Now that Disgaea 4 and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky have stopped nibbling on my soul for awhile…

What’s this? “HD” Hikaru? (in b4 stupid gag about how her initials are also HD. trolololo high definition)

Have some Numair, too. Because it would be nagging me forever until I did just ONE frame.

RT graphics fodder, yes. And probably I shouldn’t have gone right to the final equipment, but this is just an HD test to see what the minimum fullsize I can comfortably work at– in this case, 800×800 to be shrunk to ideally 150×150 but no smaller than 120×120 before too many details get lost and I have to dive back in for repairs. Both field and battle sets will be done like this for consistency (as opposed to the current system which has, uh, low-res sprites for the field and “SD” sprites for battle).

“HD” is kinda misleading– high definition implies you can jam in more details, right? Yes and no… you can certainly add some, period, but not too many since you have to account for things being blended or nearest-neighbor absorbed in the great shrink.

Drawing HD sprites like this… well, it demands a bit of a drastic shift from my usual tactics. For one thing, I have to make the head about 10% bigger than normal– that is, I have to turn off “anatomically/proportionally-correct” because otherwise on shrink, most of the face details are lost and would necessitate a repair dive. And then, of course, I can’t go drybrush at all– the paintjob is ENTIRELY 3px Detail Brush out of the Acrylics subtools, and restrict to 3 colors per “thing” (skin, armor, hair, etc.), exception being metallic parts where I can have two midtones, a shadow and a highlight.

Hikaru’s going to be the most time-consuming to convert, of course, since being the main character she has THREE outfits (cavalry plate with and without the Majestic Goat, and the Maximillian), a mount, and more “emote” frames than the others. Oh yeah, and a freaking DRAGON. Oh well. That’s what you get for being the main character, after all. :P

Screw your Double Rainbows! Triple Complete Birthday, Dood!
Yes, I know a crapton of other famous people have 1/17 birthdays… but this is for NSFW. How long has it been since I did an Instant Ramen piece this complex in one sitting? 12+ hours from start to finish… uh… 2 hours for the line art, I think, and the rest of it was coloring. And 2/3 of the coloring was on that background, which got the most feedback from the chat room.

I didn’t livestream this and just as I thought going in, I PROBABLY SHOULD HAVE (if only to have a recording). Doh!

I would say that I should go lie down because I’m still congested like a plugged-up warp pipe, but actually standing up makes it not so boo. Also my cat is putting his paws on me again in potentially-inappropriate places (because kitty is a lover and not a fighter). Keep on top of the Twitters, and your forks/chopsticks polished for the next alert of Instant Ramen LIVE, doods!

Bwah, I did an extended one-shot Instant Ramen as birthday gift art for NSFW… I think it was 15 hours from start to finish and most of that was the paint job, and most of THAT was attempting to recreate the backdrop of the roundtable set of the TWiT Brickhouse. I’ll do a proper Instant Ramen post later…

So today I was all “buhhhh” and sore and rather out of it, just fading in and out throughout the day and coughing a bit. I thought it was because I had done that stupidly-complex Ramen piece and not taking enough breaks, but I think I might have caught whatever bug mother has since she was super-congested and such, and she had given me her leftover fries when she brought back McDonalds.

This wouldn’t be a problem except… tomorrow– er, today? I’m being summoned to do a virus purge, which involves going outside. Yoshi + sudden temperature changes = NO. x_x Not only are the “re-chills” painful (moreso when it’s after showering), it also drastically increases my likelihood of getting an awful headcold or worse. :(

What to do…? I said I’d do the virus purge, but I would like very much to just let this bug pass quietly without being exacerbated by temperature shifts and what-have-you. But then I’d be a flake for backing out and a jerk for not fixing someone’s laptop in a timely manner… not to mention a total wimp for not wanting to go out when I may be brewing a bug. Boo. (I’d be more willing to go out in the cold if I weren’t already a little under.)

In other news, I’m just now getting to play Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky. I played Red Rescue Team a few years ago, and found that I liked it WAY more than anything from the mothership. Mystery Dungeon-subseries are often written off as being too cute and… other things that suggest that it’s not serious, but they are actually very well-written compared to the mothership titles. Of course, you still get to scratch that “collect them all” itch in the post game… and evolve, too. Plowing through as a Blastoise kicks ass. >:D

The best kind of ramen is the kind that’s made fresh, just for you! Instant Ramen LIVE!
For those who were unable to make tonight’s yet-again-impromptu livestream, the time-lapsed YouTube edition:

By gosh, I think I’ve found the magic combination for converting from Justin.tv autoarchive into a format that won’t get artifacted too badly on YouTube. H.264, WHY haven’t I used you sooner? XD It exports hella fast into a nice, small little thing that uploads to YouTube in about 10 minutes.

What do you doods think, anyway? Is time-compressing the streams into 10-minute fun-size versions awesomesauce, or do you prefer watching at the original speed? (Because I can easily toss the stitched-but-otherwise-unaltered versions on my server if you wanted to loot those.)

Also had quite a few doods in the audience/chat room this time, just some passers-by who were curious about the software and thought this was fan art. XD

In any case, I’ma try to assemble the actual wallpapers before raid time. As for what’s next… uh… oh yeah, something for NSFW since the next episode is TRIPLE COMPLETE BIRTHDAY (one of the hosts, a frequent guest and one of the TWiT tech director doods).

What? Another time-lapse release of the last Instant Ramen LIVE broadcast? Okay!

We’re… getting there as far as video quality goes. But I get the feeling that it’s not going to change much if I go past 1mb/s, since it appears the other half of the problem is something that can’t be fixed (video compression hates line art… which is what this IS, and is less glaring when I add moar color). But now I’ve gotten a means of speedily extracting, polishing and punting to YouTube. :D

Now it’s just a matter of getting more doods to show up and watch, so I can open up Skype for what would ideally be a 3-way+ sass commentary. Yeah, I should be doing these streams much earlier in the evening.

The next part (Blastoise dual-wielding the giant Hydro Pump cannons) will be tomorrow tonight.