#but their expression work is so stylized and intense and on game it straight up looks like a horror manga sometimes which i also love

[zeravmeta]

im reading this manga abt this divorced woman who falls in love with her neighbor and i really love the artists style because the way the artist draws her makes it apparent that theres not only something deeply wrong with her but it veers into looking like a horror manga at points

this lady has a schoolgirl crush and is a total crybaby and she looks like a creature from a junji ito manga

#its called My Crybay Divorced Neighbor #its very cute all this artists works are stories abt deeply damaged people healing which i love #but their expression work is so stylized and intense and on game it straight up looks like a horror manga sometimes which i also love #stay strong ochiai san...!!

[jedidragonwarriorqueen]

My turn!

👀

YESSSSSS okay here's a snippet from my Star Wars modern AU featuring Young Jedi Knights/New Jedi Order era characters!!

But for all the signs of activity, the sole occupant of the garage was a single scrawny girl with a mess of blond curls perched on top of the ancient volkswagen bus. Her bare feet dangled over the side, kicking lazily, but her striking green eyes watched them warily. “Can I help you?”

“We’re looking for the proprietor of this establishment,” Shawnkyr said calmly, unperturbed by needing to crane her neck to make eye contact with the girl. “Are they around?”

The girl jerked her chin towards the back door. “He’s out back. Want me to call him?”

“That won’t be necessary,” Jag began, “we can—”

But the girl, startling both agents, launched herself from her perch straight towards the floor. She executed a frankly admirable tuck-and-roll before popping up like she’d simply hopped off a child’s swing and dashed lightly over towards the door, heedless of her bare feet on the grimy garage floor.

Jag let his hand fall from where he’d instinctively reached for his holstered gun. At his side, Shawnkyr swore under her breath.

The blonde flung the door open and hollered, “Little Brother!”

Jag caught his partner’s eye. She raised an eyebrow, and he shrugged.

A distant clang sounded from beyond. “What!”

“Customers!” With that pronouncement, she left the door open and made her way back to the volkswagen, shimmying back up to her seat with practiced ease.

A moment later, a lanky boy stepped through the door, wiping his hands on a greasy towel and sweating from the Arizona sun. Despite what the girl had called him he was clearly several years her senior, seventeen or eighteen if Jag had to guess, but still younger than he would have expected for the owner of a mechanic business. Intense electric blue eyes frowned at them from beneath unruly brown hair, and Jag had a nagging feeling he’d seen that expression before. “You guys having car trouble?”

“Not exactly,” Shawnkyr said, and she and Jag flashed their badges. “We’re with Interpol.”

The boy’s eyebrows rose almost to his hairline, and the nagging feeling in the back of Jag's mind only grew. “Are you serious?”

“One of your frequent fliers witnessed an…incident last month that we’re investigating,” Jag said. “We just want to ask them some questions, and were told you might know how to find them, Mr . . .?”

The boy rubbed a hand over his face, muttering something that sounded like “Mom’s not going to believe this.” Dropping his hands, he said, “Little Brother is fine. That’s what everyone here calls me.” He caught Jag’s eye, as if daring him to push.

And suddenly, it clicked. After spending almost a week in D.C. working closely with President Organa and her administration, including her husband, it really shouldn’t have taken this long.

“Anyone ever tell you you look like Han Solo?” Jag asked, trying to ease the tension in the room.

The kid just looked at him for a minute, like he wasn’t sure if Jag was trying to make a joke. “I have to admit they do,” he said finally.

“He gets that allllllll the time,” the girl piped up brightly.

The boy tossed a scowl up at her that made him look even more like the First Husband, but she just giggled. “Who are you looking for?” he sighed, turning back towards the agents.

“We don’t know their name,” Shawnkyr said, “but we have a photo of their bike from the scene.” Jag pulled up the photo on his phone, showing him the pale violet motorcycle with the stylized komodo dragon painted on the flanks.

The kid blinked. “That’s Twin One,” he said, sounding surprised. The girl stifled a gasp, then scrambled down and pushed past an irked Shawnkyr to take a look herself.

“So you do know the biker?” Jag asked. Finally.

No matter what universe they're in, if there's trouble to be found, a Solo will be involved...

From this wip ask game

#ask game #thanks for asking! #stars writes #star wars legends #star wars legends fanfic #anakin solo #tahiri veila #jagged fel #shawnkyr nuruodu #jaina solo #sw legends #star wars fanfiction

[camposantoblog]

Zora is one of the two main characters in our second game, In the Valley of Gods. Quite a few people remarked on Zora’s character design, in particular her hair, when they saw our announcement trailer. Indeed, creating Zora’s hair is a challenging problem for intertwined technical and cultural reasons. I would like to talk about our explorations and aspirations so far, and why it’s important to us we get it right by the time we ship. 

In 2015, Evan Narcisse wrote an important essay on natural hair and blackness in video games. You should read it. It was the first time I’ve really thought critically about hair and representation in video games, and the yearning in the piece struck me.

Hair is very personal. As an immigrant woman of Chinese descent with atypically frizzy wavy hair, my hair is, to an extent, an outward expression of my struggle with who I am and where I belong (or don’t). I want to love my hair the way it naturally is, but it’s never quite simple as that.

So when I first saw the character design for Zora, I had an understanding of what task lays before us as a team. None of us has Type 4 hair, characterized by tight coils and common among black women. In fact, none of us have even made video game hair before, but we are committed to giving Zora the hair she loves, the way she chooses to wear it, with all the care and effort we can.

Building Zora’s hair will be a continual effort that lasts the whole project. Our first milestone for the hair was getting it in shape for our announcement trailer, when Zora was first introduced to the public.  

As a small team without a dedicated character modeler, we hired a couple of specialists to do Zora’s character sculpt. Their task included sculpting a static version of her asymmetric bob so we could evaluate the scale and silhouette of her whole body. We knew the static sculpt would serve only as a placeholder and reference while we figured out a longer term hair solution.

Hair is a complicated combination of geometry, shader work, and texturing, and it requires a very tight and frequent iteration loop to get right. It made sense for us to do it in house even if we haven’t created hair before. The task of modeling “good enough, first pass” real-time hair for the trailer fell to me; the shading and rendering work to our graphics programmer Pete; and the copious texture and oversight work to our art director Claire. We started by investigating what other developers have done.

Real-time hair geometry, as far as I can tell, falls into two broad categories: “hair helmets” and “hair cards.” A hair helmet is what I call completely opaque geometry, as one would see on a plastic action figure or Lego figurine—think Princess Zelda’s hair in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Hair cards, on the other hand, use many sheets of hair strands to portray more free-flowing hair —think many characters in Uncharted 4. That approach is well suited to hair types that can be abstracted into sheets, which works well for any length of straight hair. There are also hybrid approaches, such as this wonderful tutorial of a game-ready afro by Baj Singh. 

Claire designed Zora’s Type 4 coily hair to have a lot of texture and volume, but it also has a "big-chunky-tubes” structure allowing fluid “floppy” movement. Neither of the two previous approaches is ideal for Zora’s hair.  

The closest in-game hair reference I found is Nadine Ross from Uncharted 4, but on closer inspection Nadine has Type 3 hair with very defined curls, quite different from Zora’s tighter Type 4.

Sometimes the only way to solve a problem is... just by making something, even if it sucks in the beginning. So I started off with a variant of the hair cards approach by making “big tubes” of three cross-cards to follow the shape and flow of Zora’s hair helmet sculpted by Ted Lockwood. It was important to have some geometry that remotely resembles what we will ultimately create, to test the shader Pete has been writing.   

I would work on the hair for a few days at a time whenever I wanted a break from creating the trailer’s environments. After two months of wrangling various placements of polygon tubes, flat cards, and cross-cards, as well as bending all their normals as if her hair were a shrub, we had the following result as of October 2017.

Part of the challenge of all this is that not only are we making Type 4 hair, we are making stylized Type 4 hair that evokes Claire’s distinct style. It became clear very early that the way Zora’s hair interacts with light would be a key part of the shader work.

I’m not able to go into the technical details of the shader in this post, but we ended up adding individual controls for each type of lighting we wanted the hair to respond to, based on Claire’s specific concept art: for instance, light striking from the back, from the side, ambiently, and so on. This got finicky, but taught us a lot and provided enough variation to create the trailer.  It will take much more experimentation and iteration for the hair to behave according to the style guide under all necessary lighting conditions, but making the trailer gave us a lot of direction for our next steps.

Right now, we have an intensely stylized back-scatter effect in the hair when backlit, but we still lack the ability to do high-quality rim lighting without relying heavily on post-processing.

We are currently only using alpha-cutouts for the hair cards (alpha sorting is a whole different topic outside the scope of this post) and I’ve been advised by character artists that some number of alpha blend cards for flyaway hairs usually works well.

For the trailer, James rigged Zora’s hair and hand animated the movement, but we plan on applying physics simulation to the hair rig for the shipping game.

There is a long way to go before we’re truly happy with Zora’s hair, but this is a good first step. As the rest of the game’s visuals become more solidified, it will become more clear what we need to tackle next.

#posted by jane #video games #game art #in the valley of gods #campo santo #gaming #game dev #game development #gif #screenshots #game screenshots

[keptin-indy]

Exalted: Saigoth Gates 53

Last time, West impersonated Mela and convinced the Mouth of Peace to declare amnesty for Solars who fought in the coming war against the Never Was.  The circle returned to the Bull of the North and Ardor told him that his conditions for not invading the Realm had now been met.  Talespinner sent another list of plot points in the Western ocean and the circle decided not to deal with Danaa’d at all after the mess that was Mela, instead going straight to the Skullstone Archipelago, where the Silver Prince agreed to send his ominous soulsteel armada to fight.

Previous installments

During the long journey back South, West took the opportunity to summon some of the other shadowline elementals to get a better idea of what they’d be facing.  He started with a medium-strength light elemental, which manifested as a great flash that coalesced into a tiny, intensely bright mote that addressed its summoner in a somewhat surly fashion and somehow refused to be bound.  When questioned, it said that it had not been created during the summons like regular elementals, but had always existed.  West conjectured that it was like the subordinate soul of a Primordial, but the mote said the Primordials had instead modeled themselves off of the Never Was.  It refused to give them any information that might actually help them, so Mazatl dispatched it manually (e.g. via daiklave).  West tried again with a darkness elemental, which took the form of a little homunculus of oily shadow, who told them right up front it wouldn’t get them any more information than the light one, which made the circle question if they all sprang from the same source.  The elemental said that darkness and light were from different oversouls, but they talked and so everyone knew about the summoning.  While the circle discussed whether killing a Never Was would wipe out portions of reality as the Primordials’ deaths had reportedly done, the little shadow tried to slip away, but Mazatl saw it and disposed of it again.  West tried again with a smaller, non-sentient elemental of Will, which appeared in whatever form a beholder thought would be cable of rational thought (human, in this case) even though it didn’t have any thoughts of its own and radiated a sense of determination that somehow seemed hollow.  Rounding off the elements, destruction came in the form of a small pyramid of nothingness, summoned on Krait’s old alchemy barge just in case.  It ate anything put into it, and West decided to dispose of the creation elemental he’d summoned months ago by feeding it to the pyramid to see what would happen.  It of course exploded, taking most of the barge and parts of West’s flesh with it, which the Twilight considered a fair tradeoff for such interesting information that could be of use in the coming battle.

Talespinner added a couple of chapter headings for the South, one leading to Chiaroscuro and another for something called the Five-Metal Shrike, in which West was instantly interested.  The directional indicator led them deep into the trackless Southern desert, where there were no landmarks or indications of what they were looking for until something crossed the sky in front of the ship in a blur of speed, fast enough to leave flames in its wake.  West immediately took off in pursuit, which was only possible because the thing was following an erratic course, sometimes turning in random directions or stopping dead in the air without decelerating beforehand.  At rest, it appeared to be an intricately-sculpted ship in the form of a stylized raptor, made entirely of the five “classic” magical materials.  With his sorcerous sight, West could see it was designed to channel Essence similarly to Krait’s death ray, only with much more precision, and additionally, it seemed able to use Essence to absorb hits more efficiently than anything he’d ever seen. That, combined with its extreme speed and fine workmanship, made it a marvel by even First Age standards.  West tried to hail the ship, but couldn’t be heard, so switched to flying a flag hailing it in Old Realm.  The ship abruptly stopped and slowly turned to face the Vengeance, putting her squarely in its sights and hovering there, motionless.  Krait hurriedly wrote a condensed version of Naran’s recruitment spiel on a banner and hung it over the side and the metal ship lowered a ramp in mid-air.  The circle rode Secret and Typhoon over, finding the interior surprisingly cramped and spartan compared to the outside.  West called out a greeting and was answered by a voice from the walls.  Having been through this before, he asked if he was addressing the ship and, if so, what they should call it, and was unsurprised when the answer was “yes” and “the Five-Metal Shrike”.  West very genuinely said that he was thrilled to meet the Shrike and the circle began asking it questions about its purpose (to defend Creation and intimidate the populace into obedience, currently in holding pattern because the captain didn’t want it doing things on its own with only a half-finished AI), what it wanted (nothing, it was not programmed to want.  It was, however, somewhat interested in exploring the artistic possibilities of craters and laser-gouges because it was intensely bored), and how to get it out of a holding pattern (with access codes that died with the captain, who went down with the Directional Titan of the South, ironically to defend his ultimate war machine).  The Shrike had been designed by five Twilights working for a hundred years under the direction of a Dawn caste, the captain, and the AI had been a pet project of his, never complete enough to be truly sentient, unlike Denandsor.  He had believed in precision over brute force and had built the ship as a counterpoint to the Directional Titans, which explained why it was so impressive on the outside, but brutally functional inside.  The circle asked if it would join them in fighting the Never Was, since it had been created to defend the world, but the Shrike pointed out that a) it had no way to override its programming, and b) the Never Was would destroy the free will of individuals and it wasn’t an individual, nor did it have free will, so it stood to gain nothing from the fight.  The circle conceded its point, so Krait instead engaged it in a conversation about art, joined by West with his experience in cloud sculpting, which turned into forms of expression and interpretation of art, which turned into comprehension of life in general, which turned into what it truly meant to be an enlightened being.  The Shrike thought all of this was fascinating and asked for a moment to think about it.  All systems on the ship turned off and it plummeted from the sky.  West made a frantic attempt to bring the controls back online, engaging the emergency hover at the last moment.  After a few minutes of catching their breaths, the Five-Metal Shrike booted back up and declared that it had discovered sentience and was now interested in everything.  The circle pointed out that this made it vulnerable to the Never Was, which the Shrike took cheerfully, saying that it liked the feeling of sentience and wanted to keep it, so would lend them its help in the war.  Having made its first decision, it then decided that decisions were fun and made a series of arbitrary ones just to see what it felt like.  The entire circle unanimously decided that it was adorable and must be taught and protected, which was the first time the circle had agreed on anything in months.  West asked it to demonstrate its laser art, which it happily did in an unimaginably destructive burst (thankfully over empty desert), but said that it could only fire that weapon infrequently, as it had to gather ambient Essence to recharge it.  Additionally, it could fire into other realities, such as the Underworld, and could convert spirits caught in the blast into Essence.  It had four modes - speed, defense, offence, and recharge - but could only be in one configuration at a time.  West asked hopefully if it would be offended to have a pilot, and it said not at all, it had been terribly lonely for millennia, so the Twilight invited it to come with them to Chiaroscuro.  The Shrike mentioned that it was unable to talk to them on the Vengeance because they didn’t have a communication device like all First Age ships had been equipped with, so under its direction, West built one to keep contact between the two ships.

With their new friend the terrifying warship in tow, the circle headed back to Chiaroscuro, the place their quest had begun and the last stop before gathering the armies to march on Palanquin.  Naran sent his people out to spread the quiet word that he wished to speak to the Lunar he now knew was here and West disguised Ardor as a Dereth man to avoid her Delzahn followers from recognizing her and instantly rallying for war and/or worshiping her while they still had subtle business to take care of in the city.  Ardor also sent Naran’s people to retrieve her horse from the Plaza while the Twilights checked in with both the local alchemist they’d done so much business with and Bronze Coyote, the occult bookstore owner.  Krait gave him a number of copies of his sorcerous treatise to sell.  West checked in on his favourite Water aspect Immaculate.  Word filtered back that the circle should come to the Tri-Khan’s palace the next day, and when they did, they were met by a dignified nomad who didn’t deign to acknowledge them until they had greeted him respectfully.  He pointed out the irony of them being polite now, after the turmoil they’d thrown his city into the first time they were there, and Naran protested that they hadn’t known he existed at the time.  The Lunar said he’d be angry if anonymity hadn’t been exactly what he’d wanted and introduced himself as Tamuz.  He said he’d talked to some of the other Lunars the circle had spoken to in their journey, and had been keeping track of them, so Naran gamely launched into his spiel which Tamuz said he already knew, but he didn’t think “barbarians with swords on horses” would help much at this point.  The circle pointed out that that description fit several of their other armies and Ardor said that the real reason the Delzahn should come was to make them a part of the worldwide force working together to protect Creation and hopefully make a better world afterwards, having fought side by side with former enemies and with peoples from lands they’d never even heard of.  He acknowledged the symbolic significance, but only allowed for a small force to leave Chiaroscuro, citing the need to protect his own lands (and potentially get a leg up in the ensuing chaos after the war).  Ardor pointed out that, with her reputation among the Delzahn, she wasn’t sure how not to get all of them to go with her, and he said she should set up camp a few days outside the city and he would deliver the ones he thought should go.  True to his word, he sent about a third of the horde, who were thrilled to be marching under the woman who had led them to such glorious victory against the Imperial invaders.

Having made the complete circuit of Creation in about a year, and recruited armies from many lands, the circle, with Delzahn hordes in Krait’s Wyld kingdom and Five-Metal Shrike in tow, flew up to the Marukani Redoubt, where the bulk of their forces waited.  They sent infallible messengers to the far-flung armies, who Samea teleported via demon if they didn’t have their own way of travelling.  Together, the largest fighting force Creation had seen since at least the First Age demon-teleported to the Dreaming Sea, picking up their remaining allies there along the way.  Ysyr’s impervious bubble of mist had been pushed out from Palanquin nearly as far as Ydanna, spreading thinner and thinner as it expanded, and many of Palanquin’s original defenders and the navies of the surrounding nations had laid down their lives to keep the creatures within from expanding any faster than they already were, but they were in desperate need of relief.  Talespinner’s promise of one year had held true, but that year was nearly up.

#exalted #exalted: saigoth gates #actual play #livejournal replacement #game