#and the actual DRAWING software in them is never easy to use

[starrspice]

Procreate is Making an animation app thats dropping in November

Nobody touch me I will be foaming at the mouth until this is released

[hansoeii]

Several things: -LOVE your art, it’s amazing! Especially the one with Crowley and Aziraphale under the umbrella - which software do you use? Your art always look SO gorgeous (cheeky quote from GO right there lol) - how did you get so good at drawing?And thank you for encouraging other people to keep drawing and being so kind as I sometimes can’t help but compare my sketches to others and feel silly, but I guess it’s just a learning curve… Thank you so much for bringing your art to the world!😊

Thank you so much!!

I use Clip Studio Paint for drawing and Photoshop for small adjustments!

2. Haha thanks! Honestly...it's the hyperfixations. I managed to improve a lot in just a year because I've been drawing SO much cos there's so many shows and movies I became obsessed with that I wanted to create art for. So by drawing a lot I just naturally improved. For example these two Illustrations are just a year apart:

I actually didn't actively try to improve, it's been a while since I did proper studies (I just don't really have the time for it between freelancing and art school), it just happened.

But I can absoluetly recommend going on YouTube and look for some art tutorials if you actively want to start improving! There's some channels that helped me so much back then:

moderndayjames

Incredible shape language and super insightful tutorials on all kinds of topics! I learned so much from him.

Ahmed Aldoori

So many awesome tutorials on so many different areas of art. Love it.

Marco Bucci

Incredible tutorials on color theory and understanding how color works in general! Learned SO much from him!

Sinix Design

The OG tutorials I began learning from. I watched his videos religiously as a teen. I adore his painterly style and adopted it in some way, haha.

Ethan Becker

This dude sometimes drops these tiny art tips that just completely blow my mind and that I adopt immedietly. He's super entertaining but also such a great teacher.

And I can also recommend checking out this book by James Gurney if you want to get better at colors!

And for anatomy I highly recommend the Morpho books!

But improvement doesn't only come from drawing a lot. A lot of the time I don't draw for a while and just study the world and artists around me and suddenly I improved when I get back to drawing. Don't ever overwork yourself to the point that you don't enjoy what you do anymore. Take breaks and listen to your body!

I learned to try and not compare myself to other artists, which helped a lot. Through conventions and social media I made so many lovely artist friends and realized how we're all struggling in a very similar way. A lot of us don't even really know what we're doing most of the time, haha. But we help each other out, it's such a wonderful community. I think when you're not actively part of the community it tends to feel like other, more successful artists are some kind of art gods that have perfected the craft and never struggle. But believe me, all the artists you admire go through rough times all. the. time. Sometimes what they do feels easy and natural, other times (more often than not) it feels like you have to try and learn how to walk all over again and you start to doubt your abilities. I personally go through that so many times.

So what I'm trying to say is that instead of comparing yourself to the artists you admire, learn from them instead. Ask questions, befriend fellow artists, study the artists you enjoy and just have fun with it!

And finally I thought it would be fun to share some of my horrendous Johnlock fanart from a decade ago for some motivation:

I hope my answer didn't overwhelm you, but I thoight it would be nice to give a more detailed answer!

Have a wonderful day and keep drawing! :)

[genericpuff]

"As cheap as owning a tablet" as if those weren't expensive, as if you didn't need a decent art program,... Man, fuck Webtoons.

All the other expenses of creating a comic that Webtoons doesn't take into account:

The cost of software

The cost of resources (3D models, licensed font packs, etc.)

If you're an Originals creator or someone who wants to work with others (like myself), the cost of an assistant which is entirely out-of-pocket (the cost of resources is also out-of-pocket, Webtoons doesn't cover the cost of 3D models and other resources that creators practically have to rely on just to meet their deadlines)

The cost of learning how to draw to get to the point of creating a comic. Sure, you can start drawing a comic at any skill level, but if you want your comic to actually grow on a larger scale - which is exactly what Webtoons is compelling people to use their platform for - then you're gonna need to brush up on a lot of foundations both in art and writing that take years of work and practice.

The cost of actually making the damn comic, because that's hours of labor that are largely unpaid / completely voluntary. Much of those hours amount to just a little bit of content that the majority of people swipe through so fast they don't even absorb what they're looking at and never read again.

It's really easy for a company like Webtoons to say "making webcomics is cheap" when that same exact company has foot all the financial burden of creating a comic onto the creators. We all know who they're really trying to appeal to when they say creating comics is 'cheap' - other companies and investors who are also looking for 'cheap to produce' content that they assume is cheap because they're only putting in the bare minimum to sign them on and aren't the ones doing the fucking work. And we all know where that line of thinking leads, because it's exactly where we are right now with social media platforms and streaming services. Art has become "content" and the platforms hosting the content have become completely enshittified.

Man. Fuck Webtoons.

[ayaisokay]

The Kids Aren't Alright

* ~ I'm sorry for making this ~ *

Doomers & Fatalism

Regardless of your age, you need a reason to move forward. You need hope. Yet, it's hard to find hope for teens and young adults.

Not a year goes by without an update on the planet's decline (at our hand), wealth is only feeling more unstable and unequally distributed, a pandemic destroyed any hope of sociability for some, and social media does more harm than good when it "connects" people.

There's no true community, nothing to take pride in, there's hardly motivation for ambition or wealth. Hell, we grow up being told we'll be a generation of renters, because it's a statistical improbability than any of us will EVER afford a home without working 3 jobs into our grave.

I can't speak for America, but I know my government haven't made any real effort to prevent renter's from taking that news and slowly inflating rent costs each month.

I'm a part of the generation that is thought to deal with the broadest range of mental health concerns; however, I'm also part of the generation that's most likely to be told to "deal with it," or "grow up," by the people perpetuating our suffering, or the peers that fell victim to toxic hustle culture— enabling the shitty circumstances.

When you start adulthood with so many problems that directly impact your life, most of which come at no fault of your own, you'd hope for help in addressing those matters, but it never comes.

We're told we're lazy, we don't try hard enough, and we've got it easy (which is a demonstrable lie). How is it any surprise we became hopeless doomers? At some point you just get the idea that we were destined to fail.

Threats of War

Now we're told to be ready for World War 3 and I'm struggling to understand why. What values am I defending? Why should I die for a country that doesn't care about me?

Sure, Ukraine and Palestine are in shitty situations, but saying that doesn't require me to do anything. Though they demonstrate something: the government will risk our lives for money, and turn a blind eye to genocide if it suits them.

All that matters is that we're made to feel like our interests align. They don't represent us. They represent themselves.

Don't get me wrong, I don't support either conflict, and I sympathise with the aforementioned nations; however, I am not willing to die for them— I don't think you are. So is it even fair for us to bother complaining? It's not like diplomacy has done a thing so far.

Whether we're roped into a war or not, it doesn't feel like we'd have a choice.

Hobbies and Corporations

Normally I'd propose finding an outlet for everything. I'm not sure that's ideal anymore. Commonplace hobbies like gaming, sports, martial arts, reading, and art, they require 3 things: time, motivation, and effort.

Thanks to hustle culture, holding 3 jobs, running a drop shipping business, and abandoning any meaningful social life is considered just enough and reasonable. That doesn't leave time for personal hobbies, entertainment, or time to actually live. A life like that is no life at all. You're an animal operating on the exclusive goal of survival. You're alive, but you're not living.

Among those of us too physically or mentally scarred to work like our peers, we compassionately took to pen and paper, or software and devices, writing stories, drawing and animating worlds, or making music.

I fear that pocket of joy is getting smaller. AI image generation has already impacted artists, AI voice recreations are already being used in place of some voice actors, and we've all seen the AI voice covers for songs— claiming "you don't need to learn to sing." It didn't take long for me to see "generative AI" being proposed as a source for track samples and stems in music production.

Considering such things, it's hard to motivate yourself to put your work out there. You struggle to justify spending time creating anything, and you're probably not ready to put the effort into producing enough algorithm optimised works per day. After all, no one will see it. No one cares.

That's how it feels.

Social Media

Maybe we still have digital spaces? Really. Are cespools like Twitter spaces you can enjoy? Even Tumblr is quite detached, with small accounts struggling to get so much as a couple likes— nevermind a reblog, and god forbid you get a comment or DM.

That's minor though, it's the relationships that bother me. The ability to lock someone out of your life, within 5 seconds, for the slightest of perceived infractions. You're sensitive and a snowflake if you need boundaries, and you're "rude" and "mean" when you're pushed too far for not establishing them.

You can join a fandom or community and run into those issues, but do you really need more trouble? Ive hung around with furries since I was 13 or 14. It wasn't a furry that SA'd me, and I've never been groomed. But as a child online, I was labelled as a dog fucking groomer (at 15), because I was in a furry community discord server. I don't like to think about how that made the young adult owner of the server feel.

Social media is good for "satirical trolls," who take pleasure in hurting as many people as they can, and then claiming it's OK because they're joking, and you should've known. Is it really worth the effort for anyone else? You know, us "normal people," not bogged down by million strong fanbases, actively managing parasocial relationships and morally questionable stalking.

Closing Statements

I'm not entirely sure why I wrote this post. I guess I'm just another girl crying on the internet when I should save it for the therapy I can't actually afford.

I want to be hopeful, to feel like there's something attainable to desire, or even just things to look forward to. It's been a long time since I woke up and felt there was a good reason to be awake or even alive.

Thanks,

- The Girl That Doesn't Exist

[inthedarkshadows000]

SneakPeak#102.......

From the story I might never write

"This is a kitchen knife. You seriously kept a kitchen knife to defend yourself against someone like that." At the sound of a gruff voice a looked in Toji's direction who was moving from behind the desk towards me. He held the bloody knife in his hands like it was normal.

"I didn't know I would need it." I sat straight and replied, offended.

"You did. That is why it was there. You don't normally keep knives on yourself obvious from the lack of proper ones. The fact that you bothered having one here meant you knew this was going to happen." I was at a loss of words. He was right I knew this was gonna happen obviously, I had done my homework on that man.

"Let me rephrase. I hoped I wouldn't need it and that my manipulative skills would be enough to get out of any sticky situation. That was a back up, I agree a shitty one though." I shrugged and relaxed back. No need to go off bonkers here.

"Yeah? How'd that work out for you. If it hadn't been for me pushing out suguru your brains would be splattered on the wall here." He wasn't giving up here, was? Also Awwwwwww. He had moved right behind the coffee table. Suguru still sat between us.

"No. If Suguru hadn't stepped in my plan INITIAL would be ruined but not my beloved face." I got up shakily and moved towards my desk. Bending down to open the last drawer I took out my pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

"I agree I misread how fast his temper would flare up but even in the situation where I would be physically at a disadvantage, I knew how to not die." I continued and went toward the window on the left side of the room.

Drawing the curtains away, I opened the window and lit a cigg. I felt the tension leave my body the moment i inhaled the first drag.

Fucking finally!!!!

"Please enlighten us then." I really didn't like how sarcastic the dilf was. He sounded closer. I looked behind me to see them all getting up and moving towards me.

"I will if you calmed you tits down. Here, catch" I threw something at his face obviously knowing he will  catch it. Frankly I just wanted to get my frustration out.

"Smoking after losing that much isn't the smartest idea." Oh.. Kento my responsible baby!!!

"I know but that stressed the hell out of me. I'll stop if the smoke is an issue though?" I replied suddenly realising how it probably was, I was about to put it out when he shook his head in negative. So I just shrugged and continued.

"You wanted to blackmail him. He was about to kill you anyway taking it out of your dead or alive hands would be literally the same feet for him. An easy one." He gave the recording device to the others after finishing with it and came to stand next to me. Lighting a cigarette himself, he looked at me and gave me a challenging look.

I couldn't help but roll my eyes at how much people could underestimate a person. Inhaling another puff I explained "Actually no that wasn't what I was going to do. Only a dumb ass would be that.... dumb. I was actually gonna make him believe that this entire meeting would automatically go viral if I didn't stop it."

"Would he have believed you could do that?" Asked toru seeming really intrigued by the idea.

"Of course, I am a software engineer, one of the most efficient ones. Why do you think he wants me. Also he knows nothing of modern tech." I smiled cheekily and winked at him. That made him guffaw. Let me just tell you it was the most beautiful sound ever.

"And would it have gone viral?" Toji was still as serious as ever.

Now what HAPPENED to his chill pill attitude.

"Does it really matter all that I had to do was make HIM believe that it would if he didn't leave this room and me unscathed. It's called bluffing. Not to mention that I could always have people actually do that with whatever dirt I have on him if he did harm me." I shrugged looking at him with an attitude and put out my cigg.

In an instant he had his large hand wrapped around my neck and I whimpered being taken off gaurd. "DO NOT give that attitude, little girl. I also don't take people talking down to me lightly, best you remember that."

His grip more like a warning than hurtful and it did nothing but awaken my inner freak and drama queen.

My choke fantasy is finally true!!! 3 more people to go!!!! Cannot believe I can finally tick one off of my list.

"Enough! let go of her this instant." Kento was next to me in an instant, the other too surrounded me. I jutted out my lower lip a little and made my eyes water a tiny bit.

Toji waited a beat and before releasing me and moving back to take a puff of the cigarette, which I had frankly forgotten about, while still maintaining eye contact with me. Kento was glaring at him.

Oh my chivalrous man.

Making sure no one was looking, i let one side of my lip quirk into a tiny smirk. Toji's green eyes grew slightly realising my act. His eyebrow raised, surprised, then a knowing gleam settled into his bright green eyes, impressed.

"Hey, you good?" At suguru's question all eyes were on me and I nodded innocently.

I had to bite my lip to stop my laugh when I saw toji shake his head and turn to look out, silently whispering "Tch, you little minx."

That's right big boy, I got my own powers. I evilly giggled.

[greed-the-dorkalicious]

All the discussion around AI lately got me thinking about an incident recently in which a guy got his ass sorely beat by the vocal synth community

For those of you not familiar, “vocal synths” in the electronic music sense typically refers to programs like Vocaloid, SynthV, UTAU, Alter/Ego, DeepVocal, etc., digital instruments that allow composers to create, as the name implies, synthesized vocal tracks. The way they work is that they draw from libraries (referred to as “voicebanks” or VB for short) of special studio recorded* vocal samples from singers singing different syllables at a consistent pitch. The program then splices these together and adjusts the pitch to match whatever notes you put in- You want to do All Star, it’s gonna string together “[suh][m] [buh][di] [wuh][n][s] [tO][ld] [mi]” or something like that. Basically it’s an extremely complicated sampler.

(*unless you’re using UTAU or another build-your-own-vocal program in which the “studio” is only metaphorical, and is sometimes somebody’s basement with a Rockband mic plugged into a laptop.)

Now, there is no threat of vocal synths putting actual singers out of a job. Even the best vocal synths always have a bit of a robotic sound to them, and the voicebanks take hundreds of hours of recording time from you know, actual singers. Any piece made with vocal synths has to be worked by a human hand in a process called “tuning” in order to sound any good, whether you’re trying to make it sound human or leaning into the robotic sound. This isn’t something that’s being done on a corporate scale to cut costs- This is something pretty much exclusively being done by small scale indie music hobbyists because we fucking love Hatsune Miku and her weird buddies. Most folks are less interested in doing something that sounds 1:1 like a human voice and more in going beyond what humans can do to make shit like this

One of the leading vocal synths right now is Synthesizer V (SynthV), created by a company called Dreamtonics. SynthV offers fancier versions of some of its voicebanks, which are called “AI” voicebanks. These use machine learning trained on, again, professionally recorded and legally licensed vocal samples to help make songs sound a little bit more smooth, a little bit more in line with whatever singing style you’re aiming for. Everything else previously mentioned still applies: They’re still painstakingly recorded and programmed, you still need to tweak it yourself to get it to sound just right, and it’s still never going to sound 100% like a human. And that’s fine!

For this next bit y’all are gonna have to trust me because the tweets all got deleted, though if anyone wants I’m happy to pull up screencaps of talking shit about it with other vocal synth folks when it happened lmfao

So basically. Since ChatGPT type grifters have convinced people that “AI” means “magic plagiarism button”, back in April some dipshit NFT guy on Twitter started complaining on an official SynthV update post that SynthV (which he apparently believed to be called “Dreamtonics”, the name of the company that makes it) should allow people to make voicebanks from “their own voice”, insisting that it would be easy and PROFITABLE!™ to do so. He also clearly did not actually mean “their own voice” but rather “the voices of celebrity singers shamelessly lifted without their consent”, which was made extra obvious from a tweet on his own page that was like “Teehee people in monitored Twitter spaces don’t realize their voices are being recorded and fed into AI!” which he then deleted after I linked it on the thread about SynthV. lol.

Dude proceeded to get whupped by actual vocal synth people basically saying shit along the lines of “Yeah we can all tell you just want to commit cheap plagiarism, jackass” and “Dude why are you here when you clearly don’t understand the very very basics of what this software even is” and “Go make an UTAU voicebank if it’s so easy then”. (UTAU being a Japanese freeware program that hasn’t been updated since 2013. Creating an UTAU voicebank is complicated and takes a lot of time and technical knowledge.) He still refused to learn the basics of how vocal synths work, and proceeded to ask if “UTAU or Diff is most compatible with Dreamtonics”, a question absolutely no one could make any sense of? Lol.

Anyway, I don’t have anywhere in particular I’m going with this, I just think AI grifters are morons, and it’s obnoxious how the vague and misleading term “AI” has gotten nigh-mythologized by shady tech companies to the point that people can’t tell the difference between perfectly reasonable assistive technology and magic plagiarism.

Btw, fun fact for anyone who’s wondering, there do in fact exist legally/morally questionable UTAU voicebanks spliced from outside vocals. These are called “jinriki” voicebanks and not only do they take the same amount (if not more) of hard work as any other voicebank, they’re far from the insta-Beyoncé this dude was aiming for, and instead they sound um. like this

[paracosmicessence]

Hey! I love your art so much 💖 I wanted to ask what program you use for 3D modelling?

aw thank you!! :3

and to answer your question i’m going to warn you this is going to be kinda long because i’m gonna use this post as an excuse to show my 3D models that aren’t awful (sorry lol).

i actually use two different programs, both for different purposes, but you don’t need to get both, it really depends on which kind of modeling you want to do.

1) the first is called Nomad Sculpt on the iPad, you do have to pay for it unfortunately but it’s definitely one of the best modeling apps for the iPad. i know Blender is free but my computer is really old and doesn’t run the program very well, and at this point i’ve already gotten used to nomad sculpt.

anyway tho, i use it for art-related things like the obvious 3D models, but recently i’ve been playing around with just making scenes to use as references for my drawings. they’re not anything impressive, most of the time i actually use it to make little figurines to print and turn into earrings/little friends that sit in my room just for fun.

i’m gonna show this first bc they look cooler once they’re printed and colored (also you can tell i printed mini crowley and aziraphale when my sonadow hyperfixation started bc i never actually painted crowley) (he’s just kinda sitting there oops).

the little red guys are actually my favorite bugs (goliath beetles), i made them about a year ago but i still wear them like every day.

and here’s what they look like in the app, it’s a little intimidating but once you get used to it it’s actually kinda fun just playing around and seeing what you can do.

2) the second program i use is Shapr3D (also for the iPad, but i think they made an update where you can run it on windows/mac). you also have to pay for this as a subscription which sucks, i’m only able to use it since the engineering program i’m in pays for it.

Shapr3D is one of the many CAD software programs out there, but it’s nice bc it’s very beginner friendly and very easy to use. CAD is mainly for architecture/engineering but i honestly think more 3D artists should give it a try. it’s really nice once you get the hang of it and (i’m probably biased bc i’m a student) i honestly prefer it over just normal modeling software because i feel like you can be a lot more creative with it.

right now for my engineering class, our semester final is to design and present something that’s functional, and we can either explain the math behind it or just 3D print it and demonstrate how it works, and i’m making a functional mini model of “the rack” trap from Saw III (i’m not psychotic i swear i’ve just had a Saw hyperfixation for 5 years).

i’m definitely gonna post it when it’s finished just bc i’m already excited with how it’s turning out, but for now here’s a couple at-home projects i’ve done:

(above) i have a bunch of wet liners and i designed a stackable holder thingy with bolts between the shelves and a little cute star screw to fasten it at the top.

(above) i also made a few rotating brush holders at home (bc the ones that actually rotate are like $40 for some reason) by buying a set of small sphere bearings at home depot for like $5 (that’s what those little metal things are inside the third one, i took it apart bc i don’t know how to put a video and a picture in the same post) (just pretend they’re spinning rn).

anyway that’s all!! if you actually read this whole thing i love you so much bc engineering and design is one of my special interests so thanks for letting me tell you about the silly things i’ve made :3

[quohotos]

i demand the 3D objects thoughts

Well I put it off to the absolute last possible moment. If you're reading this it's already too late. Paint 3d is dead

You will not be able to download it from the Microsoft store, and let's be honest, it's too shit for anyone to actually archive it (not that I'd even know how given it's a uwp distributed through the store and never offered as a standalone exe)

But let's not dance on paint 3d's untimely grave. As the world's first ever Kafkaesque photo editor it gave something very special to us all. I've come to love it, even if every time I use it I feel a deep and unending desire to become the joker. So let us Eulogize this beautiful mix failed start of a future we were promised but was failed to be born. Let's pour one out for Paint 3d, and explain once and for all what it really means to paint 3d.

What is paint 3d?

Before you can understand Paint 3d, you must first understand ms paint. Microsoft paint, often just referred to as "Paint" is one of the oldest standard programs to come with any windows installation. It's a bitmap editor that was begun long before most tiktok users were even born. It holds a special place in a lot of 90s and 00s kid's hearts for two reasons.

without fail, it will be installed on every windows machine. You will always have paint. It's dependable, fast, easy to get into, and will open corrupted or mislabeled images. It's the notepad of images, quick, dirty and gets the job done. You can copy and paste screenshots into there to quickly crop them

It's a little bit shit. It doesn't support transparency (well it does now but lets not get ahead of ourselves) so if you tried to make a minecraft skin with it you'd get all these solid color blobs. It doesn't support layers, so anything made on it is going to have a level of earnest shittyness to it. Text can't be rotated, bounding boxes have to be predefined shapes, and once something is on the page it's on the fucking page. MS. Paint will put pixels on the page for you, but after that point it won't hold your hand.

Point 2 is really a larger part of how ms. Paint is remembered. Ms. Paint is synonymous with youth, it's synonymous with limited computer time, with ignorance, with having nothing better. The spectacle of doing anything in Ms. Paint lead to the selling point of ms paint adventures which became homestuck. If you want to strawman someone's political opinions, you draw them in MS paint. The early, edgy, ugly look of the 00s web was defined by MS paint just as much as it was defined by adobe flash. The limitations of this piece of shit software defined a generation's artistic identity. We love it because it is shit. We would not have it any other way

Okay but you didn't explain Paint 3d!

Well, gosh, don't interrupt me. Yeah, so what is paint 3d? In 2017 Paint was added to the deprecated feature list. A special update was pushed so if you opened up paint it would ask you if you'd rather switch to paint 3d

Paint 3d put a fresh new stab at the utility, redoing it in the new UWP format and dressing it up in the company's then standard design language. The refresh also added a whole host of nice, modern features such as:

An updated set of tools, some but not all of which are pressure sensitive when used with tablets/touch

The ability to use transparency!

Hurray those are great new features wait what do those other buttons do?

Yes paint 3d lives up to it's name, you can add stock 3d models to any of your drawings and they're all kinda awful

3d text, 3d models, go ahead and place them in your scene. They put the whole project spark asset library in there last year, if you can think of it it's probably not in there but hey there'll be something and it may or may not have a texture because the model may have been intended for 3d printing

You can manipulate these objects with a slick interface that's completely non industry standard but hey it at least looks nice.

Models can also be painted on and you can pick from these options to decide the albedo/metalic values. No I don't know how to set the custom values, sometimes it's there and if you click off it's gone forever. Good luck

Oh and also when you're painting you're given a very convenient gizmo to rotate the object that isn't available in normal mode. You can multi select objects and group them together but beware it doesn't always work and using the undo key sometimes spawns a new copy at the wrong position and scale but don't worry this is a small bug in a new program and certainly won't be present in the final version on November 4th I promise.

You can put stickers on models and there's a nice little UI to stamp it if you want to put multiple here are all the stock standard stickers

You can also use these pretty tiling textures

Or you can add any png from your hardrive

Those are the only options you'll ever get or need. You can also spawn arbitrary shapes, like cubes and spheres

And in a post launch update they even added the fucking TUBE BRUSH

Look how many tube there is. So many tube You can also edit the points individually after they're created but each tube has a maximum number of points that it can contain and you have no way of knowing until it's too late.

You can also use the 3d doodle to make a shitty potato looking thing, but if you browse the #paint3d tag you'll see a lot of people more talented than me using that tool to it's fullest

As you saw you also have the option to round or point the corners.

At any point you can click the 3d view button and suddenly you're no longer head on, you can orbit the camera and view the scene from any angle. Is it actually good to work with 3d scenes in this program? God fucking no

This scene nearly killed my computer to make, and that thing had okay specs for the time. Placing objects with the non standard (but touch friendly) controls is a pain and the camera cannot be oriented in any meaningful way. There is no frecam, there is no camera scale, you can orbit, you can pan. If you want more go learn blender.

You can also change the time of day

Go ahead, rotate the sun or change the filter, some of them are even minecraft specific. Most of them are objectively worse than the default, but hey you get a lot of options

Okay yes these are all cool features, but I've been dancing around paint 3d's one actually cool feature, the one that drives me mad... because it's a good idea

great even...

...too bad it's shackled to this program.

Oh this? This? yeah we can fuck with this. Now we're fucking talking

Now I can move my objects around in 3d, scale them, reorent them and make all kind of cool 3d compositions out of cut out pieces of my 2d artwork. If you look at any cool marketing material this is by far the feature they're most proud of

The possibilities are endless... unfortunately they're also frustrating.

See that flower I made has a white background, and there's no magic eraser so I'd need to manually cut it out with the eraser... or use magic select

If you're in a video call while this UI is active and you're sharing your screen it will only show the gif and not the program itsself

With the add and subtract tools you can provide hints about what should and should not be included. That's fine for something as simple as this drawn with a pen tool, but... well if you like to draw with the pencil? Get ready for pain buckeraroo. You can't manually slice out what you want, you just have to get the AI to guess and it will never guess perfectly. Part of your bat will be left behind on the canvas or it'll start picking up a few extra white pixels

but hey, it's 3d now, sometimes it works. You can choose to content aware fill whatever was behind on the canvas, or leave a weird white empty space behind

But now I have a field of flowers I can move however I like, okay but I think I want to add an extra leaf to one of them

Get fucked. Idiot. Once you cut it out, it's like paper. These 3d canvasses can never be grown, only shrunk and only by the eraser tool which carves in a perfect circle like a bull in a china shop. Now, it's actually very cool how you can recursively create new 3d canvasses out of existing ones, and I'm sure you could do cool stuff but any time the canvas shrinks that's as big as it'll ever be it can never grow

Also, yeah you can't just make a canvas in place, you either have to reserve space on your main canvas or clip it off of a second canvas you make earlier and just... I don't know stash it off to the side out of frame? this is how you use layers and if you want to re-order them put them in literal 3d space? Want to hide a layer? Put it behind your canvas.

This is what experts are calling: "technically a workflow, I guess"

This would be a really cool feature, unfortunately it's just not finished. It's missing that extra 20% that would make it at home in real software versus just a toy. Just like paint you have to sort of plan ahead and make all of your layers. In order... but in reverse bob ross order. See you need to make all of your foregrounds first, then and only then can you start working on your background canvas, and should you ever change your mind and want another foreground you must destroy a space of your background to create it. Oh, also, once it's 3d it can never be re-projected back into 2d... well you can turn it into a sticker, which kicks ass, but that will be flattened, if you wanted to retain the 3d rotation of it too bad. Also, making something into a sticker physically consumes it, so you'll need to copy and paste it first just in case otherwise it's gone forever

oh yeah and sometimes copy and pasting doesn't work, creates extra clones, or places them at the wrong space.

Okay let's save our work

You can actually save it as a project folder. You heard me right, folder. Paint 3d stores projects as individual folders

And they're all just called checkpoint, there's no association with like, which project each one is

And they're all full of undocumented binary files, with the exception of a png thumbnail at the very bottom.

So uhhh, why? You can't send project files to other people, at least not easilly. Is this some library that I don't know about? This all boggles my mind. I mean a .docx file is just a renamed zip file was it too much to ask to make these all renamed zips? Why would you leave it half finished like that and just not make a "new" file type?

Okay sorry I got lost in the weeds. Also I hit the image limit for this post so you're just gonna have to bear with me and use your imagination. You can do this I believe in you.

You can export as a .glb file that goes to your 3d objects folder (put a pin in that), or you can export it as a video/gif. There are few pre-canned animations like bobbing back and forth or rotating on a turntable. They can be sped up or slowed down, but that's about it.

Okay but why 3d?

God damnit I'm going to need more images for this so I'm gonna post this as is and hope I can add more photos on the reblog...

[passionesolja]

Okay, I’ve started beefing with AI again, so I got some shit to get off my chest. AI bros invading creative spaces and not understanding etiquette and social rules is a huge defining factor as to why there’s friction. A lot of these AI bros think that because a machine did it, that it negates the use of plagiarism. And if you’ve ever been in any creative space for more than a week, you know how much beef is caused by people stealing other people’s work.

“Oh well the machines are advancing, technology is advancing” mf my labor, energy, and concepts are not going to be sacrificed on the alter of your bullshit robots. Dawg, you wrote “make me a fantasy book about ogres” and that robot scoured the internet until it found SOMEONE ELSE’s years of hard work, effort, and time—months and years that they’ll never get back— and repurposed it shoddily for you. Bastardized it completely without any of the thought and nuance of the person who wrote it. You don’t even know who originally wrote what that AI generated because it doesn’t credit them.

These AI bros are selfish and lazy. Like ofc your slothful ass don’t care that the genetic anime girl you AI generated only has 3 fingers, because you don’t have one sense of pride or self worth wrapped up in this. You’re not putting yourself out there when you post AI generated art, you don’t have nothing to prove. You’re not opening yourself to being seen as complete trash and cringe whenever you show the world your art. You don’t even have the disappointment of nobody caring after you poured your heart into a project for years, months, weeks, days, or hours.

Hell, you didn’t even create the AI you’re using so you didn’t learn anything new about coding, or toil with debugging and brick walls. You’re a leech who’s too lazy to produce anything but wants the fruits given to those who truly do make shit.

AI art and writing lacks the humanity and risk of creation. It’s far removed from what makes art art. It removes the AI bro from even making something of their own. Like if somebody self-made their AI and had it for personal use only, it’d still be scummy and stealing but at least they busted their ass and created something that complex. At least the person spent time and effort creating something. Like AI isn’t easy to code, it takes effort just like art does

These AI bros are leeches. They don’t create the software the use, or the art they steal.

Because how can you—somebody who can’t draw, can’t code, isn’t a team member of the AI dev team—“push technology forward”? You’re not doing anything to advance anything, you’re a parasite who merely acts as a tester for software but you don’t implement the changes and do the work of actually translating metadata into the code.

Do not let these people lie to you, or themselves, they’re doing anything remotely productive by stealing peoples’ art and writing.

[ididnotknow]

hey im researching drawing tablets that you can like... take out and about with you and i remembered that one comic you drew of your experience of being misidentified as an architect (via spirk) on a train ride and was wondering: What drawing tablet you use/ do you have any recommendations for portable ones?

thankyou!!

(i think about that comic all the freakin time and i love it so much. the spirk. the other persons eyes falling out of their head to stare DIRECTLY at them making out. its perfect.)

(comic for ref> https://www.tumblr.com/ididnotknow/692672943716810752/long-train-journey-shenanigans?source=share )

I use a wacom companion 2 that I bought back in 2016. It used to be extremely good and could even run unity without issue, but honestly it is dying now and can barely run photoshop anymore. I've been looking into switching to an ipad because it's more nomad. Even though the cintiq is as well, you have to carry around the big charger and it is quite heavy.

They don't sell it anymore but I see it has been replaced by the wacom mobile studio pro.

I'd say the pros of wacom is that you get an actual computer. It's running windows 10, you can crack your softwares and it is very versatile, though the price is steep and it's less comfortable to carry around (around 1.5kg+power adapter, so closer to a laptop).

Apple has the advantage of being lightweight, it's easy to use but you are stuck with whatever app is available on it (like procreate that you have to pay for), it's super easy to carry around. Ive tried a couple of different ipads and i found it comfortable to use, though the pen is a bit too thin for me. you have to be ok with giving money to apple, too.

There are obviously alternatives, that often come with a lighter price tag. huion for example also sell pen computers. I have never touched one though, so I cannot give an opinion. I think windows also sells tablets that can be used efficiently to draw, but as for huion, I haven't had the opportunity to try them.

I hope you find something that works for you!

[titleknown]

Robomaus wrote this disquieting vision of a possible future, shared with permission, where the anti-AI art push "wins" that I think any anti-AI folks should take pause over, if only because it's one where nobody wins except the megacorps:

2023-2024: An unknown number of challengers hop on the bandwagon of suing a handful of AI companies publishing open-source (er, relatively) models and software. Their PR campaign is centered around the abuses of closed platforms such as OpenAI, and continued reliance on public technical misunderstandings.

2025: Butterick, Getty, or some unknown challenger wins the lawsuit. Styles are now copyrightable or "infringeable" in some form, and all input has to be licensed before being used in a model that has any potential of being used for profit in any form whatsoever. Research on generative models continues in a handful of European universities where data mining is still legal for purely academic purposes. After additional lobbying, the USCO decision is reversed, allowing for AI-generated works to be copyrighted by the prompter.

2026: Midjourney disappears into the night. Stability AI declares bankruptcy. OpenAI is able to pay their legal fees by a bailout from Elon Musk and Peter Thiel-types after a public shift to "anti-wokeism", but will never live up to the "open" standard or publish any models, or access to them. Emad becomes an angel investor and technical advisor for Drawful (no relation to the game), an AI-generated licensed art startup.

2027: DeviantArt is bought by ArtStation and is now an archive and source for additional ad revenue. If they haven't been already, Midjourney's model-training techniques are leaked. Models are widely shared on pirate sites with names such as www27.notavirus.modelputlocker.ru. Since Automatic1111's webui doesn't actually contain any models, it's left up for research purposes, or easily downloadable. However, most AI research is now moved in house by new divisions of major publishing companies, who are now also lobbying to have access to consumer GPUs restricted.

2028: Drawful and Soundful are now in open beta, if they haven't been already! Now you can make art in the style your favorite artists for only $30 a month; however, any art you prompt, in addition to any derivative work you make from the art you prompt, is owned by the service. Licensing costs extra.

Although they make it easy to train your own model by uploading a folder of your own work, artists get paid a fraction of a cent per generation on these sites, decided by a mixture of nearest-match reverse CLIP search, and a dropdown menu suggesting "popular styles" such as classic Disney, Pixar, and whatever limited-time offer corporate crossover event is currently happening. Signing away your right to be trained on is common practice in the industry. When you sign away your right, you also sign away the rights to all works created by fine-tuning a model on your work. The "most liked" works on the site have a chance to be re-recorded by the artist, with no credit whatsoever to the prompter. After all, they only came up with the idea and happened to like what came out of the AI; anyone can do that.

The scary part of this is, the ideas don't come out of nowhere, according to the author, this is directly based on what happened with Napster, Facebook and Spotify.

Which I think any artists cheering on the idea of applying a Spotify model to AI art should take pause over...

[starrspice]

Procreate is Making an animation app thats dropping in November

Nobody touch me I will be foaming at the mouth until this is released

[knife-moth-mc]

Since i said i'd make it available, here under the cut is what i did to get museum of anything goes working:

I tried wine first, because that's the sane thing to do. Or rather, i tried to try wine first. I couldn't figure out how to get it to accept the game file.

So i pivoted to dosbox, because i knew that can run games of the correct approximate era.

I got it to open the game! ...kind of. I got it to tell me that the game needs windows to run.

That's fine! This is a solvable problem. I made a virtualbox instance with windows 3.1 installed in it.

This turned out to be harder than expected, because i had to install both msdos and then windows 3.1, and i had to do command line things for that.

Which, again, is fine, but i didn't know the right commands offhand, so i had to look them up.

I then had to install cd-rom drivers in order to open the .iso file in the instance.

And the game ran! I walked around in it a little bit to make sure!

But there was a problem.

Two problems, rather.

Two very big and obvious problems.

There was no sound, and it had 16 colors rather than 256.

I turned to the internet. The internet said to install sound and color drivers.

So i tried to install sound and color drivers. This went poorly. The sound drivers caused a number of error message but did not cause sound, and the color drivers broke the instance such that i had to edit the windows system files from the command line in order to be able to open windows at all.

Eventually i grew tired of this.

One of the threads i looked at for help suggested trying windows 98 instead, as most 3.1 programs will also run in that and it works nicer with virtualbox.

I made a windows 98 instance in virtualbox. I got it to run. It took a few tries, but, you know, eventually it worked.

And then somehow i broke it so badly that virtualbox not only went "we're forcequitting this kthxbai" but also DELETED THE ENTIRE INSTANCE.

I still don't know how i managed that.

In any case, it was clear windows 98 wasn't meant to be.

This meant i had hit a dead end with virtualbox. So i asked my parent, @the-real-seebs , for help.

"Why don't you run windows 3.1 in dosbox?" Seebs asked.

"What." I said.

"Windows 3.1 isn't actually an operating system, it's a program that runs on top of msdos."

"WHAT."

So i went back to dosbox and tried to get windows 3.1 running there.

This worked great! The sound and colors worked perfectly there! Everything was going swimmingly.

And then it threw an error message when i tried to open the game.

Googling the error message turned up nothing.

Like, "0 results" nothing.

So i was back to the drawing board.

Desperate, i googled "run windows 3.1 games on linux" and the internet said "hey, have you tried lutris?"

And i went "oh yeah..... lutris...... the thing i downloaded to help me troubleshoot among us and then never touched again....."

I poked around a bit and found some scripts that claimed they could open a windows 3.1 instance in lutris if you provided the actual files.

I provided them the actual files. I received error messaged in turn.

They were pretty easy errors to fix, just some missing packages. So i got the missing packages and tried again.

The error messages stopped. The instance quietly failed when i tried to open it.

I found the logs, which complained of more missing packages. This was fine and fixable.

Until they asked for a package that doesn't exist for the version of linux i'm on.

So that was that for lutris.

At this point i had been working on this for about ten hours. I asked seebs for help again.

Seebs said she couldn't help me, and suggested i ask some software furries she's friends with for help.

I resolved to do that in the morning, and i went to bed.

Pretty much as soon as i woke up i asked the software furries for help.

"Have you tried qemu + freedos?"

I had not, having not previously heard of either.

Qemu turned out to be a neat little editor that runs from the terminal, which means you have to type in all the commands yourself without a user interface.

Or you can paste them in from the guide you're clinging to like driftwood, which is what i actually did.

I think freedos is an open source alternative to msdos. I'm not 100% sure. I wasn't processing things like that very well because they weren't relevant to my Task At Hand.

I had to do things like:

Make a fake hard drive!

Install freedos on the fake hard drive!

Open the fake hard drive in qemu!

Once more install windows 3.1!

And it was all very cool and sexy and hackery.

It seemed to be working perfectly!

Until i closed it and tried to re-open it.

There are only so many times one can read an error message before accepting that one has been bested this time.

I think at this point i cried a little.

I went back to dosbox, because maybe i was missing something.

Maybe the windows files were borked.

I tried a different set of windows files.

They opened fine. They had working sound.

By god they had working sound.

The instance played a single note, repeatedly, something like twice a second.

I couldn't figure out how to make it stop.

But that didn't matter, because i got the same error message when i tried to open the game.

The only thing that had worked remotely stably so far was virtualbox, so i turned once again to virtualbox.

This time, for sound, i used one of the tutorials i found for doing this in qemu instead of the tutorials i found for doing it in virtualbox.

And, of course, they worked.

Because i live in a comedy of errors or something.

This left only the colors to figure out.

The general wisdom i had gleaned was that the built-in options would break the virtualbox ui, and the drivers would break the windows installation (as i had discovered repeatedly earlier).

The solution was to use patched drivers. But i couldn't figure out where to get them or how to make them.

Truly at my wits end, i opened a youtube video that claimed to be a tutorial for getting the colors to work.

It said, of course, that this requires patched drivers.

It said, there is a link to the drivers in the video description.

And so there were.

And they worked.

I opened the game and it looked and sounded perfect.

At this point, i had been working on this for a total of 15 hours.

I am unstoppable and inevitable.

[genericpuff]

Let me preface this: I'm an architecture major

I used to be a big LO fan but obviously fell out of love of it like a lot of us did, and I know LO uses SketchUp for backgrounds. That is not an issue I have with the comic or any comic, I want artists to have an easier time in any way they can. I was always under the impression Rachel imported the models into Photoshop and drew over them like you can see in the early episodes with the sketchy lines. Well, school just started recently for me and I now have access to SketchUp for my coursework, and I made a few discoveries: 1. Photoshop cannot read SketchUp files, and while you can import them into Clip Studio through some configuring, they can be finicky and will lose parts in the importing process, so they are best used into the original SketchUp program to export as PNGs. 2. Many of the models Rachel uses are incredibly easy to find, especially if you put "modern", "luxury", or "classy" before the main part of the search. Many of the houses and rooms for example are first page results. 3. The biggest discovery: You know how we all assumed Rachel was hand-drawing all the lines over the SketchUp models and how she gave up the longer LO went on? Well, it's actually worse. It turns out SketchUp has a thing called "Styles" in it, which means you can mess with the lines and look of the model, such as making it look more like a blueprint or playing with the colors. Well, they have a lot of styles on SketchUp known as "sketchy lines", which are the exact ones Rachel used early in the comic to fit with her style, and it takes a literal click of a button to do. All she would do is pose the model, click the sketchy line style, and export the PNG. That's it. So, yeah, Rachel is so checked out of the comic that she can't even bother to click a single button to make the models fit into the comic's style anymore. Use that information however you like.

Ouhhh sorry OP, I'm about to like, undo all the work you just put into that ask. We've already known about the 3D background problem for a long while now.

First off, it's more likely LO doesn't use SketchUp but actually Acon3D, which is a website that offers 3D models both for free and at cost, which are actually compatible with software like Clip Studio. As soon as you open it up you'll likely see a lot of very familiar backgrounds that are often used in romances, isekais, and period pieces. It's literally the go-to spot for Webtoon Originals creators. Like, to the point that I wouldn't be surprised if Naver was partnered with them because of how many of their creators use it.

Second, there's plenty of up-to-date evidence to support the fact that Rachel doesn't exclusively stick to one software, sometimes she's drawing in Photoshop, sometimes she's drawing in Clip Studio Paint, sometimes she's drawing in Procreate. She's undoubtedly using Clip Studio for her paneling, speech bubbles, and backgrounds, as there are built in tools to utilize and convert 3D materials into lineart, among other features that are recognizable as coming from CSP because they're not available in PS or Procreate.

Third, yes, she just uses filters to turn her backgrounds into lineart, this has been apparent since S1. The only backgrounds she's ever 'hand drawn' were the ones involving lots of nature and even those are mostly just Photoshop brushes stamped on.

Like I realize I'm probably bursting your bubble here and I apologize for that lmao but these buildings were never hand-drawn, this is not new information (￣﹏￣；) I appreciate you mentioning your own experiences with it as you're learning it though, I find once you start to learn the process yourself you really start to notice what others are doing. Even I've gone through that over the past couple years as I started to use 3D models and more advanced tools specifically for drawing webtoons.

I will mention btw, there's nothing wrong with using 3D models for your character drawing and backgrounds. The only time it tends to get frustrating is when you're reading a comic that isn't making any attempts to blend the background in with the art style.

Like, The Kiss Bet probably uses 3D models to help with perspective and laying out scenes quickly without second-guessing, but you can tell they still hand-draw over the models because they look natural and like they belong to the comic's stylization. The characters don't look out of place sitting in a living room and the living room doesn't look distracting.

But then you get stuff like Lore Olympus, Let's Play, and Midnight Poppy Land, and it becomes a bit more obvious they're not giving a shit about backgrounds lmao

I get it, WT's deadlines are cutthroat as fuck, but if it's getting to the point that you have an entire team behind you and you're literally just copy pasting video game models from Phantom Hourglass, then it's probably time to re-focus your priorities a bit. There are comics with as few as 1-2 assistants (and even in some cases no assistants at all!!) pulling off backgrounds better than this, even when they're taking shortcuts.

(Nevermore and City of Blank)

But a lot of that does come down to how WT manages its expectations as well as support for their creators. The deadlines and requirements WT puts their creators under are insane and awful in the long-term, and they're not acting with the amount of professionalism they ought to be for a platform that's trying to breakout as a major publisher here in the West. I feel like it comes down to WT loosening the choke chain around their creators, but also creating a standardized level of quality to ensure it's not suffering for the sake of quantity. The traditional literature industry has real editors and stages of quality control for a reason, whereas WT is more interested in just throwing as many series at the wall and dumping all their stock into the ones that stick.

[queenlua]

"Vulkan is weird— but it's weird in a way that makes a certain sort of horrifying machine sense. Every Vulkan call involves passing in one or two huge structures which are themselves a forest of other huge structures, and every structure and sub-structure begins with a little protocol header explaining what it is and how big it is. Before you allocate memory you have to fill out a structure to get back a structure that tells you what structure you're supposed to structure your memory allocation request in. None of it makes any sense— unless you've designed a programming language before, in which case everything you're reading jumps out to you as "oh, this is contrived like this because it's designed to be easy to bind to from languages with weird memory-management techniques" "this is a way of designing a forward-compatible ABI while making no assumptions about programming language" etc. The docs are written in a sort of alien English that fosters no understanding— but it's also written exactly the way a hardware implementor would want in order to remove all ambiguity about what a function call does. In short, Vulkan is not for you. It is a byzantine contract between hardware manufacturers and middleware providers, and people like… well, me, are just not part of the transaction.

Khronos did not forget about you and me. They just made a judgement, and this actually does make a sort of sense, that they were never going to design the perfectly ergonomic developer API anyway, so it would be better to not even try and instead make it as easy as possible for the perfectly ergonomic API to be written on top, as a library. Khronos thought within a few years of Vulkan being released there would be a bunch of high-quality open source wrapper libraries that people would use instead of Vulkan directly. These libraries basically did not materialize. It turns out writing software is work and open source projects do not materialize just because people would like them to."

[eightfish]

Okay, I have SEARCHED Painttool Sai's site so I can download Painttool Sai 2, and I can't actually find any link to download it. I have ver 1, the 30 day trial, right now and I can't say I love it because I'm used to softwares with a lot more variety built in to them. I mean, variety of brushes, layer effects, etc. There's a layer effect I wanted to try that I heard about from another artist who uses Painttool, and it's not available with the version I have. How on earth do I get version 2?

Hey! It's actually a "technical preview version" as of now and it is somewhat complicated to install - quote the website, "Please never use this version if you have not basic skills for Windows operation."

Here's the link to the install and instructions: https://www.systemax.jp/en/sai/devdept.html

Feels sketchy but it is legit and I haven't run into any bugs, it's the most stable drawing program I've used. Probably cause of the lack of features lol. It's pretty easy to make custom brushes tho!

Also I really like SAI cause the design philosophy works with my brain. It's a streamlined program with all the tools I need and nothing more. It's easy to learn, and once you do you can combine the tools to do pretty much anything you want. But it's not for everyone and if you prefer a more maximalist approach to software design I've heard good things about Clip Studio Paint!