#it took me a whole week of opening krita

[chicoryblue]

HRGNH i hate rendering can someone point me to some tutorials that arent "ultra realism"

theres a brush in krita that works really well for his choppy fur (in action on his mane) but thats not what i waaaant

[cryptidsurveys]

Friday, August 16th, 2024.

Have you had more hot or cold drinks today? I've had something like 20% hot and 80% cold.

What's a name you like that's similar to yours? I don't have any special fondness for names similar to mine.

Where did you get the last plate/bowl you ate with from? It's a giant red mug decorated with gingerbread houses. I bought it at Walmart last year during the holiday season.

How's your mental health today? It's decent. I'm a lot better at bouncing back from stress/overwhelm than I once was. Things that used to crush me are now basically resolved within 24 hrs.

What bands and artists did you listen to when you were a teenager? I listened to a lot of alternative rock/metal on the radio; I don't think I could list out all of the bands I liked because it was more like a song here, a song there, etc. But some regulars (meaning I had their CDs or made mixtapes of their music) were Evanescence, Three Days Grace, Green Day, My Chemical Romance, Creed, Sarah McLachlan, Linkin Park, and J-rock artists/bands like Malice Mizer, Gackt, Gazette, etc.

Do your feelings get hurt easily? They can. I still struggle with my sense of self-worth and the belief that maybe I deserve to be treated badly, like it's my karma or something, but I'm actually starting to get annoyed when people are needlessly rude to me. I know - pick your battles - but maybe I'll finally start sticking up for myself instead of constantly taking it...?

What sort of restaurant did you last eat at? I went to lunch with my parents at Black Eyed Pea a little over a week ago.

Do you have a friend who's always sending you TikTok videos? Do you actually watch them? Oliver often sends me funny little videos, and yes, I do actually watch (and appreciate) them. We have a very similar sense of humor.

Have you ever seen a cougar in the wild? I haven't.

Will you attend a wedding in the next 3 months? No.

Are you good at following instructions? Yeah, for the most part, unless they're ridiculously complicated or dealing with something I know very little about (like car mechanics, for instance).

What's your backyard or outdoor area like? The backyard is fairly large and rather overgrown.

Do you like your boss? Or your last boss if you don't currently have one? Even though I'm just a volunteer, I consider Leslie and Iris my "bosses." I do like them.

When was the last time you took a selfie? Wednesday. It was of me with the new kitten.

What did you have for breakfast yesterday? Oatmeal.

What do you do to entertain yourself on a long flight or journey? I haven't been on a long flight or road trip in years, but I would probably entertain myself with audiobooks, podcasts, music, daydreaming, random snapshots of the scenery, chats with my dad (if he happened to be along with me)…

Where are you right now? I'm at home, in my bedroom.

Have you ever done a hearing test? Yeah.

Do you hate small talk? It can feel a bit awkward. I try my best, but I just don't know what to say.

What's the hottest temperature your current town/city has ever had? 109*F.

What programs/applications do you currently have open on the device you're using right now? Microsoft Edge and Krita (art program).

How many steps per day do you do, generally? I'm not sure. If I'm at the animal shelter, then probably a whole bunch because I'm almost always on my feet. However, when I wore a step counter back when I worked at the pet shop, the total was often underwhelming. Not nearly as much as I would have guessed - again, especially considering I was moving around all day long.

Have you had any snacks today? Yeah. I typically have 3 meals and at least 2 snacks, plus random bits of whatever.

What's the next thing you'll tick off your to-do list? Probably pick out my clothes for tomorrow. I hate rummaging around trying to find things in the morning.

Have you ever had a chia pet? No.

What's your favourite sandwich filling? Lol, probably cheese. I eat primarily cheese-based sandwiches these days.

Do you have any nieces or nephews? I don't.

What was the last reason you saw a doctor? For a check-up.

Do you use light mode or dark mode on your phone? I guess light mode…?

[dashawfrostart]

This Week In "Time & Again" #22: AUTOMATION 101 Because I Said So [Techy!] [And Other Ideas] 😎

I was thoughtful, so I did some simple math for the reason of mere curiosity and statistics. I counted the number of panels per chapter, just to see clearer what lies past and ahead of me, and to entertain myself. It turns out, the average number of the panels in every chapter for the chapters 1 to 4 is 92. Counting Chapters 3.1 and 3.2 as separate entities, just because they're basically two books anyway. It was a double chapter. ... Which means that for every more or less normal sized chapter I make I draw 92 separate little artworks, most of which have backgrounds and somewhat advanced, non-simplistic shading (although my latest art philosophy intends to go the opposite direction... but it only intends to do it, it does not necessarily do that very well yet, lol). Not just stick people. And here's the good part: Chapter 5 contains whooping 187 panels. The simple math tells you it's roughly double the original amount. Mostly because I needed to show the maniacal changes in Lothar's expression, the gradual changes, the agony. I hope those pretty numbers serve you well and answer the ultimate question of where the heck I disappear so frequently. And how much work it is. For one person. (and yet, I honestly think I do quite well regardless) Obviously, I disappear into "Time & Again". That is the right answer. That's how it's supposed to be for an artist working on something that is incredibly important to them 😁

But enough numbers, here are some exciting (and also facially hilarious) snippets from the storyboard! (of course, includes censorship by The Author, because Lothar never stops cursing)

With the page by page script fully storyboarded by now, I took a small detour on my road to Chapter 6.

Within the last few days, I set to work on the two important tasks, one of which is already accomplished by now.

The first task - the one that's done - was to mass process a tremendous amount of older artworks for the grand reupload (larger than the number of the panels in Chapter 5 - and that's sayin' something! 😱). I had 138 older artworks that I needed to resize and reapply a watermark on top; plus additional 77 to perform the same very task on afterwards. Why that is needed is a secret for now. But it will definitely see the light of day soon-ish (hopefully). ... As you can already guess, doing all of that manually would've been yet another nightmare - especially since my memories of going through pain and real hell of adding full bleed to "Time & Again" are still fresh in my mind, and hot like cakes straight from the oven... Also, of course, I didn't feel like dedicating a whole bloody month doing just that either, when I have Chapter 6 on the go as well as a transformation of Chapter 4 (more on the matter is just below). That's why I urgently needed automation of sorts. I'm a little surprised to discover that in my older post about how I prepared "Time & Again" for paper printing I totally skipped talking about an incredibly useful plugin for Krita that's called Krita Batch Exporter, made by GDQuest (whose videos I actually watched a few years back when I still worked on my game about the sleepy knight... but alas, as you might guess, the game never happened. oh well). Even though the plugin originally is aimed at indie game devs, it proved to be useful to me when I was working on full bleed areas for my chapters and when I needed to match them to the final print size. TL;DR: I simply opened all the pages of my graphic narrative as multiple layers, mass resized them all, and then batch exported layer by layer with the help of that very plugin. Simple and fast. Thank you so very much, GDQuest! 🌻 But alas, with the task that was ahead of me this time, with the supermassive number of random artworks that varied in size and aspect ratio GREATLY, that trick most likely wouldn't have worked. Instead, I braved learning the usage of ImageMagick command line utility. I was thinking about using it to batch edit and import "Time & Again" for printing, too, but back then I was not brave enough and didn't want to bother. This time, I urgently needed to learn. For a tech savvy person such as myself - who is a hardcore Doom nerdist who practiced modding not once but twice and thrice (and still does it 😁), a person with a lot of experience making older programs work on newer Windows, it was not very difficult. Yet, it still required some dancing with a tambourine around a table before everything started to work like a charm, and, of course, asking my Editor-In-Chef for guidance. I will even share my incredibly simple batch file code:

magick mogrify -filter Lanczos -resize "1200x1200>" *.png magick mogrify -filter Lanczos -resize "1200x1200>" *.jpg pause

to batch resize (and override!) all the PNG and JPG files to 1200 pixels wide or high depending on the original aspect ratio (unless they're already smaller), using Lanczos scaling method that proved very useful for downsizing the larger pieces to produce clean result. Afterwards, I needed to take my signature watermark and stamp it on top of all the downscaled artworks. I started working on the code for the image overlay in ImageMagick... And then, working on something totally different, I found out that IrfanView can do that for me. And unlike ImageMagick, IrfanView has UI (whatever will you do?.. I am indeed a person who has to see things in front of me, even though I'm not scared of CMD 😁). IrfanView is simply fantastic. It reads lots of different file types, it saves the watermark settings, and it works very fast. Adding my watermark to all those files was super easy and quick. And I only spent, like, one day doing all of that instead of a month of work manually 😁 Whooohoooo! I cannot verbally describe how rejoiced I am! (And I think I also used IrfanView to work on my Doom mod... that's why I installed that nice piece of software. Peanut Butter Jelly Time!.. Aaah, memories)

So that is done! Now you just gotta wait for all these 138 + 77 = 215 artworks to reappear in the internet sometime this year for everyone's happiness 😉

I am also glad that earlier this year I have discovered that Inkscape now supports batch export of layers natively - which is INCREDIBLY useful for my project (because I always start from arranging text and speech bubbles on multiple layers in Inkscape before porting everything to Krita for further work).

The second task bears a huge importance: I am polishing and slightly expanding Chapter 4 for the "Clean Cut Edition". The feedback on the chapter I have received earlier from my early access readers indicated a certain lack of hints... It was actually meant to be fairly vague to begin with. However, Chapter 4 was the only chapter for now that had a few outtakes from the script I wrote. I figured that I could fill in the gaps and make it easier to understand via the addition of a small (by my standards, lol) passage of text, aside from adding "Notes, Hints & Commentary" section. Ironically or not, all things considered, I simply decided to restore the cut content that was originally present - the content that I excluded for a truly naïve and dumb reason of keeping the page count intact (and, as we could see as of lately and thanks to my math above, Chapter 5 broke all those limitations and standards of yore anyways). Now I'm sad that I dissected my script without a weighty reason back then. But good news! I'm restoring all of that for the Clean Cut Edition! AND now with commentaries 😁 As for now, all the text and panel placement is decided on, and the only thing I have to do is to draw extra faces of Lothar and [redacted for the reason of spoilers for those who haven't yet read it] to portray a proper conversation between the two. And I think that the extra pages fit in quite nicely, too.

And aside from that, I also worked on a random artwork featuring Lothar. Here's the teaser; the full version will be uploaded soon.

And down below there's a bit more stuff I'd like to share today (even though I started writing it a few days ago, so idea simply accumulated in my head), in a form of expanded theses:

Since I don't want to stretch it all out as it sometimes happens with my endeavours, and there's no actually useful AI that might help me speed up the process, I think I'm going to try something peculiar this time, and it might sound... well... a bit crazy. I've been thinking about that for a while already (quite certainly, since the times I used to be an active DeviantArt user, which makes it approximately... 15 years by now?! wowza!!!), but never really had a chance to try out that approach. I was thinking about dropping the sketching phase completely. Earlier I've mentioned that, when I work on the comic pages in digital workspace once the approximate sketching and paneling on paper is all done, normally I work "in stages", outlining the panels in Inkscape first, then gradually working my way from sketches to lineart and, finally, to colouring, in segments. So I'm thinking about skipping the sketching part completely and doing the final lineart right away - simply because it will save me time. And quite possibly, a lot of time. AND time is a precious resource - so said Winston, and they were right. I understand that that might not be a good idea - but the student must learn sometime and through intense practice, right? And since I wished for that since a near immeasurable time ago, but then never ended up doing that for a reason unbeknownst even to myself - then it's probably the time to do it. Well, I'm looking forward to an adventure. I promise there will be no eyes on different height or any other fancy-schmansy stuff, and no extra fingers. With my demands to the quality it's near impossible - of course, unless intended. 😁 (I will still do simple sketches first for the complex views and angles. Otherwise everything will look crooked. Come on. I'm not that proficient yet.)

Ever since the development of Chapter 6 has been started, and its plot was in the stage of an embryo, my research lead me to a fairly solid conclusion that Lothar is a sociopath. He passes the test quite well and complies with numerous criteria wonderfully, I don't even have to doubt that. Heck, I don't even know if I like Lothar anymore... That Ar*****ch has done some very questionable stuff in Chapter 5. I just want him to put himself together and finally move on, preferably in a somewhat positive direction. This is also one of the reasons why I want to finish "Time & Again" - to help Lothar redeem himself. Come on, dude. Get in the effing robot... Eeeerrrr... Please don't take that too far though; that was just a figure of speech.

That's enough for today. See you soon 😁

[timpac-capstone]

Week 11

Timestamp: 6:18 to 7:05: A friend of mine recommended this video of Billie Eilish watching and cringing at her old Vanity Fair interviews. For the most part, she isn't too hard on herself because she takes into consideration her age and feels more forgiving for what she says because of that factor, it could also be because this is her sixth time doing this in a row. However, in the timestamp that I gave, she reacts the same way that I react when I watch my old YouTube videos which is comforting to see that I'm not the only one that wants to choke myself because of the dumb things I said and did in the past.

This was another recommended video, I can't remember if it was from a classmate or my teacher but this was a lot more useful to watch. For starters, I finally understand why there are no camera positions indicated in screenplays thanks to 13:47 to 14:04 and that is because the screenwriter's job is to make the story and the director's job is to present that story. This is also helpful because Emily is writing a SciFi story which has its own issues of having ideas too ambitious for the audience to understand. It was also insightful to see how the writing process progressed as Emily got more studio notes, an example being how loose she was in writing the first draft, and then in the second draft she made many quick decisions to get rid of scenes or dialogue she didn't like and flesh out the stuff she did like, and in the third draft was further fleshing out extra details and adding more background info about the characters and the world.

I FINALLY DID IT, I FINALLY ANIMATED A CHARACTER IN KRITA. After months and months of telling myself that I couldn't do it, I finally got around to making this walk cycle of the brain cell carrying a heavy bag. I think what definitely helped me was using the drawing tablets that the Fablab provides rather than the cheap one that I have, it actually does make a huge difference and it's not cause the Fablab one has more buttons. For one I have more surface area to work with that is closer to the sketchbook size that I'm used to and the pen feels like it has some resistance when I'm drawing and I can feel how hard I am pressing into the tablet. Once I got used to it I just started drawing the first pose of the character and then when I finished that I said "Fuck it let's just try animating this bitch" and looked up a tutorial and loosely followed along. I won't lie to you this was a very long learning process and I did get frustrated at times to the point where I had to leave my laptop, this animation that you're seeing right now took me a whole day. Something that was very frustrating was definitely the size of my laptop since there are a lot of panels that I needed open but Krita doesn't like it when you try to shrink those panels past a certain point so I had to constantly close and open panels. Another frustrating thing was the legs didn't seem to be coming out right no matter how many times I redrew them so I recorded a video of myself trying to act out carrying a heavy bag of laundry as a reference and I was finally able to fix it. I also had to figure out how to space out these 6 frames to make the bag look like it's heavy to pull. Before I had the frames evenly spaced out and the physics just didn't seem right and was about to draw some more frames but thankfully I figured out the timing before I did all that work. I'm really proud of myself for this even though this is just a rough test animation but I'm not as reluctant on digital drawing anymore.

REFLECTION:

Honestly, I have nothing to reflect upon, I finally did an animation and that is a victory in itself. Next week for my Capstone presentation I'm going to try and put together a scene from my storyboards. It won't play out exactly how I want it to because I'm still just doing early test animations to see what works and what doesn't work as well as just figuring out Krita. Not sure if I'm gonna put dialogue in or just let the animation speak for itself but if I have time I'll try to do some voice acting.

[nitro-nova]

“C’mon, tell me. Which open source project is the disaster mess?”

We see things like LibreOffice and Krita and VLC it’s like damn, open source software tends to be pretty freakin’ successful. This stuff is phenomenal.

And very hard to program. Not every project is a shining beacon of awesomeness. Sometimes, a project is a mess, especially when it’s ambitious.

Let me tell you about the couch potato of the group. Not necessarily a toxic community kind of place (because nobody wants to deal with that), I’m talking about the open source project that is admitting to their therapist that on a brisk tuesday morning, last week, they wore sweatpants with bed head to the local diner and ate a greasy cheeseburger in the corner before going home and getting a shower.

This is the project that wants to get its life back together but is an absolute mess, right now.

This is

Linux Multi Media System, LMMS, the music making program. Tagline: “It technically works, please forgive us!”

Allow me to introduce you to a contributor’s rendition of the program’s Cartoon Mascot that everyone VERY THANKFULLY abandoned.

H E L L O... H U M A N

It’s not easy to make attractive graphics, but LMMS seemed to have just incredibly bad luck. I won’t name and shame, but you have to admit, despite the amount of work it took to make some of these themes, we’re talking about basic violations of color palette theory.

The software itself is incredibly prone to crashing if you stress it too hard by, say, trying to preview the default sound of certain powerful synthesizers before you properly add them to your project. The UI is loaded with little issues like scaling and accidental mis-clicks triggering annoying effects.

Luckily, they’re on top of these problems because they use an online source code project software where everybody edits their own copy, and that prevents issues with the original version, right?

Oh dear.

One of the major reasons why the project looks so intimidating to contribute to is because half of the issues aren’t actually issues. See, despite its horrendous first impression, LMMS is actually a really cool music making software that is highly ambitious with lots of features for being completely free to use, so naturally lots and lots of fans registered accounts and made 342 open tickets with brainstormed ideas for it. It is an overwhelming amount of passion and support and suggestions for the few who actually do the programming work.

The other reason is that the documentation (as in, documents that explain to new developers what everything in the project DOES) is really lacking!! And it’s in C++, a language that lots of well-meaning newbie developers use to make lots of obscure, frustrating, and easily-made mistakes!

Let’s get into the tongue-in-cheek of these goofballs. Here we have a translation issue that has been labelled as an enhancement because shh we do not speak ill of The Father of LMMS

An ironically named fellow demonstrates that his dialog boxes and buttons and -- okay, actually it’s the ENTIRE appearance of the software -- has been scaled up like 400% and has no idea why. Yes, that’s his itty bitty little taskbar all the way at the bottom of the screenshot! Turns out it involved his configuration, of which he was none too pleased to hear about, considering that it didn’t do this in the previous release.

Poor bear.

Another major issue is with pull requests. When people have a rough draft of a new bugfix or a new feature, they make a “pull request” to merge their code in with the original code. Unfortunately, they’ve got pull requests from as far back as 2018. Peer review needs to happen so that everyone’s sure this doesn’t bring in a whole bunch of unwanted bugs, and they’re also supposed to review the coding style so that it stays consistent and clean.

But these requests are just sitting here. A couple of them don’t even work anymore because the project marched on without them. Maybe something happened to where that code couldn’t be merged in, but this is a rather long buildup of what should be polished up and approved changes.

That’s basically LMMS, right now. It’s a mess. It’s not a serious mess, but it’s a mess, all the same.

It’s not all that gloomy, however. The program works well enough, all things considered. It’s got lots of instruments, you can choose lots of chords to add, the workflow is actually pretty beginner-friendly, and there’s plenty of out-of-box plugins to work for practicing composition and mixing.

There is an interest from talented designers who have strong ideas for improving the software. Certainly it would take a significant amount of work, but the fanaticism is definitely there.

The developers are now looking for talent that can do the tough work of handling documentation, establishing setup and development guides, becoming more attentive with pull requests. A lot of the fundamentally necessary stuff for a project is sought after. And while this is an absolute nightmare project, it is stuffed to the gills with people who regularly show their appreciation.

You can in fact give the software a shot. The developers have a Discord, Github, a wiki, I think they still have a Facebook, and they’re looking for talent.

please help them