pipeline

This blog is a brief overview of my digital production pipeline.

Photoshop now costs 20 bucks a month to rent access to it. 

Fuck That Shit. 

I use Pixelmator which for my purposes does exactly the same thing and cost 10 bucks for your own copy of the full version .

Ordo Octopia bought me a HuionH610Pro graphic tablet which I do not use as often as I should. I will now that I have moved to a place I feel safer and homelier in. There are so many very talented digital artists using g-tabs who are so far ahead of what I am capable of that I feel a fool even trying. For some specific tasks it is the precision instrument necessary.

For me it is easier to draw with a biro onto paper and work also with real paint to create unique painterly textures, then photo or scan and upload into Pixelmator, than it is to sit down and develop pictures with a new thing such as g-tab. It's my generation showing through. I was the last generation to grow up before the internet although I was recognized to be a computer genius as a kid. Back then it was programming my grandads BBC micro, I was a teenager before Amiga came along and Delux-Paint. And FASA's Shadowrun book.

I got a copy of the lite version of Cheetah 3D for my mac and when they upgraded to a much better version they gave the good version away for free to all their buyers, so lucky me got the good version for cheap. Again this is a thing which I have not fully explored into, it has many functions which I feel I am aging and running out of time to learn. When my mind and soul are ready they will be capable and I will push myself to achieve. Meanwhile I am at a stage where I can do a lot with it, a lot which makes pro's laugh and the uninitiated awe. I have strictly limited my output to low-poly creations. This is because our current generation of computers lags very badly whenever they have to render anything complicated in 3D. Mostly I build architecture favoring Japanese traditional and modern styles and of course Brutalism and Art Deco.

I have Unity and Unreal game engines. Not because this is what everyone else is using but because when I did a lot of research into which platforms best suit me, these two came top of the list, which is why everybody with the same criteria is using them. These are both free now, a game changer in the market, although they charge a % of your profits if you make any which is fair enough. 

I have a bunch of Udemy video tutorials for those  which refuse to play properly due to some glitch which Udemy has not fixed yet. I experimented with both platforms (Unity and Unreal) and discovered that their interface is "like steering a cow" to use the famous aphorism. This puts me off them a lot more than it should. The definition of 'professional' in the game industry means 'obsessed enough with making a product to put up with annoying bullshit interfaces' and this is the major reason why game developers are frustrated.

If I want to see the result of my work quickly, I use SecondLife VR which although a fifteen year old modified Torque game engine which can be rather laggy. The dominance of SL as the major VR platform proves it is not yet obsolete. It has the advantage of a global audience of users most of whom are also creatives. It has the advantage of being the social life I do not have due to where I live being so remote that not even google street maps can get here. 

 

As a result most of what you will see of my 3D designs will be 2D screenshots of my builds. You are perfectly welcome to check them out in SL, a place which changes fast. I have had some excellent teachers in there showing me how to upload 3D and texture it, skills which are immediately applicable to Unity and Unreal. I would have had to go to uni to get to the stage I am now at, which would have cost a lot of money. 

 

Growing up in the 80s as a Shadowrun kid, SL VR is a dream come true for digital artists. I love it. Yet it is not commercial in the same way an Android App or a Steam powered game release is commercial. 

 

A few objects in the SL market and a lot more which my browser rejects from uploading to the SL market for reasons of its own are a world away from having a whole computer game product to sell which is worth buying.  

 

Perhaps I simply was not ready yet to achieve that stage of the game. As with everything it is step by step. It is all about process. Which is why I am doing a blog about workflow pipeline. On which note here is a link to showcase some of my SL builds.

 

So I build 3D game apps, largely architectural, often cyberpunk, all custom designed for low lag. I am developing as fast as I can. I cover a lot of bases and cannot do everything. I do need to team up with others to further my career and see my visions complete. 

 

Sometimes I even turn my computer off and go for a walk.