illusion magics and hearty strength. His parent in the Cloudstrider clan has made a bet on the outcome of the war, and is not above mobilizing Antaeus to tip the scales in his favor. See Anateus’ stats under encounter 5.

Guildmaster Ryker, the gruff merc

Half-Orc Rogue

Gruff leader and founder of the adventuring guild. He’s been contacted by the crown and is headed to the capital to negotiate a contract. He wants the political grandstanding over and done with, and is weary of the number of recent attempts on the Crown Prince’s life. His low wisdom and relative renown makes him the perfect target for Antaeus’ manipulations.

Guard Captain Katya Hauss, the loyal watchdog

Half-Elf Fighter

A veteran of The Ash Guard (also known as Slaggers or Dust Devils) who served the Crown Prince’s late mother Donella before him. She is on the fence about mercenaries, but convinced that Ryker is not a spy from the Republic. After the assassination attempt, she will try to delay Ryker’s execution but presents the party with a timeline for their investigation to uncover the real culprit. She is suspicious of Magistrate Tossletock’s overt critique of the Crown Prince.

Magistrate Nyx Tossletock, arcane advisor

Gnome Wizard

A sour faced advisor on the arcane to the empire. She is against hiring mercenaries and thinks that the crown prince’s brother, Fredrick, should rule instead of Theodore. She doesn’t have many friends in court, but she is powerful and has allies among both the mages and nobility. She should be a potential suspect for the party to investigate, is innocent.

Heid the “Servant”....*cough* spy *cough*

Human Rogue

Heid, if that is her real name, has been sent by the Republic to spy on the Crown Prince and the negotiations. She’s been posing as a servant for the past few weeks to gain more information. She should be another suspect, but will provide the party information if they can track her down and convince her.

Theodore Ellywick, Crown Prince of the Ellywick Empire

Gnome...just a regular gnome

In charge of the dynasty while his twin Fredrick leads armies against the Republic. He’s a young gnome with prematurely receding hairline and touches of grey from the stress of the war. His main purpose is to get stabbed a lot.

Cloudstrider Estate - an elegant Victorian style mansion surrounded by luscious and immaculately groomed gardens owned by Antaeus Cloudstrider. The gardens are patrolled by 3 Griffons and 2 Goliath Berserkers. Inside the mansion’s library is a secret passageway leading down towards Antaeus’ lair.

The Cracked Flagon -  a ramshackle bar in Old Town where a spy for the Republic, Heid, has set up base. She was sent to gather intelligence, and since the attempted assassination has begun her own investigation into the culprit.

Ashguard Prison aka The Black Peaks - Twin towers which hover over the castle and city like a watchful hawk. The prison holds the most important of the Empire’s enemies and doubles as a guard garrison. The party will be led here after the assassination attempt and held for a time before meeting with Guardcaptain Hauss.

The Castle - is a castle...its impressive but generic

The Guildhall - the base of operations for your adventuring party. This is where they meet before leaving on missions, and can restock their potions/equipment if necessary. 

Encounter 1 @ The Guildhall w/ Guildmaster Ryker:

Purpose - EXPOSITION - Provide the PCs with a chance to familiarize themselves with their skills and lay the groudwork for the plot

You enter the guildhall and see Ryker there, arms crossed and a scowl on his face. “Finally! Well, come-on. Out to the training yard with ya. What, did you expect me to take you on a job as important as this without seeing what you’re made of first?”

This is the Tutorial section of the one-shot

Start off with either a one-on-one combat or free for all with the party members fighting each other. This will allow them to get familiar with their skills and meet the rest of the team.

Afterwards, on the road, they will be able to ask Ryker questions about the world and their job. They can learn the groundwork points in character here.

Encounter 2 @ The Castle w/ Guildmaster Ryker, Guardcaptain Hauss, Antaeus, Heid, Magistrate Tostletock, & Crown Prince Theodore

Purpose - COMPLICATION - To foreshadow potential culprits, introduce all the characters, execute the “murder”

You arrive at the castle gates, and are greeted by a hand-full of guards in grey chainmail and shields adorned with the Royal crest. One of the guards--a tall half-elven women with sharp cheekbones and a no-nonsense look about her--steps forward, her black cloak and shining plate armor adorned with golden trim. “We have been expecting you.”

The party is greeted by Guardcaptain Hauss at the gates, who shows them to their room. Ryker will insist on beginning negotiations right away while the party settles in, forcing Hauss to lead him off and leaving the party a chance to explore the castle if they’d like.

There are several ways you can foreshadow the events of this evening and present suspects before the assassination takes place:

The party overhears a conversation between guards, or questions someone to learn (depending on the success of their ability check):

The spy master was just fired, as the amount of information leaking to the Republic is atrocious and there keep being assassination attempts against the prince

There’s open hostility towards hiring mercenaries for the war effort and Magistrate Tossletock has suggested that Theodore be replaced by his brother

The party explores the castle and spots a servant (Heid) leaving a hidden passageway from behind a tapestry

They can question her, finding suspicious but plausible deniability in taking shortcuts on her deliveries

They can investigate the passage themselves to find that it leads inside the wall of the Crown Prince’s study where negotiations are happening between him and Ryker

After exploring, the party will be called back to attend the feast tonight where the Crown Prince will announce their contract and provide a general update on the war effort. At the party, Antaeus will approach and present himself as an ally, making small talk. Additionally, with a high enough perception check, the party can spot Heid serving food and drink with a concealed dagger hidden in her belt. After a period of chat, Tossletock will approach and make a poor impression, letting it be known that she disapproves of mercs.

Eventually, the Crown Prince will begin to make a statement. In the middle, those with a high enough passive perception should notice Ryker disappear (stealth check 30--damn rogues). Ryker stabs the Crown Prince twice, rendering him unconscious, before Guardcaptain Hauss has him subdued on the ground. He doesn’t struggle, as dominate person only lasts a minute and he’s now come out of it.

It doesn’t matter if the Crown Prince dies--the party and Ryker will be in trouble regardless. In fact, I would encourage you to let the party try to save the Crown Prince, as that will provide even more reason for why they’re allowed free to investigate while Ryker is imprisoned.

The party will be escorted to Ashguard Prison by guards to await questioning.

If they resist and escape, have Guardcaptain Hauss approach them in disguise/a hooded cloak after a few hours to begin the following conversation about Ryker’s execution

If only some of them escape, add some pressure on that the ones who ran away will be considered guilty with Ryker if they don’t find the real culprit

Encounter 3 @ Ashguard Prison w/ Guardcaptain Hauss

Purpose - MOTIVATION - To present the party with a timeline for their investigation and consequences should they fail (Ryker’s execution and their own trial)

The guards march you through the castle hallways until you reach a doorway, watched by more soldiers. You pass through, and for a brief moment you see the night sky, stars shining above before your view is obstructed by a pair of hulking, charcoal-grey behemoths of towers directly in front of you. Behind their jagged peaks, storm-topped mountains crackle with lightning. Welcome to The Black Peaks, Ashguard Prison.

After spending the night in the prison, Guardcaptain Hauss meets the party and explains that the Council wants to execute Ryker, but she thinks he was manipulated. Since the room was warded from outside interference, the culprit must have been in the room, and she suspects that Tostletock has conspired with the Crown Prince’s brother. Ryker is set to be executed quickly as a show of force. The party has 24 hours before Ryker’s execution. There is also pressure to hold the party for investigation, but Hauss has been able to fend that off for now. It’s uncertain how long that will last.

The party should have two leads after talking with Guardcaptain Hauss: The Magistrate, and The Spy. You don’t want Antaeus to be too suspicious yet or that will spoil the big reveal.

Encounters 4a/4b

Purpose - INVESTIGATION - To provide additional information that will eventually lead the party to Antaeus

These are intermediary steps which should lead the party to the final encounter. They can do both or either in any order.

4a. The Magistrate’s Chambers

The magistrate’s chambers are in suite style. There is a main sitting area which seems to double as a study. An ornately woven rug and plush deep burgundy sofas compliment a dark mahogany desk and tall bookshelves. To the side is a workbench with various arcane contraptions and papers on it. The bedroom is fairly standard. There’s a tall four poster bed with a wooden chest at the foot of it. Off to the side is a vanity and dressing table, as well as a partition that separates the bathing and washroom area. The entire suite bleeds lavish opulence and high society comforts.

There is a trapped chest in the bedroom that holds gold and magic items

A poisoned needle is hidden within the chest’s lock. Opening the chest without the proper key causes the needle to spring out, delivering a dose of poison.

When the trap is triggered, the needle extends 3 in. straight out from the lock. A creature within range takes 1 piercing damage and 11 (2d10) poison damage and must succeed on a DC 15 Constitution saving throw or be poisoned for 1 hour.

A successful DC 20 Intelligence (Investigation) check allows a character to deduce the trap’s presence from alterations made to the lock to accommodate the needle. A successful DC 15 Dexterity check using thieves’ tools disarms the trap, removing the needle from the lock. Unsuccessfully attempting to pick the lock triggers the trap.

There’s a desk with a letter inside from the Crown Prince’s brother Fredrick explaining that he too is suspicious of Antaeus trying to push Theodore towards mercenaries and his sudden appearance at the start of the war, but they can’t do anything about it and Tossletock should simply bide her time.

If the party wont enter the rooms, then consider having Tossletock approach and allow them to convince her of their good intentions

The party should leave here convinced that Tossletock is innocent but Antaeus is suspicious.

4b. The Cracked Flagon

You make your way through the city, passing from the more affluent areas to those more working class. Old Town lives up to its name. The buildings are a bit ramshackle, with patchwork repairs--a melding of different stonework and timbers. Eventually, you see a building--lights on, and a bit of music coming from slightly cracked windows--with a sign hanging out front of a mug that’s been cracked down the middle.

When the party enters the tavern, Heid will attempt to slip out the back. If the party can catch her and convince her to talk, she can reveal she’s already investigated Magistrate Tossletock and found no evidence of any plots. Instead she’s begun to be suspicious of Antaeus, who isn’t a Republic agent but seems to be working against the crown.

The party should leave here convinced that Heid is innocent but Antaeus is suspicious.

OPTIONAL Encounter 4c @ Back Alleyway

If you’re really having trouble getting your party to latch onto Antaeus as the big bad, then add in an ambush encounter while they’re in the city. They will face 2 Berserkers who were sent by Antaeus to either kill or scare the party away from investigating the assassination attempt. The berserkers will either flee when bested--running back to the Cloudstrider Estate--or carry a note on them with Antaeus’ signature and seal. This will serve to confirm their suspicions and lead towards the final battle.

Encounter 5 @ The Cloudstrider Estate w/ Antaeus

Purpose - RESOLUTION - The climax and battle where Antaeus will reveal his motivations and the party will defeat him, clearing the name of Ryker and themselves.

The Cloudstrider Estate is in the Sunset ward, closer to the castle. You pass by numerous shops and businesses, houses that border on mansions. A lot of them have hedges and fences that remove the main house from the street. One of these such estates is protected by stone walls about 8 ft tall. You can see on the entrance-way besides the front gate is an engraved placard that reads Cloudstrider in fancy letters with the crest of a sword piercing a cumulonimbus beneath it. The interior of the walls is big. You’d estimate almost an acre worth of land, most of which is taken up by a beautiful garden. The house itself is a two story classic Victorian style with dark blues contrasting white masonry.

The exterior gardens are guarded by 3 Griffons and 2 Berserkers. If the party find the estate by chasing after the barbarians sent to attack them, the barbarians will raise an alarm and the guards will be more alert. Also feel free to adjust the number of guards based on how many they fought/killed in the optional alleyway encounter. There should be several options for dealing with the guards:

Sneak past them

Distract them

Fight them

Negotiate with them

Unless the party convinces the guards to lead them inside peacefully for a conversation with Antaeus, they will have to investigate to find Antaeus and/or evidence. The physical evidence is all hidden underground in a secret bunker activated by uncovering a trapped rug in the library.

The rug hiding the secret passage is woven with a glyph of warding which will activate unless the proper password is given or it is dispelled.

The glyph can be spotted with a DC 18 Intelligence (Investigation) check by the faint shimmer of an arcane sigil or a detect magic spell.

When activated by touching the rug without using the password, the glyph’s explosive runes erupt in a 20-foot-radius sphere centered on the rug. The sphere spreads around corners, encompassing most of the sitting room. Each creature in the area must make a Dexterity saving throw DC 18. A creature takes 5d8 thunder damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one. The thunder also alerts the guards (if they are not aware already) who will arrive in 1d4 rounds.

If they find it right away, Antaeus will be waiting in the bunker, otherwise he will exit and confront them upstairs. If they are fighting upstairs and seem to be doing very well, consider having any remaining guards/griffons join the fray to spice things up. Otherwise you can always add a few berserkers chasing the party down to the bunker. Antaeus has the stats of a cloud giant with the added bonus of a curse ability and the Rakshasa’s dominate person and invisibility spells, which should make him plenty difficult for your party.

[aion-rsa]

MrBeast, Charli D’Amelio and More Nab Big Streaming Award Noms

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

MrBeast and Charli D’Amelio are among the nominees for the 2020 YouTube Streamy Awards. The tenth anniversary of the awards will stream exclusively on YouTube on December 13, and you’ll be able to watch them right here.

John Krasinski, James Charles and Addison Rae have also received nominations this year, as have Will Smith and Jack Black. Disney and Netflix will almost certainly be fighting it out again to snag the top brand award.

MrBeast aka Jimmy Donaldson is also up for a Social Good award for his Feeding America Food Drive. The popular streamer dropped out of college to pursue a full-time career as a YouTuber, and has become one of the most-watched creators on the planet, dabbling in a winning combo of expensive stunts and philanthropy.

Here’s a complete list of 2020’s YouTube Streamy Awards nominees:

Overall Awards

Creator of the Year

Addison Rae Charli D’Amelio David Dobrik Dixie D’Amelio Emma Chamberlain James Charles Larray Marques Brownlee MrBeast Sarah Cooper

Show of the Year

A Heist with Markiplier • Markiplier Binging with Babish • Babish Culinary Universe Challenge Accepted • Michelle Khare Epic Rap Battles of History • ERB Game Master Network • Rebecca Zamolo Good Mythical Morning • Good Mythical Morning Instant Influencer • James Charles Liza on Demand • Liza Koshy Nikita Unfiltered • Nikita Dragun UNHhhh • WOWPresents

International

HIKAKIN (Japan) Mikecrack (Spain) Mythpat (India) Sandra Cires Art (Cuba) Whindersson Nunes (Brazil)

Individual Awards

Breakout Creator

Addison Rae Charli D’Amelio Dream Spencer X ZHC

Collaboration

David Dobrik and Justin Bieber – SURPRISING PEOPLE WITH JUSTIN BIEBER!! The Hype House – TURNING THE HYPE HOUSE INTO A TRAMPOLINE PARK! Jackie Aina and Naomi Campbell – NAOMI CAMPBELL GETS GLAM WITH ME!!! Sway LA – Most Likely To Challenge! Zach King and David Blaine – David Blaine Tricks Zach King with Zoom Magic

Crossover

Jack Black Jason Derulo Kevin James Naomi Campbell Will Smith

First Person

Alex Warren David Dobrik Emma Chamberlain Larray Logan Paul

Live Streamer

NICKMERCS Ninja Pokimane Shroud Typical Gamer

Show Awards

Indie Series

20 Seconds to Live Arun Considers Choose Me: An Abortion Story Chris and Jack The Lock Down Buddy

Live Series

BET’s House Party Bright Minded: Live with Miley Cyrus D-Nice’s Club Quarantine Reunited Apart with Josh Gad Verzuz

Live Special

Graduation2020: Facebook and Instagram Celebrate the Class of 2020

MrBeast’s $250,000 Influencer Rock, Paper, Scissors Tournament Some Good News Prom with Billie Eilish, Jonas Brothers, & Chance the Rapper Travis Scott and Fortnite Present: Astronomical YouTube Dear Class of 2020

Podcast

Anything Goes with Emma Chamberlain H3 Podcast Impaulsive On Purpose with Jay Shetty ‎ VIEWS with David Dobrik and Jason Nash

Scripted Series

A Heist with Markiplier • Markiplier Could You Survive the Movies? • Vsauce3 Epic Rap Battles of History • ERB FPS Logic • Viva La Dirt League Liza on Demand • Liza Koshy Unscripted Series Brave Wilderness • Brave Wilderness Challenge Accepted • Michelle Khare Instant Influencer • James Charles Jeff’s Barbershop • Jeff Wittek UNHhhh • WOWPresents

Subject Awards

Animated

illymation Jaiden Animations Ketnipz The Land Of Boggs TheOdd1sOut

Beauty

Bailey Sarian Brad Mondo Hyram Jackie Aina James Charles

Comedy

Brandon Rogers Brittany Tomlinson Gus Johnson Nigel Ng Sarah Cooper

Commentary

ContraPoints D’Angelo Wallace Danny Gonzalez Jarvis Johnson Tiffany Ferguson

Dance

BFunk Dytto Matt Steffanina Michael Le Sofie Dossi

Documentary

AntsCanada Justin Bieber: Seasons Nikita Unfiltered The Secret Life of Lele Pons State Of Grace

Fashion and Style

bestdressed Bretman Rock LaurDIY Sneaker Shopping Wisdom Kaye

Food

Alex French Guy Cooking Babish Culinary Universe How To Cook That Joshua Weissman Tabitha Brown

Gaming

Dream FGTeeV Jelly LaurenzSide PrestonPlayz

Health and Wellness

Chloe Ting Demi Bagby Doctor Mike The Fitness Marshall Kati Morton

Kids and Family

A for Adley Goo Goo Colors Kids Diana Show Rebecca Zamolo Ryan’s World

Learning and Education

ChrisFix Mark Rober NileRed onlyjayus Peter Sripol

Lifestyle

Alexa Rivera Calle y Poché Jennelle Eliana Larray Rickey Thompson

News

All Gas No Brakes Complex News HasanAbi The Philip DeFranco Show Some More News

Sports

2HYPE Braille Skateboarding Dude Perfect No Days Off: Sports Prodigies Ryan García

Technology

iJustine Marques Brownlee Michael Reeves Simone Giertz Stuff Made Here

Craft Awards

Cinematography

Cole Bennett – Lyrical Lemonade Devin Graham – devinsupertramp Niels Lindelien – Lindsey Stirling Peter McKinnon – Peter McKinnon Pierre Wikberg – Climbkhana TWO

Editing

Casey Neistat – CaseyNeistat derkslurp – derkslurp Emma Chamberlain – emma chamberlain Evan Puschak – Nerdwriter1 Hayden Hillier-Smith – Logan Paul

Visual and Special Effects

Aaron Benitez – Aaron’s Animals Buttered Side Down – Buttered Side Down CyreneQ – CyreneQ Sam Wickert and Brendan Forde – Chalk Warfare 4.0 Zach King – Zach King

Writing

Akilah Hughes, Milana Vayntrub, Brian McElhaney, and Nick Kocher – Making Fun with Akilah and Milana CalebCity – CalebCity Chris W. Smith and Jack De Sena – Chris and Jack James – Casually Explained Zach Sherwin, Nice Peter, EpicLLOYD, and Carter Deems – Epic Rap Battles of History

Social Good Awards

Company or Brand

Barbie – Career of the Year • Mattel Dave’s Killer Bread – Second Chance Employment • Tastemade Lyft – Undercover Lyft with Alicia Keys • LyftUp

Creator

The Game Theorists – St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital #CancelCancer LIVE MrBeast – Feeding America Food Drive Nabela Noor – NoorHouse

Nonprofit or NGO

Arbor Day Foundation – #TeamTrees • MrBeast and Mark Rober COVID-19 Response Fund – Post Malone x Nirvana Tribute – Livestream • Post Malone Equal Justice Initiative – Bear Witness, Take Action • YouTube Originals

Brand Awards

Agency of the Year

BEN Portal A R and CPMK Reach VaynerMedia

Brand of the Year

Barbie Disney Fenty Beauty by Rihanna Netflix Old Spice

Brand Engagement

100 Thieves Cash App Compound Reveal – Cash App 5-Minute Crafts – Barbie Need for Speed Heat x David Dobrik – Electronic Arts Rihanna’s Summer Fenty Face Tutorial – Fenty Beauty by Rihanna Under the Influencer – Comedy Central

Branded Content: Series

Cold as Balls – Old Spice • LOL Network No Days Off: Sports Prodigies – Got Milk? • Whistle Second Chances – Dave’s Killer Bread • Tastemade Under a Rock with Tig Notaro – Amazon Alexa • Funny Or Die Undercover Lyft – Lyft

Branded Content: Video

Aladdin Meets Parkour in Real Life – Uzbekistan Tourism • devinsupertramp ASMR SNAP SHADOWS TUTORIAL W/ AMANDLA STENBERG – Fenty Beauty by Rihanna I Trained Like Black Widow – Marvel Strike Force • Michelle Khare James Charles Spills the Tea on His Glow – Ole Henriksen Skincare • James Charles We Lost A FaZe Member – G FUEL • FaZE Clan

Creator Product

Chamberlain Coffee – Emma Chamberlain Dragun Beauty – Nikita Dragun Hairitage – Mindy McKnight McKinnon Camera Pack – Peter McKinnon Pro Ant Farms – AntsCanada

Influencer Campaign

ALLNIGHTERLEGEND – Urban Decay

HotGuysMakingLipstick – Bite Beauty

Google Pixel 4 Nebula Superstars in Training – WWE

Multi-Platform Campaign

Disney+ Launch – Disney Gift it Forward with Cardi B – Pepsi The Greatest Challenge of All Time with Cristiano Ronaldo and Marta – Clear (Unilever) Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker – Star Wars Tito’s Made To Order – Tito’s Vodka

Social Good Campaign

DistanceDance – PandG • Charli D’Amelio

My Vaping Mistake – The Real Cost • AwesomenessTV Seize the Awkward – The Jed Foundation • Ad Council Teens for Jeans – Aéropostale • DoSomething.org Undercover Lyft with Alicia Keys – LyftUp • Lyft

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The post MrBeast, Charli D’Amelio and More Nab Big Streaming Award Noms appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[tinyjefe]

Finished my first game and game jam!

Link to my game Ahh, Crabs! I realized that I haven’t posted in a while, so I thought I would write about finishing my first game and game jam, and what my next plans are.  Get ready for a fucking novel lol. 

I entered the I Can't Draw But Want To Make A Game (Again)  game jam because I wanted to make a game. Before starting the jam, I’d thought about game development and 3D modeling on and off for about a year, but hadn’t started any projects. Last summer, I’d watched BlenderGuru’s series and made a render of a doughnut which was cool and did a few tutorials on the Unity learn site, but I didn’t do anything with those newly developed skills and eventually forgot most of what I’d learned.  I’m currently 24, going to be 25 in August, and I think a lot about how I spend my time, am I on the right path, what do I want out of life, etc. All of the big existential anxiety inducing questions. I work as a front-end web developer, its a great job, but I know that I don’t want to do web development forever.  Anyway, I’d recently started thinking about game development, and wanted to try committing myself again. Game development presents the opportunity for me to create something that combines all of my interests. Art, music, technology, story telling, world building, animation, etc. It’s also appealing to me because being an indie developer means being an entrepreneur. I know that I want a life where I’m my own boss. I want to decide what projects I work on and what takes priority. I want to build a creative life where I can support myself financially from my work.  I thought about how this time could be different from a year ago where I tried to get into game development, but never committed. I started off slow by creating small assets with MagicaVoxel while I tried to come up with ideas. This is when I remembered that game jams were a thing.  I found the game jam (not going to keep typing the name cuz its long as hell lol) on itch.io and was hesitant to enter. I was afraid of starting and committing to something only to let myself down when I didn’t finish.  I’d recently started journaling and was writing about this fear that I had. I realized as I was writing that I was stopping myself from trying something because of fear. That’s when I decided to commit to entering.  The great thing about game jams is that they take place over a set period of time and you’re usually given some kind of parameters. This was EXTREMELY helpful to me because I was able to quickly come up with an idea for the game. I knew that I only had two weeks to finish. Not two full weeks because of course I work full time and have other home chores to do. Plus ya girl likes to relax and watch anime ( I think at the time I was actually reading Hana Yori Dango aka Boys Over Flowers uwu).  So being given a set time period helped me to plan a semi-realistic scope for the game.  So I started to work on the game! I had a lot of fun making silly art and music. Because the mechanics of my game were also SUPER simple, I could easily find tutorials for everything that I wanted to implement. Even with the tutorials, I still had small hiccups as I worked my way around Unity and C#, but I was never stuck for more than a few hours.  Things were going great! And then.... I stopped working on the game.  I think I didn’t work on the game for like 4-5 days?? I got off track because of some personal stuff that I had to deal with. Once it was handled, I didn’t immediately get back to work. I wasn’t really motivated anymore and I was running out of time. I felt like I had wasted time already, I wasn’t going to make the deadline so why FUCKING TRY *sobs*.  BUT! Once again, journaling saved the day again lol.  I was writing about these feelings and saw how stupid I sounded. Why TF am I giving up before the jam ends???? BITCH!!!  So I got back to work.  I think at this point I had like 3-4 days left?? Something like that. I worked my butt off , literally until the deadline. I was rushing like crazy, super determined to finish. I was keeping up with a Trello board of things I wanted to add to the game, but a lot of things had to get cut. For example, the help button, a pause game function, cleaning up the mechanics, also wanted to add some pre-game comics, etc. BUT thankfully I was able to prioritize the absolute must haves to make the game playable and shippable lol.  So, the deadline was 12am CST Friday. 11:59pm CST rolled around. And I’m still waiting for my build so I can upload it. 12am came and it was too late. I didn’t make it. I was literally sobbing. I don’t remember the last time I cried so much. I was just feeling super emotional. I had a long day at work, just spent the last 8 hours crunching to finish my game to submit to the game jam, and even though it was finished, in the moment I felt like a failure because I couldn’t submit it to the jam. I know it may sound silly, like BITCH you did the thing! You made a game! You reached your goal! Buuuut I was still feeling like shit lol.  The build finished and I uploaded it it itch.io. I was sniffling around the discussion board on the jam’s page, feeling sorry for myself, and decided to post a link to my game and let everyone know that Hey! I finished this game but couldn’t submit it in time. pls check it out *sobs* WELL! Many blessings came my way, the creator of the jam was sending unique submission links to people who missed the deadline a little! They saw my post and sent me a submission link. Of course I submitted that hoe so fucking quick lmaooo  A wave of relief washed over my exhausted shriveled body. It was time for celebration and sleep because a bitch had to go to work the next day.  I’m so thankful for this experience. I saw something that I wanted to do, I committed, almost QUIT, BUT PUSHED THROUGH AND REACHED MY GOAL!  I feel so much confidence in myself and my ability to pursue and finish my creative projects, whatever they may be.  SO WHAT’S NEXT BITCH???? Well, thank you for asking uwu I’m going to make another game! This time, not part of a jam so I have to keep myself super accountable. I want to make a game where I can learn and experiment with dialogue, camera movement, art, and sound design. I think I’ve settled on an idea but need to give it some more thought before I commit and reveal the idea.  I’m hoping for about 30-45 minutes of game play?? And I want to work on this project for 6 months, so pretty much the rest of 2020. Might as well keep myself busy while the world burns :/ If anyone is reading this and made it this far, wow, i’m impressed. I wouldn’t have read this much lol I think I’m going to make a youtube video on this topic?? I mean, if I can write a novel about it might as well talk about it on youtube. It can be my first dev-log-ish type video for the yeahyeahbaby channel (that has yet to be created lol) Okay. Bye-bye now. 

[lichen-soup-scribe]

How to make an neural network draw your pets

Has science gone too far? Inspired by Janelle Shane (aka @lewisandquark​), I’ve taught a neural network how to draw my cat Mulder. The results are ... delightfully off-kilter.

Here’s what the process started with:

Here’s the ALARMING midpoint:

And here, after 3,000 iterations, is the rather impressive result!

The process is actually easy enough a non-computer-geek like me could figure it out — there’s no coding involved, nor do you need a ton of computing power. All you need is a video of your pet (or whatever you want to see AI try to recreate), and two pieces of free software: VLC Media Player and RunwayML.

DETAILED TUTORIAL BELOW THE CUT... If you use it, please reblog this post with your results -- I’d love to see ‘em! Note: I’m a Windows user; the process for Mac might be slightly different at some steps.

Step One: Gather your dataset

In order to train an AI, you’ll need to feed it a sampling of 500-5,000 relevant images. Rather than take all those pictures individually, we’re going to use VLC Media Player to extract the frames from a video you take.

1. Record a roughly two-minute video of your subject (eg., your own cat, a mushroom, your mug collection, your own face if you’re really brave, whatever). The subject should be centered in the frame. For the best (most coherent) results, you’ll want good lighting and contrast, for your subject to remain relatively stationary.

2. Download the video onto your computer from Google Photos or whatever cloud service your phone backs up onto.

3. Download and install VLC Media Player. If you already have VLC Media Player, ensure you’re running the most recent version by clicking “Help” and then “Check for updates.”

4. Run VLC Media Player as administrator. (Right-click the shortcut on your desktop or in the start menu and select “Run as administrator.”)

5. Hit ctrl+P in VLC to open your preferences menu. In the bottom lefthand corner of the menu, you’ll see the words “Show Settings” and the options “Simple” and “All.” Select the “all” option. You should see this:

6. In the menu on the left, scroll down to the bottom and click on “Filters” (not the “>” sign next to Filters, but the word itself.) Find “Scene video filter” and tick the box, as shown:

7. On your computer, prepare the file where you want those frames to go once VLC extracts them. I just created a new file on my desktop named “Mulder frames.” Double-click the file to open it, then in the navigation bar, click the dropdown to show the whole file path. It’ll be something like C:\Users\elven\Desktop\Mulder frames. Ctrl+C it.

8. Back in VLC, in the menu on the left, expand the Video>Filters submenu by clicking the > button next to Filters. Scroll down til you see “Scene filter” and click that to open its settings. In the “image format” field, input “jpg” or “png”.

9. In the “directory path prefix” field, paste in the file path from above.

10. Then, choose your “recording ratio.” If you put in 1, VLC will extract every single frame from the video. If you input 3, it’ll be 1 in 3, and so on. If your video’s on the short side, you’ll probably want to grab every frame. I went with 1 in 3.

11. DON’T CHANGE ANYTHING ELSE in this menu. You’ll especially want to avoid ticking the “always write to the same file” box -- that’ll just overwrite the same frame over and over again. (Yeah, I did that to myself.) Your settings should end up looking like this:

12. HIT SAVE.

13. Hit Ctrl+O and select your video. VLC will extract the frames automatically as it plays. Open the destination file you set up earlier -- it should be filled with hundreds of pictures. (Once that’s done, if you intend to continue using VLC, make sure to open settings again and UNTICK the “Scene video filter” box you ticked in #6. Otherwise, VLC will continue extracting frames from every single video you watch.)

Step 2: Set up your experiment

1. Download and install RunwayML.

2. Launch RunwayML. Create your account, then dismiss whatever “welcome to the program”-type popup it gives you.

3. In the lefthand column, click the button that looks like a lil wiggle. That should open this page:

4. Click “Train a new image model,” name your experiment, and click “Create.”

5. It’ll prompt you to select a dataset. Click the first box, with the + symbol, and navigate to the file of frames you made earlier. Select it and wait for it to upload. (If your file is larger than 5GB, you’ll have to delete some of the images.)

6. Click next. That’ll take you to “Setup.” This is where you choose a model someone else has trained as a starting point for your own model -- it’s faster to teach a Neural Network how to turn, say, human faces into cats than it is to teach it to make cats from scratch. I suggest just leaving the settings as-is, though if you want you can click “change” and browse other models.

7. Click “start training.”

Step 3: Enjoy what thou hath wrought

1. Be patient while RunwayML runs the experiment. It took about 3 hours for mine to wrap up. While you wait, you can watch the progress in Runway. Don’t worry about missing something -- you’ll be able to go back to this experiment and review the whole training process whenever you want. The FID score on the right should slowly count down -- the closer it gets to 0, the closer the AI’s generated results are to the dataset you gave it.

2. Once your experiment is complete, you can use the slider to move back and forth through the training steps. Click the “save sample image” button to save steps you find particularly entertaining, or hit the “create progress video” button and Runway will generate a video of the whole process.

3. Click “Next.” That’ll take you to this screen, with a gif of the final product and a few other options.

4. Click “save video” so you can look back at your freaky AI-rendered pet whenever you want. (That’s mine at the top of the page.) From here, you can also generate more sample images using the model you’ve just trained.

Congrats! You did it! Now try not to see the results in your nightmares!

[hitellshowbutbetter]

websites:

Animation World Network

Animation Backgrounds

Animation Magazine

Animation & CGI

Animator Island

Anime News Network

Cartoon Brew

Character Design References

On Animation

Reference! Reference! (free database for animation)

11 Second Club (monthly character animation competition)

tumblr blogs:

animationart

animationforce

animationtidbits

aspiretoanimate

calartscharacteranimation

disney-moments-sketches (Allen Ostergar’s blog, animator at Walt Disney)

drawingforsuckas

fuckyeahconceptart

storyboardresources

theanimationarchive

theartofanimation

wannabeanimator

resources/tips:

Animation schools: 1 / 2 (Top 50 USA) / 3 (Top 100 international)

Which animation school is right for you? (Ringling vs. CalArts)

Don’t want to/ can’t afford art school? you’ve got other options.

Animation Mentor: The online animation school

Art school exercises!!

51 Great Animation exercises

20 things you can expect as a traditional (2D) animation student that they never tell you

A Survivor’s Guide to Life Inside an Animation Studio

Animation basics: The art of timing and spacing

Animation Notes From Ollie Johnston

Animated chart of the basic principles of animation

10 Second tip: Always Anticipate

book: Animation: Learn How to Draw Animated Cartoons by Preston Blair

book: A System for Planning and Timing Animation by Glen Keane

book: Timing for animation by Harold Whitaker and John Halas

book: Gesture Drawing for animation by Walt Stanchfield

Basic 3D Animation Terminology

Digital pencil test!!

Keys to Emotion in Animation

Lessons from Disney’s Zootopia

Model Sheets central

The importance of Acting in Animation by Segio Pablos

Printable exposure/dope sheet

Phoneme Chart

Recommended reading for animation students and enthusiasts

The 5 Types of Animation

The Know-How of Cartooning

The Unofficial Truth about The Animation Industry

Why Disney Sends Its Animators To Life Drawing Classes

Walk/Run Cycles reference

What is Pixar looking for in Animators? (scroll down)

Portfolio Advice for The Disney Animation Internship

What is Rigging?

3D Rigging Terminology

3D Modeling Terminology

tutorials:

Animation for Beginners: Where do I start

Animation Physics (Video tutorials on physics for animation artists)

Animation tutorial part. 1 AKA “the secret of animation”

Appealing Poses in Animation

Background & Movement in TV

Blinking tips

Breakdown tutorial (middle frame between to keys)

Drawing & Composition for visual storytelling

Drawing for Animation

Drawing a Likeness

Animation fundamentals + tutorials

Filmmaking: Composition and Framing

Getting Shape Change

How to animate using photoshop

How to animate Characters in Perspective

How to Animate Head Turns

How to Draw Gesture

OpeenToonz tutorials masterpost

Overlapping Action and Drag

Portfolio tips / Making A Successful Portfolio

Lyp Sync tutorial

Line of action

Basics of good cartooning 1-12 by Sherm Cohen

Squash & Stretch tutorial

Squash and Stretch 2

Storyboarding tutorials by Sherm Cohen

The Illusion of Life: 12 Principles of Animation

Tilt, Flow & Rhythm

Underlying Structure When Animating Expressions

TVPaint tutorial: Uploading and Coloring Scanned Animation

supplies (traditional animation):

10 Essential Art Supplies for the Traditional Animator

How to Use a Light Table for Animation

Making a Simple Animation Lightbox

Peg bars, Animation Disk & Desk

softwares:

free

Blender (3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline: modeling, rigging, animation,etc)

Emofuri (animate using .psd files)

Google Sketchup (

Live2D ( animation/drawing software

OpenToonz (Studio Ghibli’s open source animation software)

Pencil2D (create traditional hand-drawn animation (cartoon) using both bitmap and vector graphics)

Renderman (Pixar’s free 3D rendering software)

Sculptris (Free digital sculpting tool by the makers of Zbrush

SculptGL (Online modelling program)

Synfig (2d animation using a vector and bitmap artwork)

paid

Zbrush (digital sculpting sw by Pixologic)

Mudbox (digital sculpting sw by Autodesk)

Cinema 4D (digital sculpting sw by Maxon)

TVPaint (2d animation)

animation studios:

Aardman (Bristol, UK)

Blue Sky Studios (Greenwich, USA)

Dreamworks (Glendale, USA)

Fox Animation (USA)

Imagination Studios/CN (Burbank, USA)

Industrial Light & Magic (San Francisco, USA)

Laika (Hillsboro, USA)

Luma Pictures (USA / Melbourne, Australia)

Nickelodeon Animation (Burbank, USA)

Pixar (Emeryville, CA)

Rise FX (Berlin, Germany)

Studio Ghibli (Tokyo, Japan)

Sony Picture Imageworks (Vancouver, Canada)

Sony Pictures Animation (Culver City, CA)

Walt Disney Animation (Burbank, CA)

Weta Digital (Wellington, New Zealand)

inspiration: worth watching short films

Coda by and maps and plans

Contre Temps by the Contre Temps Team

Duet by Glen Keane

DOG ENVY by Olivia Huynh

Fallin Floyd by  il Luster

French Roast

Gravity by Ailin Liu

In Between by Gobelins

Jinxy Jenkins and Lucky Lou by Michael Bidinger and Michelle Kwon

My Big Brother by Jason Rayner

Night Light by Qing Han

Nephtali by Glen Keane

Nocturne by Kari Casady

Historia de un Oso by Gabriel Osorio

Home Sweet Home  by home sweet home the film

One Bright Dot by  Clément Morin

Stickboy by Giant Ant

SOAR by Alyce Tzue

Tsunami by The Animation Workshop

Thought of You by Ryan Woodward

Vagabond by  The Animation Workshop

5 Gobelins Shorts That Pay Tribute To Women Animation Pioneers

[voiladevelopers]

What is HTML? & What are the Features of HTML? Introducing HTML with simple examples | HTML Tutorial

Welcome to our brand new and free HTML tutorials series, in this series, I will be teaching you HTML from the beginning to a pro-level frontend designing, note this tutorial is for everyone, if you are pro coder trust me there is always something new to learn in HTML, and if you are a beginner, don't worry its easy to learn, by the end of this series, you will be knowing much about HTML and will be able to code your own website. You can watch the YouTube video down below, which will give you further knowledge about HTML and assist you building your own site. https://youtu.be/OowvtbJpJR0 What is HTML? & What are the Features of HTML? Introducing HTML with simple examples | HTML Tutorial What is HTML? HTML is a standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser, the Hypertext is the text that is used to reference other pieces of text or content while a markup language is a series of markings that tell web servers the style and structure of a document, it can be assisted by technologies such as cascading style sheets aka CSS and scripting languages such as javascript. is HTML a programming language? HTML is not considered as a programming language as it can't only create dynamic functionality, instead with HTML web users can create and structured sections such as paragraphs and links, using elements tags and attributes. How HTML is rendered? web browsers receive HTML documents from a web server or from local storage and render the documents into multimedia web pages and displayed on your web browser Most common uses for HTML? a. Web Development developers use HTML code to design how a browser displays the web page, elements such as text hyperlinks and media files b. Internet Navigation users can easily navigate and insert links between related pages and websites as HTML is heavily used to embed hyperlinks c. Web Documentation HTML makes it possible to organise and format documents similar to Microsoft word, all HTML pages have a series of HTML elements, consisting of a set of tags and, attributes. Main parts of an HTML element? HTML elements are the building blocks of HTML pages, the element takes up the entire width of the page it always starts a new line in the document, the main parts of an HTML element are as follows a. Opening Tag used to state where an element starts to take effect, tag is wrapped with opening and closing angle brackets for example use the start tag to create a paragraph. b. Content this is the output that your web browser renders and the end users see. c. Closing Tag users see the closing tag the same as the opening tag but with the forward slash before the element name, for example use this to end the paragraph at a block level. Basic Structure of HTML?     Page Title       

Page Heading

  This is my simple hello world program         every HTML page uses these three tags, The HTML tag is the root element that defines the whole HTML document. head tag holds meta information such as the page's title body tag encloses all the content that appears on the page CSS - Cascading Style Sheets script tag to place JQuery Javascript or Dom elements HTML pros and cons? HTML has its strengths and limitations here are the pros and cons of HTML. Pros a. Beginner-Friendly HTML has a clean and consistent markup as well as a shallow learning curve b. Support the language is widely used with a lot of resources and a large community behind c. Accessible It is accessible open source and completely free, HTML runs natively in all web browsers flexible, HTML is easily integrable with backend languages such as PHP and node.js Cons a. Static the language is primarily used for static web pages for dynamic functionality you may need to use javascript or a back-end language such as PHP b. Separate HTML pages users have to create individual web pages for HTML even if the elements are the same browser c. Compatibility some browsers adopt new features slowly sometimes older browsers don't always render newer tags all in all HTML is a markup language that defines the structure of your content by making elements appear a certain way that's it. Yada! now you're familiar with HTML. To know How to host a website on your PC and Access the website on the Lan Network from another computer? Click Here If you find this content helpful, feel free to post a comment, like, share and subscribe on YouTube Read the full article

[setsuntamew]

Kingdom Hearts 3 Liveblog: Part 1

As promised, all spoilers will be under a cut! My understanding of Japanese is very limited, but even with that in mind, there will be plenty of gameplay spoilers and some plot summaries. For now, all "screencaps" are taken with my phone, since I don't wanna spam my PSN friends with spoilers >< Sorry for the low quality shots!

So, for some context: I'm the one doing all the actual playing while Liz (dragonofeternal) and Pat (arahith) watch and provide commentary. I know very minimal Japanese, but the two of them know enough bits and pieces to translate the menus and get the gist of cut scenes. So while we're obv missing a lot of details, we've got a general idea of what's going on! However, this also means that I only have so many pics, because I was doing the gaming. Liz has a more detailed liveblogging experience going on over on their journal, and Pat is just dying of emotions (tho we're pretty much all doing that). 

oh my god oh my god oh my god I honestly lost my mind just over the download. I didn't plan this is advance btw; I only realized I could buy digital games on the Japanese PSN a few hours after the game released in Japan, because I have no common sense I guess lmao.

IT'S REALLY HAPPENING!!!!! AHHHHHHHHH!!!! The opening was super gorgeous which like, yeah, I knew it would be from trailers...but seeing it actually happening on my TV??? SO GOOD. It's an extended version of the trailer too; it's got more scenes in it!! Also the only thing (so far at least) that blocks sharing of screenshots/video. The stained glass beginning is done differently than previous games, with floating screens showing clips from past games as your way of choose what to value versus what to give up. It is SLICK as fuck!! And then the big fuckin shadow that you fight (because there's always one....allways) is mirrored and different and it's in a world of pure sky. It's beautiful. It's enough to make me wish I had a 4K TV and PS4 Pro, tbh.

.........uhhhh excuse me? Fuck you Nomura I wanna play the god damn fucking video game please just let me into the fun fucking part of the game!! XD Anyway, the first world was Olympus and I spent most of it figuring out the controls, aka fucking everything up because X and O are reversed in Japanese. I knew this even, from play Final Mixes 1 and 2 back in the day, and yet? Still fuckin it up hardcore XD It's so much fun to play though, which is something I'm probably gonna say a ton of times, but it's true. Since it's the first world, it is technically the "tutorial" world but it doesn't feel like one. Learning all the new play styles comes organically, and it's all very intuitive- especially considering I can only understand about 30% of the instructions they game is giving me. I love Hercules; it's my favorite Disney movie. I nearly burst into tears of joy when I got to explore Thebes because holy shit it felt like walking through my favorite Disney movie??? It felt like it was crafted with such love and care...There was a lot of thought put into KH3, and it shines for it. I wish it hadn't been such a long wait but also? It's done so well, it was worth it. Also, controlling a giant magical pirate ship is the dopest thing ever and I would like to kill basically all heartless with that now. The magical Disney rides as an attack system works even better than I had hoped :D It's my favorite new addition so far. Going to Mt. Olympus was fantastic as well!!!! The whole time, Liz, and I were making jokes about how Sora was gonna have to apologize to Hercules for breaking all of the stuff in his dad's house, and I think Pat almost had a hernia when I started breaking things in Hephaestus's forge.

Finishing up Olympus rewarded me with my boy Riku!!!! He's been my fave since KH1 and just...hello Riku :D I fucking hate demon towers but playing as Riku was slick. It definitely reminded me of Aqua in 0.2, and it reflects the growth he's had versus Sora having to start all over again.

......why are your pants so awkward lookin though??? Like that's an......interesting bulge :T Please...please wear your pants differently in the future...

Aaaaaand my other boy, Ienzo!!!! I just about screamed and jumped out of my seat in excitement; I somehow didn't expect to see him quite so early!! I'm a little disappointed that we haven't gone to Radiant Garden so far, but cell phone Ienzo is more than enough to keep me satisfied. I loved him asking Aeleus if he wanted to talk to Roxas, too, because fuck that's adorable?? Too cute. Too good. If anyone makes Ienzo cry I will fight them. FUCKING TWILIGHT TOWN IS GORGEOUS I DIED FIFTY TIMES FROM JOY (but not during the massively overpowered demon tower fight because I'm good at video games). It was so fucking good to get to go back and see it lovingly rendered in high def. I almost immediately went to find the crack in the wall, got upset that someone had apparently fixed the glaring hole in the wall, and found a back way to the forest through the sewers :D

Remy is adorable??? Like I didn't get good enough shots because I was just too into the cut scene, okay, it was cute. I was very sad that they left him behind (and pleased when apparently Scrooge decided to employ him later, because he knows what's up).

Hi sorry I have to go cry??? Forever????????? Because apparently I wasn't ready to see the Twilight Town mansion without being a big fucking baby! I just...it breaks my heart. These kids and their tragedies hurt me deeply and just. It hurts so good.

R O X A S!!!!!!!!!!!! sobs sobs please help him Sora ;w;

Pence has hacked into the mainframe :D

NOT.

Real talk though, getting to see Hayner, Pence, and Olette again was so fucking good, and watching Pence be a useful nerd was A+ for sure. And just basically everyone being like yeah Sora can't work technology please keep him away from it forever, thanks. It's good. It's good shit!!!!

Something about this shot feels very melancholy, and I while I don't think it was what the end of this cut scene was supposed to feel like, it feels a bit like foreshadowing.

Speaking of problems...I know they were talking about something serious in this scene, but Liz and I kept re-dubbing it with cracky bullshit and so now it makes me giggle. Oops!! Seriously though, it's like "Hey Ansem, maybe stop checking out teenagers? It's getting kinda creepy, even for us villains." "But they're so cute..."

I'm so sorry I'm like this.

Aaaaaaand I'm gonna cut it here, with this fantastic Xemnas face! See y'all next time with Toybox, Kingdom of Corona, and potentially Monstropolis, depending on how much time I have to write at work today :D

[wifihunters]

Can I ask how you got so good at digital painting? I'm trying to get really good, I can already draw really well on paper and can kinda watercolor okay but I'm kinda not sure how to make it look good

lmao you should see my first digital stuff

but ahhhhh i used to do traditional before 2010, and I’m trying to help my girlfriend with using my tablet so I can at least give you a few personal experience tips for differences between them!

idk how people do anything without tablets. i can do… not much… with a mouse.

getting used to just drawing a line is tough when you aren’t looking at your pencil. doing line drawing exercises can help, but i’ve found there are just  some things i’m better off just scanning into the computer off paper (some people, like @may12324 do this for their lineart entirely i believe! but hers still has the digital coloring, so you can find a balance) 

use what tools you have!!! flipping the canvas and the ability to resize an arm are things that make pure traditional artists rage. ask rachele after she watches me do it five times. 

layers!! i figured them out trial and error in corel paint 500 years ago and never read a tutorial in my life but save yourself. youtube it. 

if your program has it–clipping masks/layer masks or the free selection tool is a thing that will always improve your art after you learn how to use it.

know your screen colors/vibrance. if i’m working on our ancient desktop, I can go wild with colors and know they will look duller on most screens.if i’m working on the IPS panel fancy monitor i gave 2 years of my life for on my own computer–I know 90% of people and printers will not see the contrast I do while working.  

honestly–youtube, patreon, and twitch are your best friends. find artists that upload time laspes of their processes, find people livestreaming! this is how i learned so much of things that could be added to my process. there are entire channels dedicated to this, like Level Up! (process videos with guest artists giving voice overs and advise, long), RossDraws (incorporating photos in… different ways than you’d expect, fun and energetic, very short), FZD (tutorials on… everything…) and tbh hundreds more you can find by clicking ‘related channel’ over and over.

get a good brush pack. everything you could want exists, and it’s probably free/cheap! charcoal, graphite mockups, painterly ones, things that will cover your canvas in 300 badly rendered roses (thanks, adobe) are all there ♥ 

try new things. there are hundreds of paths to make a final product and you only know which one is best by trying at least a few! 

And after asking rachele: apparently memorizing what order I click buttons in is hardest for her (and still hard after you’ve watched tutorials! some of us use hotkeys and you’ll never see us open a tab or menu) so just… clicking around and expanding your knowledge of what button does what will always help you speed the process. I have only a few keys i set manually to be under my left hand on the keyboard, aka: eyedropper/color selection, brush tool, selection/selection inverse, and undo/redo. That’s all I get by on! 

also, this was the oldest thing i have to show, so just for ref: don’t give up, the switch is rough♥

[spectrumelf]

Hi there! So, first off, I absolutely ADORE your animation and art style! The characters are just so flexible and bouncy-looking! Especially the way you draw MTT! And second... I don't know if you'll read this, but I'm hoping to got to college soon. I wanna be able to do storyboards and character design for cartoons one day! So, I was wondering... What would your advice be? What classes should I take? And, also.... After doing what you do... Do you still love it? Hope to hear from you. 💛 ~K.

Hiya!! Thank you so mush for your nice words ;o; They make me really happy!!!! I like my characters bouncy looking hehe ^^ Sorry if this gets long !What most of my advice would boil down to is both practice what you know already and actively learn new things. Also ask yourself what you enjoy doing! Storyboarding mostly involves character acting and quickly rendering appealing and readable gestures, while character design is drawing different types of characters to populate scenes, often from a bunch of different angles, while drawing it all in the style of the show (aka, you gotta be flexible).If you enjoy both equally, that’s awesome! You can always try for both jobs. Either way, figure drawing would be a good class to take (and also something you can do on your own, though having to pass a class provides good motivation haha)! It helps you to render 3d forms on a 2d surface and learn anatomy, which make for more appealing drawings and also helps you draw poses faster.

For storyboarding, see if you can take classes that teach composition and if there are any film-related classes (wether it’s watching films or making them) those will help. If you can learn storyboard pro (the industry-standard storyboarding program) that’s a bonus too (If there aren’t classes on that, you can download the free trial and watch tutorials, which is what I did for my first job. It’s a pretty easy program to learn and it’s fun to play around in!)For character design, I’m not 100% sure since I’ve never had that job so all I know about it is that you have to be able render different body types, creatures, animals, etc. depending on the show. If there’s a class called “character design” you should take that xD And draw all kinds of different people as often as you can.Sorry if I’m not too much help on classes; pretty much everything I learned for my jobs I learned outside of school. Basically if you have a passion for what you do, and.. sigh… STAY DETERMINED, you’ll find a way to achieve your goals no matter what. Pretty much everyone I meet in this industry has gotten where they are through a different route, so there’s always a chance you’ll get in from a way you weren’t expecting! Lastly, meet as many artists as you can. Having contacts can get you jobs and more importantly, having friends with similar interests and goals is awesome :3PS!! Almost forgot. Just something to keep in mind is that storyboarders are in much higher demand than character designers I hear, but if character design is your passion you should deffo go for it!!PPS Also yes!! I still loooooove doing what I do! I’ll never stop loving to draw.

[cortex-reaver]

Chapter 63: Jailbreak Prep

Warnings: language, cyberspace surreality

Masterpost

Been a while. I’ve had this with a 15-plus chapter buffer sitting on my hard-drive for a while. Just now starting to get back into things again.

Chapter 63: Jailbreak Prep

Warnings: drugs, language, cyberpunk horror-ish mention

Hacker stared morosely at the Cortieball in his lap, gently running one hand along its surface. Cortie's gaze darted around uneasily as she contemplated the psychological clusterfuck that would be his rescue mission.

He sighed.

A clatter interrupted his reverie. He glanced up to see the Stooges shuffling in to watch the goings-on. He waved half-heartedly.

“You think you guys could give me a quick Reaver c-space tutorial?” he asked tiredly. “I took a look in local c-space already and it's nuts. Also there might be some monitors out there. I noticed a couple floating skulls like the old-time Reavers”--

Moe: Dude that was us. Didn't you see the glitch art?

Larry: DUDE I had the whole Pirate Pixels hack going. BOOYAH.

Moe: C-space here is WICKED SICK!  You're gonna love it. Well once you're over the whole neon overload shitfest. It uh, takes some adjusting.

The Stooges grinned in perfect unison, letting out little burbling moans. Hacker blinked. Then blinked again. Cortie giggled from his lap.

“No wonder you didn't freak out when we showed up at the door, huh? Okay then. Anything I need to know?”

Larry: Bottomless 1-ups. Seriously. Infinite c-space reloads. Get zapped, come back pronto.

Moe: You're still gonna feel those hits, but they're just not gonna wear you down. You've got a big-ass machine, CPU and all, sprouting outta your brain. So you can take 'em better.

Curly: You also got a deeper health pool. Like, triple cuz of the cyberware. AKA: More hitpoints. I mean, from the gamer perspective....

“Nice. Now I just gotta brace for the incoming Berserker trip dipped in acid and Stam-Up then,” Hacker muttered, then fished in his armor's pockets. “Pretty sure I got a patch in here somewhere.”

Larry moved forward, waving their hands to catch Hacker's attention. He glanced up in surprise at the Reaver's wicked grin.

Larry: Nawww you're not gonna need that. Our rigs feed us the pharma shit. Yours probably does too. Just look for a Stam-Up option in the menus.

Moe: DUDE do you reaaaaally wanna enable him?

Curly: Do you seriously NOT want to enable him? We're in SHITFUCK CENTRAL here. Better he know where to get his Stam-Up NOW before he needs it. Cause we just TOLD him about the health rundown, 'member? Not as fast, but it's still gonna happen. Specially with SHODAN-flavored c-space shit.

Moe: Good point, bro. Good point.

Dazed, Hacker checked his menus.

Sure enough, there was a pharmaceutical menu with such a long list of assorted drugs to replicate for his body. He knew only half of them. Fortunately he recognized the Stam-Up option, and cackled softly.

Moe: Don't forget the Genius stuff. We get those by default whenever we go into c-space. Probably why you got back out as fast as you did. Helps with the fast reloads. Annnd you're gonna want a double-dose to start.

Hacker: Oh yeah right. Lemme just turn both of those on...

“Permanent life-time supply of Stam-Up,” he said in wonderment as his new Reaver frame promptly began feeding his body a moderate dose of both drugs. The world felt brighter, crisper, even more saturated now. He grinned.

“If I'd known a Reaver rig could do this”--

“WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU TELL HIM THAT?!” Goggles yelled in exasperation.

All three Reavers backed up. Slightly. They shot her offended looks, folding ther arms.

Larry: He's gonna need it! Specially Genius. Dude's not used to the c-space here.

Curly: C'mon, you don't know how SHODAN is in c-space. We heard plenty from the Cerberus guys here. He's going up against all her crazy-ass shit.

Moe: HE'S TOTALLY GONNA NEED IT OKAY? This IS SHODAN we’re talking about here--

“I'm gonna stop you right there,” Goggles let out a low growl as she clapped a hand to her face, then dragged it down to stretch out her skin. “I've fought SHODAN in an FTL warp that turned c-space into fucking reality. I think I have a pretty good idea.”

“SHe d-dOesSS,” SHObeta hissed.

“AnNd he WiLL neED aLl the Help he Can gET,” Cortie spoke up.

Goggles sighed, then held up her hands as she backed away.

“Okay. Fine. Ignore the sensible voice in the room.”

“All right, anything else before I go in there to break Cortie out?” Hacker asked the Stooges.

“MiND yoUR RanGE,” Cortie interrupted softly. “YoU Will KNow whaAT I meaAN. I am UNabLE to SPeaK theEEr-r-E, so I wiLl w-waRn yoU nOOW. I suSPect The SUper-ReaAVer-r-rRs kneW how To bYpasS it. It wAs the ONly DeFEnSE I haD RuNNinG TheEEe-RE.”

Hacker froze, his entire Reaver rig raising abruptly.

“You kept...that system?”

“HOw DO yOU thiNK I PuLled mY ForRK out of RebeCCA's boDY?” she asked so pointedly that SHObeta flinched.

Goggles and Hacker could only stare.

The soldier dug into one pocket, and pried out a large black bandanna, and passed it to Hacker. Only then did he realize he'd broken into a sweat his new Reaver technology couldn't counter. He gratefully took it and dabbed at his face.

Cortie drooped inside the ball, her eyes wide and sad.

“I wouLd Not be ABle to StoP thE neuRaL RoOTKit if tHe ProtoCols actiVAte it,” she whispered, her eyes welling with glittering digital tears. “P-p-p-pLeASe...s-t-t-taAY saAFe.”

“Y-yeah. Okay. N-no problem,” Hacker squeaked out. “But it's being run by an ethics program, right? That limits the kinda commands it's gonna try running on my brain...r-right?”

Cortie blinked.

“What's the worst a neural rootkit run by an ethics program gonna do, paralyze him?” Goggles asked, surprised.

“I...w-w-wOUld raTher-r-r NOt KNoOW,” she whispered. “JuusSt StaY s-s-saFE.”

“R-right.”

He closed his eyes, blocking out all his various inputs as he settled himself back on the regenerator room's floor. He settled into a nice comfy cross-legged position, and put Cortieball securely in his lap.

He tried to replicate the search for the Visible Spectrum View. Two tries flavored by constant mental cussing later, he finally found the C-SPACE ENTRY button he'd missed in his earlier fumbling.

Cyberspace bloomed in his mind, all neon outlines and utter blackness beyond. As he squinted in the new landscape, he spotted distant shapes in the darkness past the glowing walls of his immediate area.

Three large pixilated skulls hovered in front of him. One sported an equally pixilated eyepatch, while the other had animated red-and-blue flames playing across its face. The third gleamed a brilliant silver which rippled lazily from gunmetal gray to dazzling platinum.

Hacker recognized them as the ones he'd seen earlier. Then he wondered how he'd assumed they were hostiles when they looked like flying retro-ware hacker icons instead of Citadel programs. He mentally shook his head. His brain's been through a lot right now. Best to forgive and move on.

Moe: Yo.

Curly: DUUUDE that is a sick-ass avatar.

Larry: DAAAAAAMN man that makes me look like a sad troll.

Hacker: Oh? What do I look like?

The pirate-decorated skull spat out a gleaming metallic mirror which unfolded, then floated to hang between it and Hacker. He stared at it, then reeled backwards while screaming in horror.

He looked like a hyper-realistic neon green skull, complete with glittering fractal-covered orbs for eyes, and crackling lines of energy for teeth.

“WHAUGH!”

He blinked as the regen room swam into view in front of him. He glanced about wildly as Goggles eyed him quizzically.

“Dude, you okay?”

All three Reavers burbled mischievously. Hacker quickly rearranged his disarrayed Super-Reaver limbs back around him, and forced himself to settle down. Cortie stared up at him with confusion.

“Eh, not a big deal. I just...”

Larry: Little avatar shock heh heh heh.

Moe: I guess skulls aren't your thing huh?

Hacker shot the Stooge an irritated glare as he straightened. Goggles snickered as she realized what the Stooges meant, shaking her head with a lopsided grin.

“Big bad Super-Reaver scared of his own face,” he heard her mutter.

He flipped her the bird. She folded her arms while still chuckling. He rolled his eyes, then turned to the Stooges.

“I can change that, right? Is there a menu for those kinda things?”

Moe: Oh yeah sure it's probably the same on your stuff as ours. Look for Avatar Customization. You could prolly set it back to your old c-space avatar. Go to the menus before coming back, ok?

Hacker: Okay, will do.

Moments later, he found the menu he'd been looking for, and plowed into the customization options. Another few moments got him a decent replica of his old c-space avatar – a copy of his younger self's appearance with simplified polygons making up its shape. It was very in with the pixel-rave style at the time of Citadel, something he remained fond of even when it was forty years out of date.

Once he was sure he had his appearance the way he wanted it, Hacker returned to cyberspace.

The skulls looked him up and down, then nodded in unison.

Moe: Totally you, dude.

Larry: Yo Hacker, welcome back. Smart move going with your old Citadel look.

Curly: Oooh likin' the whole pixel-retro getup there. Sweet.

Hacker: Thanks. Suprised you guys even remember that interview I showed it in. Some things...eh...back to business. So where are we? Local regen-room c-space or a junction?

Hacker peered about the room. The walls here glowed from deep blue-green grid, rippling with lines of energy and code. One set of green lines pulsed horizontally from the left to the right, while a set of blue lines pulsed vertically from top to bottom. Code streamed along the lines here and there, sparking blue and purple pixels where they intersected. Beyond them lay a rippling black nothingness, which was a real feat of virtual rendering - he registered it as both a squirming solid surface and a complete utter void.

A quick scan with his software told him the walls were made of a super-dense, multi-layered ICE that would require considerable time and processing power to crack. It was the cyberspace equivalent of bending a black hole into the shape of a room. No signals got out past it, and no signals got inside.

Moe: Actually, both. It's the Med room but Cortie stuck a junction in for us. Asked us to monitor it for her. Keep out any skeeveware or whatever else her bitchzilla fork stuck in the station. As for the room? It's rigged as a Max-Sec Area surrounded by sickass ICE walls. Cortie's stuff.

Curly: It's wicked strong. She also put in in this network of high-end EMF blockers, so no signals get in or out of the area. You basically walk inside and you don't exist, as far as the station cares. Might as well be a Faraday Cage. Cept a Faraday Cage is like, Stone Age shit compared to this.

Larry: The defense perimeter is ten meters in all directions past the doorway. She took out all the cameras between the elevator and here to help with that. So the station and by extension, Crazyfork, doesn't know what you've been doing with a dead Super-Reaver. Heh heh heh.

Curly: OK back to the present, kids. Look to your left, Hacker. That's all the regenerator systems. You'll see the other operations systems as little diamonds around the room. They'll shoot data around here and there. Don't interrupt 'em. They'll bork up systems in the room if they don't get their bits and bytes.

Larry: You got into the junction when you popped in the first time cause you were just outside the doorway and inside the perimeter. So long as you're in the perimeter or in the room, you'll pop up in here whenever you reload. Got all that?

Hacker: With you so far.

Larry: If you go outside of all this, you ain't popping up here, and well, I'm not gonna speculate on that. Cause FUBARDAN.

Hacker: Oh. Thanks.

He turned to face four large glowing green wireframe boxes lined in a row. Within them moved dozens of shapes resembling bones or organs made up of very tiny flickering pixels. They floated in groups, resembling stacks of Tetris blocks coming together in lines as the regenerators went through their restorative work. Once the icon of an organ or other biological system turned from red, through yellow, and finally green, it dropped from the top of the box into orderly rows of green items at its bottom.

One box had more green icons piled at its bottom than the other, with a timer indicating sufficient cycles to equal roughly fifteen minutes. Judging from the patient picture plastered across one of the box's walls in bright black-and-yellow, Hacker guessed he was looking at Rebecca's regenerator. The other three boxes indicated bodies in worse shape – particularly the one for Suzi.

Not too different from the other regenerator icons I've seen...hmm...basically just higher-resolution, and higher complexity to match. Hokay. Making more sense here now.

Nodding to himself, Hacker did a slow 180-degree turn. Now that he had a better sense of how this higher-resolution c-space worked, he could figure out what everything was.

He quickly recognized the assorted software and data-input icons for the replicator hovering in an orderly multi-colored sphere to one corner. Then he spotted the flat blue-gray diamond shapes of the local systems icons – life-support, lighting, temperature control, gravity, and the doorway. Indicators glittered and flashed from their surfaces in shades of red, yellow, and green. Data, arranged in lines of bright geometric icons, flicked between them in orderly rows of pixels zipping across the room's c-space.

The systems' indicators were mostly green, except for a haphazard flicker between red and orange glowing from the doorway's diamond. Data sputtered erratically from it to the other systems. An error icon blinked above it, indicating some sort of software conflict with the outer doorway mainframe in the station. He was too far away to read its message to be sure.

Then came a familiar sight hovering in the empty space between the regenerators' systems and the replicator's.

A familiar cone, twice the size of his c-space avatar, drifted lazily near him. Its smooth  surface shone a dark gray covered in tidy blue and gray lines. A staticky face stared at him from its flat circular top, its eyes wide with horror. Unlike SHODAN's avatar from Citadel's cyberspace, this cone didn't have the curving tentacles along its top at quarter-intervals. Nor did it emit SHODAN's characteristic green glow.

Hacker: Damn, Cortie. You're definitely locked down. Oh. Right, you can't talk. S-sorry.

He watched as the cone continued its slow floating trajectory, nearly bouncing off a flitting data icon racing between a regenerator and the replicator. Its face flicked through several expressions – horror, anger, sadness, hopefulness, and then sadness again.

He glanced to his cyberspace weapons menu, noting that a Super-Reaver had a lot more options than he ever did on Citadel. Pulsers. Megapulsers. Rapid-fire virus projectiles. Energy beams for weakening ICE shields. ICE picks, even.

Between his loadout and his Super-Reaver capabilities, Hacker would likely survive whatever battering Cortie's ethics systems put him through long enough to get her free. The problem was more how close he'd have to get to Cortie to send that code to her.

Hacker: Okay guys. If I get close to her, the ethics params are gonna pick me up as an intruder and start shooting. My range on the filesend is about the same as her brain-rootkit system, so I'm gonna have to chance it on the range to get null.ethic to her.

Moe: Right.

Hacker: Fan out and try to keep any projectiles or shit from hitting regenerator systems. It's gonna get ugly real quick in here.

Larry: Gotcha.

Moe: Good idea, that.

Curly: We'll back you up if you need it.

Well, here goes nothing.

Hacker headed towards the tumbling cone, pulsers at the ready.

Intruder detected. No Tri-Optimum authorizations activated. Security systems online, spoke a familiar voice – SHODAN's flat pre-hack voice – as the ethics systems' ICE suddenly activated.  A glowing blue bubble popped into existence, encapsulating Cortie's cone.

Hacker: Figures. Let's see if I can punch a hole in that...

Hacker opened fire with both the pulser in one hand while holding an ICE pick in the other.

[still-as-the-hourglass]

I watched some skin rendering tutorials and thus felt the need to practice a bit when the chance presented itself (aka when 6yo asked if she could hold her brother)

[aion-rsa]

Marvel’s Avengers Beta Doesn’t Deliver Superhero Spectacle, But There’s Hope

https://ift.tt/30sxkpP

There was a moment while playing the Marvel’s Avengers early access beta on the PlayStation 4 when I had to ask myself whether this slice of the game was the best way to showcase what was supposed to be a major spectacle for Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Following two of the biggest movies of all time, Marvel’s Avengers should feel like a victory lap for Square Enix and a grand return to video games for the superhero team. Instead, the beta showcases a low-key affair that never quite feels all that fresh or unique.

While the combat, traversal, and all of the game’s other mechanics generally work just fine, the title’s dependence on long-established trends and design concepts, as well as a very dull group of baddies, render Marvel’s Avengers sort of ordinary. The game’s arcade-y co-op gameplay feels like an over-the-shoulder upgrade of the Marvel Ultimate Alliance series, which is undoubtedly a major inspiration here, while the loot shooter elements don’t really add anything new to that particular genre, either.

It’s important to note that these are my impressions after only playing the game’s beta build, a small portion of a much larger whole. This is in no way a final verdict on Marvel’s Avengers.

Before we jump in, you can check out some gameplay footage from the beta below:

I spent three days with the beta, playing through the “A-Day” intro mission that Square Enix has previewed plenty of times before as well as several main story missions (called Hero Missions in the game), a handful of short Drop Zone and War Zone missions, an Iconic mission focusing on the Hulk, and three HARM Room Challenges best described as the game’s take on a horde mode. While the beta was a varied sampling of the activities that Marvel’s Avengers has to offer, it was also a brief one that I wouldn’t consider a full view of the final product, and I definitely left the beta with the sense that there was way more to see.

The beta opens with the heavily-directed A-Day tutorial mission that familiarizes you with the different heroes at your disposal. You wreck terrorists on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge with Thor and his mighty hammer while zipping through the skies to lend air support as Iron Man. The Hulk joins the fight on the bridge, too, smashing and stomping his way through gun-toting enemies and tanks. The tutorial gives players only the briefest of moments with Captain America and his trusty shield before switching to Black Widow for a QTE-heavy boss fight with Taskmaster.

The A-Day sequence is fast-paced and exciting, full of Marvel’s signature funny quips and heroic moments to be sure. But while this opening story mission shows how Earth’s Mightiest Heroes can work perfectly in tandem during an emergency, it isn’t really indicative of the rest of the missions in the beta, which feature combat more akin to a brawler or beat em up than the choreographed, more linear fights of the intro.

A time jump after the intro sequence sees the Avengers disband after failing to save San Francisco from the terrorist attack. We reunite with Bruce Banner and Kamala sometime later on a mission to reassemble the superhero team. The beta keeps things largely out of spoiler territory, so I didn’t get to see how the duo first met or what set them on their new mission. But from what I did see, it’s clear that the young Kamala, who is destined to become the superhero Ms. Marvel, is the heart of this story.

It’s her desire to learn more about her powers as well as the heroes she grew up admiring that drive the main plot forward. She brings an energy to the team that’s a very nice contrast to the much more defeated Banner, who is living in exile on the Chimera years after A-Day. We get hints that he’s not really interested in being the Hulk or an Avenger anymore, but Kamala convinces him that reuniting the team is the only way to save the world from the game’s main enemy faction, Advanced Idea Mechanics (aka AIM).

The Hero Missions that follow hit familiar story beats, as Bruce and Kamala first go on a mission to recover an old piece of Stark tech vital to finding Iron Man and then make contact with what remains of SHIELD, now led by Maria Hill. The beta stops short of actually reassembling the team, but along the way, we watch as Kamala interacts with pieces of Avengers history, from finding Cap’s original shield in a silo to walking around the team’s old HQ on the Chimera. It’s nice to be able to experience this story from the point-of-view of a fan who feels as much wonder for these characters as we did when we read our first Avengers comic book or watched the first movie, even if the beta’s somewhat unsurprising and safe missions don’t quite inspire wonder themselves.

The big issue with the Hero Missions and War Zone/Drop Zone side quests is that AIM’s massive army of jet pack-wearing soldiers, evil scientists, and robots aren’t all that much fun to fight or learn about. While some of the robots boast cool, bug-like designs (one class even looks like a smaller version of an X-Men Sentinel), they’re basically just punching bags and bullet sponges that don’t require much strategy to take down.

Running from room to room taking out AIM agents and machines starts to feel repetitive really quickly, and it doesn’t help that the environments sometimes feel really drab — big steel buildings with plenty of glass and high-tech lab equipment to destroy. There were even times when I felt like War Zone missions were recycling the same environment, simply remixing the order of rooms and hallways you traverse. Fortunately, these environments are almost fully destructible, which is a nice touch, especially when you’re playing as someone as chaotic as the raging Hulk. But overall, the level design showcased in the beta felt a little uninspired.

Once you unlock the War Table, you’re pretty much free to embark on missions in any order you choose and with whichever character you want, except when it comes to Iconic missions, which require you to play as a specific hero. The beta featured a Hulk-centric Iconic mission that saw the Jade Giant smash into an AIM facility to destroy the group’s gamma ray research. There’s a bit more storytelling involved with Iconic missions as well as opposed to other War Zone and short Drop Zone activities, which feel a bit less remarkable.

While there are a variety of different War Zone and Drop Zone missions to choose from, the ones in the beta mostly come down to fast sprints from point A to B that require you to destroy AIM research, defeat a robotic mini-boss, gather intel, or hold down a specific position. They rarely feel like unique experiences that could only belong in a Marvel game and are generally unexciting. And although some War Zone missions tend to offer up multiple stages and objectives, usually broken up by an elevator ride into an AIM facility or underground bunker, Drop Zone missions are bewilderingly short. You can finish them within 10 minutes, which makes them feel like filler content most of the time, although it should be noted that the shorter length of these missions is by design.

The nice thing about Marvel’s Avengers is that it won’t force multiplayer on you. All of the missions mentioned above can be played solo with three AI characters at your side or with up to three other players. While I only spent a very limited time playing with others, matchmaking worked well, but the real test will come when Crystal Dynamics opens up the beta to a much bigger group of players throughout August. But if you want to play the game solo, you can do so no problem. I even found the companion AI to be nice substitutes for real players during big fights with AIM. It’s evident that the studio has put in a lot of time into making all of these heroes feel genuine regardless of whether they’re being controlled by a player or AI.

A high point of the beta was the HARM Room, a holographic training area where the Avengers can square off against hordes of AIM enemies. In this mode, which is set on the Chimera itself, the team must survive 10 waves of increasingly difficult baddies. Only three difficulty levels were available in the beta, but it was a nice taste of what the mode has to offer. Whereas fighting AIM grunts in War Zones and Drop Zones starts to feel a little redundant, taking them on in bigger numbers in an enclosed area can get pretty exhilarating, especially when you’re against a wall in later rounds with fewer chances to heal.

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As far as the combat itself goes, there’s a nice flow to the action, which feels pretty polished at this point, as you chain a mix of attacks with Black Widow, Kamala Khan, Iron Man, and Hulk. I particularly enjoyed playing as Black Widow, who uses a mix of batons, gravity-defying flips, kicks, and dual pistols to take down the game’s robotic enemies. She also has a cool grapple that she uses to swing to hard-to-reach platforms or hurl herself at enemies. Switching between her melee moves and third-person shooter gunplay is pretty smooth, too. Black Widow ultimately feels like the hero who benefits the most from Crystal Dynamics’ own experience with the action-adventure genre. At times, I even wished the studio had embarked on a Black Widow solo adventure instead of such a big superhero endeavor.

Unsurprisingly, learning how to play as each hero is the best part of the beta. While Captain America and Thor are notably absent beyond the tutorial, you get plenty of time with the other Avengers. For the most part, each character feels distinct. Black Widow performs as a close- to mid-range hero while Ms. Marvel is all about melee. Hulk not only brings devastating tank-like power to the battlefield and destruction to the game’s environments but also does quite a bit of platforming along the way (a strange choice to give Hulk so much of the platformer gameplay but it mostly works). With Iron Man, you unlock the ability to fly around and wreak havoc from above, although his melee attacks also feel satisfying and weighty.

Special abilities that work on a cooldown timer add a nice superheroic layer to each character. Iron Man can summon his Hulkbuster suit for when he needs to take on bigger enemies and Hulk can clap his hands together to create a soundwave that does incredible damage and staggers targets. Black Widow can activate a camo that effectively turns the entire team invisible for a short time while Ms. Marvel can embiggen. Each hero has three unique abilities that really complement them and their move set. It was a blast learning how to best implement each ability.

A skill tree and a gear upgrade system allow you to unlock new attacks for each hero as well as upgrade gear stats to make your character stronger. As you level up in the game, you get skill points to redeem in the skill tree while the game’s myriad resources can be used to upgrade different pieces of gear. There are quite a few resources to keep track of, mostly found inside giant crates during missions, but I found that you could mostly ignore which resources upgraded each piece of gear. Compared to loot shooters, collecting resources never feels as grind-y or frustrating as it does in, say, the Destiny games.

You can also find different pieces of gear on the field, such as better gauntlets for Black Widow or better armor for Ms. Marvel, that offer perks (buffs) such as a damage boost, health boost, or elemental effects. Some pieces of gear even have two perks that you can unlock by upgrading them. As far as I could tell from the beta, gear serves to boost your character’s stats further but doesn’t offer any cool cosmetic effects, making loot feel a little less satisfying as a whole than in other loot-based games. Instead, cosmetic changes to your character will come from unlocking skins through gameplay or buying them with real money.

While microtransactions weren’t turned on during the beta, Crystal Dynamics did provide in-game currency so that I could shop for some skins, emotes, and themed nameplates for when you want to rep your favorite hero while in the matchmaking lobby. Skins include a Joe Fixit costume for Hulk, a casual winter-themed outfit for Kamala, a very cool black and red suit for Black Widow, and MCU-inspired suits for each hero. There were only a few skins to try for each character but trailers and gameplay videos have already promised way more costumes to choose from.

Some Marvel fans might perk up at the thought of being able to play Marvel’s Avengers as Joe Fixit and I guarantee there’s plenty more deep-cut comic book goodness where that came from. Credit must be given to Crystal Dynamics for just how much Marvel history it managed to pack into just this short beta. From breaking news from Marvel’s number one reporter, Phil Sheldon, to references to Dum Dum Dugan, easter eggs to be found on the Golden Gate Bridge, and classic real-life comics that make up the game’s collectibles, it’s clear Crystal Dynamics has done its research and has a real love for this universe. There are Avengers memorabilia scattered pretty much everywhere in the Hero Missions and there are even one or two villainous cameos I won’t spoil here.

While AIM facilities feel a bit dull as you run around their familiar hallways, the world as a whole feels lived in. The level design in the beta might falter but the world-building in Marvel’s Avengers is on point. It’s just a shame that the gameplay itself never comes together like the world and lore Crystal Dynamics is building around it.

I return back to my earlier question about whether the content specifically chosen for this beta was the best way to showcase a game as big as Marvel’s Avengers. Did Crystal Dynamics play it too safe for the sake of preserving story elements and other surprises? Will War Zone missions have more to offer than the repetitive gameplay shown here? Crystal Dynamics has stressed that these missions could last anywhere from 10 minutes to two hours. It would’ve been nice to see a mission that’s somewhere in the middle, just to get a better look at the scope of the game. For now, missions and levels feel too minuscule for a team as big as the Avengers.

Will AIM be the only bad guys in the full game? Hopefully not. There are hints in the beta that other supervillains may be on the move and there’s even a brief boss fight with a villain that’s appeared in an MCU movie. With all of Marvel history at the team’s disposal, it’s hard to believe AIM was the best choice here over the countless other evil organizations, factions, and races created by the House of Ideas. Hopefully, the full game will offer a bit more variety on the bad guy front.

Ultimately, it’s important to remember that this is only a beta and what does work in Marvel’s Avengers works well. There’s hope in the game’s world-building, character design, and the combat system. And don’t forget that Marvel’s Avengers is a live service title designed to change and improve over time. It’s positioned as a platform that will receive content updates for years to come. Like many online games before it, it’s possible Marvel’s Avengers will face a rocky launch this fall, but if the history of this particular game format is any indication, Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix will have plenty of time to right the Chimera.

Marvel’s Avengers is out on Sept. 4 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, and Google Stadia. It’s coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X later this year.

If you’re interested in participating in the beta, here is the schedule of when you can do so:

August 7-9 – PS4 pre-order customers can join the closed beta

August 14-16 – All PS4 owners can join the open beta, and PC and Xbox One pre-order customers can play the closed beta

August 21-23 – Open beta across all platforms

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