At long last, the time has come to roll Yoshi in FFXIV and tell her story!
This is my first Let’s Play with audio commentary, and while I certainly expect some early installment weirdness while I remember how to chop up video, I hope you will find this “toeing the line between walkthrough and light RP” to be at least somewhat amusing. I mean, I even peppered memes! Mmmm, dank memes.
The Yoshi that’s in XIV is an Ishgardian-born Wildwood Elezen who had her childhood aspirations of being the first Ishgardian Black Mage pooh-poohed by the highborn as being “improper occupation.” What does one do when you’re told “no you can’t?” You counter with “just you watch!” I’m currently recorded up to halfway through Heavensward’s leveling stuff, and slowly getting things chopped up and packaged for upload to the YouTubes. Fun times!
In other, unrelated news… I’ve had a hell of a time trying to figure out why this WordPress installation keeps getting hijacked. It’s happened, like, 3 times now and despite doing a force reinstall it’s just… ugh. The first time was right after Kestine died as well, and Hostrocket was nagging me to fix it, so that was fun. :S
What sorts of shenanigans have I been getting into? That.
New tank armor means new Hikaru drawing and boy was this a doozy. FFXIV has some beautiful gear, especially for tanks, but ow they are often a huge pain to draw. I will never rag on WoW over having ridiculously ornate gear again, lol.
I originally intended to do this in Painter to try out the 2017 version but my monitor’s color settings, while fine for everything else, isn’t too conducive to painting. Thus I threw back to my iPad and finished in Procreate. The video thus begins after the line art stage:
I’m not giving up on Painter though. Going to look into getting Duet Display so I can pretend to be a Cintiq.
A recent patch in Procreate (one of the major drawing apps on the iPad) fixed one of, if not my biggest gripe with the app– the eyedrop tool was too fickle in how it triggered. Now it’s mapped to a separate button that triggers when held down. YES. This thing was the biggest dealbreaker for a long time, and I can’t believe that it being fixed was what finally made the app not only usable, but pretty freaking awesome for me.
As you can tell, art happened!
I had attempted to do “native” (as in, done 100% in Procreate) pieces in the past but would hit a fatal roadblock, specifically in regards to coloring, because I am heavily dependent on eyedrop sampling for when I blend. It always ended with me having to export to Blastoise to finish in Painter (which presented an annoying, but not fatal issue, in that he would “break” my colors because he deemed the iPad color palette inferior and I’d have to go through all the color layers and tweak them to get them back to where they should be. It’s NOT an issue with my monitor, the colors are changed enough for me to know it’s not my monitor being improperly calibrated).
Exporting to Blastoise is okay, and expected for super-high-detail work where I specifically want to take advantage of Painter’s brushes, but I want to be able to do more casual material 100% on the iPad. For one thing, with my iPad I can do this from bed, which is much more comfortable than a crappy sinking office chair. Also, I am not super-confined to having my canvas oriented in one direction, I can spin it non-destructively so I can better work specific places.
I’ve gotten pretty used to the way Procreate handles and I’m really happy with the two things I’ve made so far (Hikaru’s FFXIV incarnation and Numair with Dragonite & Dratini), and they didn’t take me very long to do, so THEORETICALLY this should facilitate a lot more casual art posts.
Also, another awesome part about Procreate? Native support for video exporting! It basically does all the work for me in terms of generating a process/speedpaint video (shows the completed image first, then fades to the start of a timelapse) that I can instantly plop on YouTube! How it manages to track everything I do without lagging me horribly, I don’t know because capturing this shit on Blastoise isn’t exactly the easiest thing in the world (I have to basically redo my OBS settings every time to make sure everything gets included) but having this available on the iPad is pretty freaking sweet, and I’m definitely going to export video for all the casual art I do going forward.
In fact, here’s the capture of the above-two pieces:
I COULD throw them into iMovie and drop music in, but I’m just too lazy for that nonsense.
The one feature I want to see in Procreate is better support for importing PSD files. You can KINDA do it now, but it’s super-clunky and only a handful of dimensions are supported, making it useless to me. I want better PSD importing so I can truly pingpong between Blastoise and my iPad, because right now it’s kind of a one-way thing.
Oh hi there, patch 3.3 in FFXIV. Logged in around 4:30 this morning to scope it out and my Free Company boss-lady asks me how much money I have. Before I start thinking she wants monies to get a bigger guild house (because a mess of new housing plots were added), it turns out it’s the other way around: she’s giving me money so I can get my own house, as a loyalty reward and also for my care and feeding of everyone’s chocobos.
I wasn’t planning on trying to get my own house, as I already had a room in the guild house, but if she’s offering… :P (Also, Tarrika isn’t exactly someone who takes no for an answer.)
True, it’s a small house (a Cottage, if you must use the proper term) and it’s the same size as our guild house, but… it’s my house. Theoretically I could share with 3 other people; most likely one of them will be Bonnie if she actually cared about housing.
Obviously, uh, I had to dye (paint?) my house dark blue, and I made the bushy fencing and got an Aetherlyte so I can teleport back here, except there isn’t much else here (retainer bell, etc.) yet because I’m totally cleaned out of money. :P Tarrika’s going to be making a bunch of furniture on demand later today, I’ll see if I can get a Riviera canopy bed so I can replicate my bedroom from the FC house on a slightly bigger scale. Most likely I’ll keep Dodo stabled at the guild house to make it easier to mass-feed the chocobos.
If you’re on Faerie server, my house is in the Lavender Beds, Ward 31, #56.
