Posts Tagged ‘video’

(Instant Ramen) Siblings in War

Friday, June 2nd, 2017

Double art post! There was a little over a month’s gap between them but here’s some art of my and Robert’s WoW mains.

Also here’s some process videos:

Procreate bows to ME now

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2016

hikaru_xiv_071116numair_dragonite_073016

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.

Big Bad Bowser-monde

Wednesday, November 18th, 2015

TAKE THAT, YOU DUMB EREDAR.

Watch my guild (Lazy Peons) be a bunch of badasses and ground-pound Archimonde in the FACE.

It’s normal mode, but… first kills are ALWAYS worth documenting!

I thought I may have screwed up the sound balance (between SFX and music) but… it’s the last boss, it’s gonna be noisy AF. Let’s run with it.

Finally, /salute to Robert, he and the other Shaman basically suicided that last Banish right before we finished off Archimonde.

music credits: srsly, though, GaMetal/Jonny Atma FTW, his metal covers are very appropriate for this, and that it’s covers of Bowser themes make the running “Archimonde is the Bowser of HFC” meme that Alex and I cooked up even more hilarious.

Now I’ma lie down because holy hell adrenaline crash (prolonged by editing this video).

Why I Like Twitter Integration in World of Warcraft (or, Hyperbole is for Winners)

Wednesday, February 11th, 2015

In Patch 6.1, Blizzard is adding the ability to tweet from inside World of Warcraft. While people have been tweeting about their WoW experience well before this, the integration of Twitter into the game will streamline the process considerably, and will be useful to players with low-end machines, for whom alt-tabbing to tweet is not practical.

Needless to say, this upcoming addition is not without controversy. Now, it’s not possible to please everyone, and there will always be some people who are vehemently against any kind of social network intermingling with their MMOs (strange considering that MMOs themselves are a form of social media, but eh). While I agree that Patch 6.1 is otherwise very light on content (which I will address later on), the amount of negativity rooted in willful, petulant ignorance is ASTOUNDING. That YouTube video up there? Don’t read the comments. Even if you agree with the backlash, the amount of over-the-top anger is enough to make your brain hurt. I say this as someone who regularly goes diving into comments on controversial things.

(disclaimer going forward: I am painter, not a game developer, programmer or even a “social media guru.” What I know about this subject is a result of years of observation and a hell of a lot of tech podcasts.)

The most common complaint is that Twitter integration is somehow “taking away” from Actual Content (quests, dungeon and raid development), which does not make sense because anyone who knows Twitter knows that it has an API that is very easy to implement. So easy, in fact, that in all likelihood it took probably less than a couple days to drop the API code in as well as a little more user interface work to pretty it up. This was most likely handled by someone on the Battle.net/User Interface branch rather than someone who handles graphics, class balancing, dungeon/raid development, or quest design. It is not practical to assign someone who deals with graphics to work on class balancing, you would be better served putting a monkey on a keyboard.

The tinfoil hat argument is that Twitter is sponsoring said integration, which is also nonsensical: Twitter does not pay developers to implement their service (that’s what the publicly-available API is for) and is actually more likely to buy out third-party developers to absorb their engineers and code. See: the multitudes of third-party Twitter clients over the years that have been acquired by Twitter itself (e.g. Tweety).

There is the claim that Twitter is being forced on the player. This is also not true. You have to opt in through the game settings and link a Twitter account (just like everything else that allows you to link a Twitter account) in order for it to work. Though, I imagine that the mere presence of an “enable Twitter” setting to some is enough to count as “you’re forcing me to tweet.” This leads into the perception that “nobody asked for Twitter integration.” Maybe not on the forums (WoW or fan-run), but… you know, there are other avenues for collecting feedback, right? Email, Facebook and, yes, the many Twitter accounts operated by Blizzard employees. Maybe the demand was not so much through loud forum posts and more of a subtle “gosh, I wish I could tweet from inside the game, it would be so nice” sentiment gleaned from tweets and other things. Yeah. “Nobody asked for Twitter integration, this was forced on us.” Sure. Whatever you say.

SO much Picard Double Facepalm. See what I mean about “negativity rooted in willful ignorance?”

The best part is when there are some detractors petty enough to actually call for some of these programmers to lose their jobs over Twitter integration. Really? If that describes you, I hope you’re ready to explain to their families that they’re down one– or their only– source of income and may suffer great financial hardship because they implemented a feature you don’t like, and that this makes you realize how terrible this makes you look, then you will probably need to get unsecured loans uk bad credit to get away with the situation. To learn more about loans and finances, visit https://www.paydaychampion.com/payday-loans-online-no-credit-check/ for more details. You’re possibly, no, definitely worse than those who have openly declared their intent to register Twitter accounts for the express purpose of trolling and harassing Blizzard employees over Twitter integration.

Yes, Patch 6.1 does not have a whole lot to offer in terms of content. That part I will not disagree with people about. That said, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some demand in the past for a major patch that is light on content in exchange for more class balancing, bug fixes, graphics tweaks and QoL (quality of life) updates… all of which describe Patch 6.1 very well, actually. And yet, now that we are given such a patch, it’s being dismissed as possibly the “Worst X.1 Patch EVER.” I guess all this does is reiterate that people really don’t know what they want (even when asked what they would do instead, they respond in very broad generalities, many of which are not really possible to do in the timeframe it takes to put out a major patch) and will complain irrationally about EVERYTHING.

As for me, I most definitely welcome the addition of Twitter. I tweet a lot about things that go in in game, and the ability to attach and crop screencaps is especially nice because it saves me from having to fish up a screencap (it’s annoying in both Windows and OS X) and crop it in an outside program and such.

As for that SELFIE camera toy, maybe I’ll pass on that. I will agree that the whole “duckface” part of it is a bit too much. …well, for Yoshi from Super Smash Flash 2 game, anyway. Somehow I can see Phil, Hynderia and Leslie using the camera, though. Man, ESPECIALLY Leslie– silly Bronze Dragon is SILLY.

In closing… dear players opposed to Twitter Integration: it’s okay to not like things. Please don’t be hyperbolic jerks about it. (that video REALLY needs to be required viewing for posting on forums or anything else.)

Yoshis and Gizmos and Jammers

Thursday, January 24th, 2013

As promised, extracted video of my Skype chat with the Giz Wiz and JammerB. Oh man. I forget if brendala is interested in MAD Magazine at all, but if she is she’ll surely rocket into orbit with this! XD

Also King Leo just name-dropped me (for “This Week in TWiT”) while talking with CEO Lisa about future possible TWiT swag. Hot.

I get the feeling I’m going to be quite busy in the coming weeks! *coin*