#process stuff

[wibblus]

wiggliestwobbliest girl

(godot wigglebone addon vere good :thumbsup:)

[meredithmcclaren]

how I set up colors

[smoothshine]

I don't know when I'll be able to post the full thing, but here's a wip with the man of the day himself, doing his Big Thinking

[m0r1bund]

hello! I was catching up on reading NAKAQUOI! and the essay from the most recent entry was such an inspiring method of storytelling. enough so to make me reach out and ask about your website in general (if you're comfortable answering!). what is it like running a lore/gallery site for your work? how and why did you get started? and lastly, what about it keeps you going?

thank you, cheers! -Winn

😭 Thank you so much for the kind words, this means a lot to me. I really enjoyed writing that little essay.

This is going to be a weird and vulnerable sidebar, but I promise I’m going somewhere with it. Honestly, it blows my mind that anyone reads them. I think it’s because I’m still operating on the assumption that this form of storytelling is for n=1 (yours truly) and other people are merely tolerating it, LOL. I used to be way more sensitive about sharing my characters / stories / worlds, because the forms of storytelling that came naturally to me were often received as incomprehensible, dense, and unintuitive by other people. At a certain point I decided that I just had to accept this and become my own hype man. People could enjoy the pretty pictures out of context, and they could be a vehicle for me to journal about the pretend people who live in my head. Good compromise 👍

for someone who talks big about making weird art and finding the 6 people in the audience who truly get it, I don’t think I realized that this could include my deranged essays about things that aren’t real. And yet. AND YET!!!! I think this desire to present my work in a way that’s “more” than just pretty pictures with text attached to them has been simmering for a long time, even though I dismissed it and was kind of embarrassed about it. Which is wild. Because I grew up on bestiaries and warrior cats lore compendiums and video game wikis and morrowind. There was clearly a precedent. And Yet.

Anyway, this desire started rubbing shoulders with the technical limitations of blogs and gallery websites, and also a general disillusionment with social media during the enshittification of the internet. Like, yeah it sucked that my whole body of work could vanish overnight. But mostly I had worldbuilding neuroses that made me want to scratch at the walls, and I knew just enough html + css to be dangerous. In 2018, I had also finished some longer works that made me more confident in my ability to deliver a cohesive Moribund, and these works weren’t intuitive to share on social media… So… I guess that gave me the impetus to stop flirting with the idea of getting my own website and start actually working on it.

M0R1BUND.com used to be a pure html + css + js website hosted on Neocities. It was ideal and I miss it in a lot of ways, because yeah, that IS the most unadulterated control you can have over your webspace. Had a blast with it, experimented a lot, learned a lot, hosted galleries and twines and webfiction and digital collages and ARPG stuff and interactive maps and a webcomic. And it was mine as much as it was the work of kind people sharing sample code on stackexchange, LOL.

Eventually, I felt the growing pains of managing this by hand. Updating ate hours out of my day. There are definitely more intuitive ways to build and maintain a pure html + css + js website, but I was working with what I knew. I started learning wordpress for basedt.net with the hopes of automating certain operations, like posting art to a gallery or pages to a webcomic. It felt intuitive enough that I later rebuilt M0R1BUND.com in wordpress.

It took a long time and a lot of work, like almost a year? And I still haven’t mirrored everything. Wordpress has made things easier to maintain, but I learned the hard way that it doesn't avoid the pitfalls of simpler website-builders… which is to say… whatever it does to make life easier will also make life incredibly difficult if you decide you want to do something manually. And it’s never the stuff you expect.

These days there’s also the baggage of Automattic’s nonsense. Wordpress is open source, so I don’t think it will go anywhere, but it’s still the corporate clownery that I wanted to escape by making my own website. Blech.

Really though, I love running M0R1BUND and it’s the closest thing I have to an ideal “home” for my work. Going to a dedicated website is unintuitive and out of the way for a lot of people, but (indicates generally) what have we just learned about me. This one’s for n=1 and the, like, 6 people who pop in and say hello. You are my people...

Looking forward, things cook at the rate of 2937728839 irons in the fire, and they are all getting done, but they are all getting done sooooo slowly… I’m having fun. Besides having a general compulsion to make art and tell stories and be Understood, I think that’s what carries me thru this. I want to have fun. and I want to trick people into caring about my characters and also the Sonoran Desert. And as Bjork says, I have to get the wiggles out or else the dark times will come.

It’s getting late and I don’t have a denouement for this. Thank you for your kind words! Thank you for asking! hope this answers? hope this helps (???) take the best and leave the rest.

[candycatstuffs]

Hello, I hope you don't mind me asking (and sorry if you've answered this before), but how did you get that 80's anime art effect on your summer Amy and Rouge? Did you use any specific brushes or textures? They both look so amazing!

I dont mind at all! I got the gist of it from this video, but I'll show exactly how I did it under the cut! And thank ya <333

First off, here's the base flats and lineart, no effects or anything

To start the effect, I added a multiply layer at 35% with a soft yellow color as a clipping layer over the flat color layers

Next, I shaded it on a normal layer so I could pick all the shading colors myself and added lighting with a light yellow color on a 30% add layer. You can choose the shading/lighting colors yourself or use layer effects like multiply or add, its just personal preference!

An extra detail I added was changing the layer effect on the shading layer from nothing to a 3px watercolor edge, that gives the shading the neat lines on the edges. I think this is a firealpaca specific setting tho

Next, I added a 35% static overlay on top of all the color layers to give the picture its texture. Some programs have noise filters built in, but I like to just google static overlay and copy paste it in lol

The next step is to copy and paste the lineart, drag it underneath the crisp lineart, and apply a gaussian blur filter to it at about 3-4. You also might wanna tone down the opacity

Then I put ALL the layers into a folder, and put a 15% opacity normal layer over it with a bright yellow to warm it up to make it give it more summery vibes, but also to reduce the contrast between the lineart and colors. I think that rly helps give it the retro anime vibes

Last step! Save the image as a png or make a folder containing all the layers and apply a chromatic abberation filter to it

And thats everything!

[prudenceanagram]

Doing panel prep! feat. my good friend Miffy

[sssatrn]

striker design process notes

a bit about the process for designing my fake omega strikers character. posted separately since not everyone will be interested.

the base character design comes from my pngtuber i use while streaming, which is loosely based on my irl appearance/outfits.

obviously, there were going to have to be some major changes, but i wanted there to be some consistency between this character and the striker character. the haircut is the same, but i iterated it two different ways (one tied, and one down). the jacket also makes an appearance in one of the striker designs with most of the same patches and pins, but recolored to match the color palette. some other aspects made it to the striker design like the baggy pants and chunky shoes, but they aren't as iconic or important in my mind.

the originals are both pen sketches i jotted down while running errands. tbh most of my projects start off as shitty, quick, and EXTREMELY rough sketches or thumbnails in my tiny pocket notebook. i find that having a basic idea of what im gonna draw makes me feel infinitely more confident while transferring it to digital, even if i know i'll have to make edits. i usually force myself to draw these initial sketches in pen, so i dont overthink and waste time redrawing it a million times. im sure that strat doesnt work for everyone, but i still thought id share.

honestly the hardest part of this was making sure that my character fit into the omega strikers "aesthetic", which is this sort of futuristic, streetwear, sportswear combo??? to match this, i added things like the goggles, arm guards, knee pads, straps, sneakers, etc.

this past week ive drawn a metric ton of omega strikers fanart b/c there are so many interesting aspects of the character designs. here are some things i tried to integrate into my own:

a striking color scheme. this doesn't mean having ALL striking/saturated colors (although some characters do that). it just means having a set of colors that define the character, usually one or two colors to make up the majority, and one or two to highlight parts of the character and make them pop.

so many accessories... i tried to make sure that there was no "dead space" in the design. with most strikers, even if their outfits are very straightforward, there's a pattern or accessory to break up the monotony.

weirdly, a lot of strikers have a sort of... triangular, chevron pattern? idk how to describe it but SO many of them have it somewhere on their outfit. so i went wild with it, occasionally converting it into straight stripes when necessary.

some strikers have something dramatic on their outfit that indicates motion. so like, something that will move around when they move. this could be hair, ribbons, straps, jackets, capes, etc. since my character's hair isn't quite long enough to float around, i added the scarf. this step was especially important for me since i sort of wanted my character to be a speed-based zoomy striker, so the impression of movement was essential.

sheeeesh i've written a lot. sorry for the wall of text lmao

i have a lot of other projects this week, so i wont be able to draw lots of omega strikers for a while, but ill come back to it, promise >:)

that's all. see ya ~

[seeminglydark]

Sure, tag op! why not 💕 lines are my fave thing to do, and fun fact, originally I was going to just leave it as line work! Enjoy 😉

The prompt was ‘detention.’

[themightyhumanbroom]

My average writing experience:

"Alright I think I'm almost done actually-"

*Google doc grows second health bar and a choir starts singing in latin*

[rae-butter]

Honestly, I love it when characters relapse. When someone who’s gotten over their anger issues falls into a situation so out of their depth they fall back on their old habits. When someone who’s learned to open up becomes a recluse again in order to cope with something outside their control.

There’s just something so horrible, so toxic, about watching a character grow and then slip back into their old selves in order to cope, bc you know they still care, that they’re the same inside, but watching them hurt so hard they don’t know what else to do brings a sense of catharsis.

[wibblus]

girl this might sound stupid af but do ya have any recommendations for skirt rigging? (a method i thought could work is just parenting the skirt to the bones with automatic weights but still)

srry for wastin ya time = 0-D

(not a waste at all, i've been on a roll with these asks :3)

getting skirts, cloaks, etc. to work well take a lil rigging magic; what i do is map the weights on the skirt to the nearest leg bones, and then use additional 'skirt bones' (typically 4 bones, one for each corner, parented to the respective leg bones) for additional control during animation.

example ^ the upper leg weights (left) control most of the skirt so it moves with the leg, and the skirt bone weights (right) have slight control for pose adjustments and applying a lil physics to the skirt. note that the leg weights fade smoothly from one side to the other so the skirt flows naturally between both legs.

my method for doing this is to first setup the weights for the leg bones (lining it up with the leg itself), and then i paint on the skirt bone weights at about 0.25 weight, using the 'Auto-Normalize' option in Weight Paint mode.

[hope this helps, feel free to leave a reply if something is unclear abgjkdsf]

[milkamel]

AU idea: PV never regains memories, ancients don't reunite and the beasts are freed. Soul jam's powers are weak so SMilk aims to forcefully make PV remember and takes him to the spire (Little does SM know he'll get attached to this little compassionate Healer)

More details about this AU (currently called Slumbering Truth AU): Basically it starts off with Smilk being terrible and basically doing what he was doing in the 8th episode, trying to make PV remember and playing with his mind for his entertainment. He knows who PV used to be but PV knows nothing about him or his own past. He's confused as to why would this powerful cookie need him but decides to submit in exchange for the village being safe.

At first Healer is uncomfortable and nervous but gradually despite Smilk's intimidating look decides to play along his games and get to know him better. Smilk is surprised by the other's behavior (and unexpected wits and trickery) and what started with the urge to break PV down slowly became an urge to keep the other close since the other's intentions to know him were genuine and comforting and SMilk hated the thought of losing that (not that he'd admit that. he needs that Healer to see him suffer, right?).

Now he doesn't want Healer to remember, he doesn't snap at that cookie as much, he wants him to stay in this blissful lie because if PV knew the truth then he'd definitely leave Smilk and lock him again. If Healer knew the truth he'd turn against him instantly, Smilk was sure. For the first time in a long time, Smilk felt like he found someone to who he was connected and he wasn't going to let anything ruin that.

(It's a wip so I might change some stuff along the way)

[ruushes]

companions re-classed pt 2 - wyll 🗡️💘🐉

with thanks to @thedragonagelesbian and everyone who suggested drakewarden, i think the change made it a much better piece! 💛

karlach

[nutsack90]

goddamnb!!

chill out man!!!

[smoothshine]

Some wip photos I took in the process :33

𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚍𝚘𝚗'𝚝 𝚑𝚊𝚟𝚎 𝚝𝚘 𝚕𝚎𝚝 𝚖𝚎 𝚒𝚗