#i've never used blockbench before!

[jjuicejunior]

those aren't gumballs, they're just shiny, round rocks

[pinkestsorbet]

i got you a nametag to try to revert the dinnerbone effects

gives this to you

Thank you! I thought I'd be upside down forever lol

...Did it work?

[myrmica]

1, 3, 9, 23 - and as for 23 I already know the insane way you approach layers but I'm basically asking you to share with the class

1. Art programs you have but don't use

well as of (checks watch) 19 hours ago i have blender and no ideaaaaaaaaa what to do with that thing. i'm interested in it for grease pencil/2d animation though... speaking of animation, i tried to pirate tvpaint a long time ago because on paper it seems like it might suit me better than storyboard pro/harmony does but i can't figure out how to get it to do anything. i also couldn't find the version of tvpaint i actually wanted anywhere. animation programs are such a struggle i don't enjoy working in toonboom all that much, if i could i would animate entirely in storyboard pro because it's simpler/more intuitive but i inevitably have to move to harmony to do certain things -_-

otherwise... like, blockbench, modelbench, mine-imator, all of which i haven't touched in a couple years. for drawing i switch between sai and csp pretty regularly but csp is my default now, i feel like i'm slowly phasing out sai like a cat switching to wet food or something. but i still like sai better for painting (i'm attached to my custom brush in there)

3. What ideas come from when you were little

i have no idea actually. i don't really have any long term characters or story ideas that have endured the test of time, i draw entirely different things now, erm... well here's some minecraft art i drew at age 11 some things never change

9. What are your file name conventions

bad. well no it could be worse for the most part it's just 3000 numbered iterations of the same file. i'm too stuck in my ways to change it at this point but i do wish it was more orderly

and i organize my art more generally in folders by subject matter. which is funny because then you can get stats

^ lifesteal has surpassed the competition (although the file sizes are biased by having deleted all of the iterative working files for older stuff)

23. Do you use different layer modes

okay well in my defense it's BETTER than it USED TO BE. i think i've talked about my whole layer situation before actually but the tldr is i have a problem. i think my average layer count these days for something relatively complicated is in the 200s but once upon a time it could get up to the thousands

welcome to my twisted mind

all that aside i use multiply layers and such pretty often these days. i remember years ago i really hated using them because i didn't like there to be anywhere in an image where you could tell color was layered transparently, if that makes sense? but now i like them to help unify colors

[crowputer]

HIII i saw your reblog, i used blockbench <3 it's super beginner friendly considering i never 3d modeled before this morning HSHFFSD

Ah, thank you very very much! I've been looking into blockbench (have it installed on my computer, just never opened it). Good to know it's pretty easy; I struggled horribly with Blender when I tried to pick it up Your result turned out so very nice :D

[spectresyne]

would you ever consider making video content of your model design/animation process?

or give any advice to someone who’s desperately trying to break into mod creation 😸

Wow, hello! I never get messages here, haha. Unfortunately, I'm like.. genuinely terrible at trying to teach what I know to others, and I'm not even sure my computer could handle recording a video while still working the programs I use. Not reliably, for sure. I can try to offer advice, but on more of a question-and-answer basis. It's hard for me to know where to even begin if someone doesn't ask about what exactly they're aiming to create, first, y'know? idk if that makes any sense. As far as mod creation goes, I have nothing to offer- I don't know how to code a mod in java. I've only made models using the infrastructure of existing mods and plugins, namely Optifine, MorePlayerModels, and ModelEngine, and a lot of vanilla work lately, too. These all involve some kind of coding, but it's pretty strictly limited to .json files, and nothing with actual java code.

I self-taught myself everything I know. Found out Blockbench was free, opened it up a few years ago, and just started brute forcing my way into making it do the thing I wanted (at that time, it was making a horse into a griffon with optifine. 'Start small' is not really my M.O.)

I looked up a lot of documentation for the plugins and mods I was using. Those helped a lot, as did searching up minecraft's own resources (they put a lot of articles and guides out for making this stuff, nowadays, though it's more for bedrock than java.) I also opened up things that others made and released, just to see how they did things- eventually I could pick them apart and kind of reverse-engineer the ideas to understand what I should be doing, too, with my own work. I encourage anyone wanting to learn to do this to my work, too! Bust 'em open and tear 'em apart, get at the inner workings! You can always re-download the file if you break it beyond repair :D Understanding the base of what I had to work with went a long way toward knowing just what I can make a 3D model do when it came to Blockbench, such as knowing if it could use emissive glow textures, animations (texture or model based kinds), or translucency. Or even knowing just how hard I can push an animation- for example, with MPM, animations can do a LOT, but it takes a lot of fiddling to make, say, a realistic quadruped walk cycle fit into the very short window of time the minecraft walk animation plays for. Because with MPM, there's no way to control the time of an animation- only the amount of frames within it. Stuff like that. And that's different for every mod, so you'll have to look into the one you're using, or making, and work within its bounds. I do tons of trial-and-error of loading and reloading things in-game to see what something I changed will do... then go back to fix whatever broke in the process. I often have to redo this kind of thing even for techniques I've done before, because I forget to take notes, and then also forget what I did correctly in the first place. It's kind of awful lmao. Anyway, this became a huge ramble and I don't think I even answered the questions very well... sorry.

[rightstickdev]

How do you create your art? I really like it. I want to start to make low poly 3d pixel art and i tried Blockbench; do you think Is a good app or do you have other suggestions?

I've never heard of Blockbench before so I couldn't offer any advice on that one, but all of our art team uses Blender (it's free!) for 3D art and Clip Studio Paint (it's less free! but it's fairly affordable) for 2D art and textures.

(also apologies for the late reply)