What it says on the tin

Okay, so, for no particular reason, certainly not one relevant to the super-secret project of mystery I'm working on right now...what is your preferred operating system? Windows? Apple Mac? Linux distros (and if "yes" to this, which distro, exactly)?

I knew this day would come eventually, but I was hoping to work at Nick Jr. or something before my job required me to clean up my act online...but I have been warned by my parents to clean up my online presence for the sake of my current and future occupations' reputations...even on Newgrounds here. Obviously I wouldn't let most people know I have an NG account, just my YouTube account (where the site itself is censoring my sense of humor to the moon and back, anyway), but clearly at least letting my parents know about it was a mistake. In particular, they want me to cool it with the "fat" jokes, especially the "barely-disguised fetish" kinds.

Oh well, I'm too much of an American prude anyway to make posts that are worse than a "T" rating, and if I feel making most of my stuff more P.C. (politically correct) becomes too suffocating, then maybe I'll just make a separate NSFW account under a different name and a completely different art style like so many people, possibly even Disney artists, do. It would certainly give me the motivation to properly study female anatomy for once.

More importantly, though, being more careful of commenting (choosing to simply favorite or give 4-5 stars to art I like, though I understand some of you will miss my sillier or dirtier comments) will give me more time to actually make funny animations and images. Plus, with X/Twitter, Meta/Facebook and other Web 2.0 old guards slowly-but-surely imploding and scaring off even its most addicted users, I'm not even sure I really even want that big of a web presence anymore, outside of a place to show my best art and hope people looking at it for more than 3 seconds--I'm certainly not planning on getting any new accounts anywhere until a true "Twitter-killer" or "YouTube-killer" that is also CONSISTENTLY POPULAR (sorry Mastodon or Threads) finally comes along.

Probably not going to be posting some new projects for a while, since I am currently working on setting up the Blender asset library so that I can effortlessly drag and drop realistic PBR materials and various prop models I bought off the Internet into my scenes and hopefully increase the "production values" of my renders by having my characters actually existing in a decent background and maybe even interacting with some of the stuff. Also, it would allow me to focus solely on making good-looking characters and overall hopefully give my renders a sort of "triple A PlayStation 5 game" look.

Basically, I'm working for probably the rest of 2023 on setting up the Asset Library features in recent versions of Blender (technically, I'm using B4Artists with Maya's hotkey setup, but it's basically the same) just so that I can save myself a minute or two of work on projects later down the line. But anything that basically turns my copy of Blender into a modern-day and more professional equivalent of the excellent children's/indie software, Windows 3D Movie Maker, is worth the trouble in my book. And you'll easily see the fruits of my labors in 2024 or so when every surface material on my character and the background looks real enough to touch. Such is the power of Physically-Based Rendering (PBR)!

Also, in case you're wondering, because it is tedious setting up the 300+ materials I bought or authored myself (haven't even started on the background and prop assets, yet), I've been listening to various Super Robot Wars soundtracks to distract from the tedium. Apparently Bandai Namco officially released a new SRW game in the United States (SRW 30) in 2022 for the first time since Atlus published in the US the inferior Game Boy Advance ports of the SRW OG back in the 2000's, so naturally I am rediscovering excellent Banpresto tunes like Sword-Soul-One-Strike, Trombe! and, of course, Neppu! Shippu! Cybuster.

I think it’s high time I took advantage of my “privilege” of being unable to sell my works on more “mainstream” websites like YouTube and Twitter, and thus not having any financial reason to stick with lousy websites if I don’t want to.

I proudly jumped off the Twitter ship long before Elon Musk ensured it would sink faster—I probably would have been “cancelled” if I had stayed, anyway, considering by far my most Liked/Re-Tweeted post before leaving poked fun at the “poor, poor billionaire”—but sadly Twitter no longer seems to have the monopoly on actively scaring off its otherwise-addicted users. Perhaps the only “popular” website I still use besides Discord is YouTube, and while they are at least being a bit less abrupt about the changes, YouTube is still becoming an increasingly-cumbersome way just to watch the latest episodes of OneyPlays or SnapCube, let alone figure out a consistent way to get people to see my own videos. It honestly kind of hurts that lousy animations I made when I was only 16 consistently got hundreds of views while the stuff I make now struggles to even get double-digit view counts because YouTube’s algorithm is just that hard to figure out now—I’m just figuring out now why none of the people I follow seem to post on weekends anymore, but by the time I adjust my upload schedule to days that people are more likely to watch YouTube, that could change, because the algorithm is just a “Chaotic Neutral” now, I guess.

Combine that with YouTube’s own attempts at punishing free users rather than making YouTube Premium more worth the money, other websites like Reddit and ArtStations having meltdowns, “Fediverse” alternatives like Mastodon being too weird and complicated for most, and the simple fact that once I do get a desirable animation-related job that forces me to go on hiatus online, I will likely have to start over on my follower account anyway as all the fair-weathered fans unfollow me, there doesn’t seem much point in me advertising myself on various online spaces anymore other if the websites themselves are becoming more unpopular. Oh, also the fact that most of these websites now actively discourage you from advertising your other socials on their sites and increasingly make it difficult to even see the website unless you set up an account, first, which obviously hobbles my ability to make people aware of where on the Internet I’m most active.

Until we get sites to fully replace old guards like Twitter, Reddit and YouTube, I will probably be more casual about posting for the sake of my sanity. Mostly spend most of my time on Newgrounds here, since it seems to be the last “fun” website for me (also, ironically more people are likely to see my works on NG instead of YT because it doesn’t have an unpredictable algorithm), use Discord for communicating with freelancers and clients, still post demo reels or something on YT for my parents to watch my stuff on their TVs (though it’s not worth it at this point making a serious attempt to grow on that site), and of course, focus the majority of my efforts on my portfolio website so I can get a job in animation and never again have to put in all this effort getting noticed by companies online, outside of that portfolio site. Yes, I would rather deal with Hollywood or the “triple-A” gaming industry’s problems at this point than the entire Internet’s.

If I MUST stare at a screen for long periods of time (my skin burns easily, can’t spend ALL day touching grass), it’s probably a bit better for my mental health anyway to just play more of Zelda TOTK than use up my free time scrolling the increasingly-miserable modern Internet.

When I made my latest 3D render in the Art Portal, Stinkums the Cat, I rendered it in Blender Cycles, as per usual. But I've seen so many impressive things lately, such as The Voice in the Hollow and Tenacious D's Video Games music video, being rendered much faster and more efficiently in the video game engine, Unreal Engine 4/5! Unfortunately, Epic's bloated game engine really doesn't like my laptop or its smaller screen, so I wondered if I could achieve similar results in the open-source alternative, Godot Engine, which recently got a massive update that, among other things, drastically improves the 3D rendering and simplifies importing .blend Blender files and animations in and out of the engine.

Here is the result when I used the most advanced console/PC-oriented Forward Rendering+ engine, rendered on an RTX 3060 mobile GPU and a massive dollop of anti-aliasing and post-processing effects:

Looks nearly indistinguishable from a path-traced Cycles render, right? I even added some stuff like Fog and subtle Bloom, which you can't get with a raw Cycles render until AFTER you do mountains of photo editing.

Here is my first attempt with the more energy-efficient Mobile rendering, with the bare minimum of anti-aliasing and many of the ray-traced/screen-space post processing effects no longer working:

It looks a bit flatter, unfortunately, particularly without the Screen Space Ambient Occlusion under his making Stinkums's unibrow stand out more. Does this mean Godot is only a viable alternative to rendering in Cycles if you have a powerful modern GPU for Forward Rendering and your laptop is sucking in a lot of power while plugged into the wall? Kinda, but I found if I can pre-bake the AO map and composite it into the Albedo Color Map, I can make up for some of the deficiencies in Mobile Rendering:

There are some artifacts on Stinkum's face since this was a quick and dirty bake, I didn't want to go through all the trouble texturing Stinkums properly again just for this demo, but hopefully you can see you can still get some decent renders out of the Mobile or possibly even Compatibility render engines, so long as you use some "cheats" from the PS2 and PS3 eras of video games to make for the less-sophisticated rendering on Mobile as opposed to Forward Renderer. Basically the less work the computer does, the more work you have to do (Mobile), and the more work the computer does, the less work you yourself have to do (Forward Renderer).

This may sound like a lot of shop talk, and it is, but if your art style is simpler, all you really need to remember is to go into Edit>Project Settings>Anti-Aliasing and turn on both MSAA and FXAA as high as your computer allows to get a clean image without "jaggies"--you can ignore TAA, it's not necessary and also only works with Forward Rendering. If your animation is supposed to look like an old PS1 game, then you could even ignore the Anti-Aliasing and leave in the "jaggies" if you want!

Safe to say, I definitely plan on instantly rendering my 3D animations in Godot 4 instead of waiting and twiddling my thumbs for Cycles to render from now on. You can't beat a fast, real-time render that only takes 1/144th of a second to render each frame of animation. Hopefully this inspires you to render your 3D cartoons in Godot 4, too, especially if you haven't had as much luck rendering in more mainstream game engines like Unity and Unreal.

A couple blog posts ago I spitballed some vague ideas of a game I wanted to make in RPG Maker 2003. After a bit of testing I unfortunately decided that RPG Maker is TOO limited for my tastes game-design-wise and even though I said I wouldn’t use shiny graphics as a crutch, I was doing exactly that because, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t design the game to be more interesting than a glorified Pac-Man combined with an especially-grindy early Dragon Warrior/Quest RPG system.

More importantly, game design JUST isn’t something I’m interested in—I think what I really want is to design art assets for programmers, level designers and other game devs to then turn into a game that is BOTH fun and pretty to look at. I want to make the game pretty while someone with far more motivation and math/logic skills makes the actual game. At least I developed an immense respect for solo game devs after trying and failing so often to even make a Pong clone by my lonesome—personally, I think game development takes even MORE time and sacrifice than even traditional frame-by-frame 2D animation and anyone that is not discouraged by that reality and finishes a game anyway, especially without a decent-sized team to delegate tasks to, is super-human to me.

The good news is that I’m just going to shift my focus instead to drastically improving my 3D art and animation skills and continuing to work on my portfolio so I can actually get an industry job with my skills. Specifically, I am currently working on a nice 3D version of Stinkums the cat here:

I’m going to finally start working again tomorrow, so I need to start budgeting my time again to avoid burnout and I feel continuing to get my 3D skills to a better level and making more small-but-highly-polished cartoons is a better use of my “personal projects” time right now. One thing at a time…

When you look up “ssbbw” on Newgrounds and filter it to the most recent art pieces, you get one of my latest pieces, “I’m Disappointed in You…Son.” I have achieved all I have set out to do in life, now it is time to retire and play Zelda for the rest of the year.

Don’t ask me why I searched “ssbbw” in the first place. Also, pardon my French but the drawing above mine is somehow more fucking disgusting than mine even though I tried to gross people out on purpose and I will never look up “ssbbw” again as a result.

It was called “Story XPeriential” and is an online/remote class run by X in the Box, which includes many alumni from my favorite childhood animation studio, Pixar.

Here is the story reel/animatic I made for the class since last March, on YouTube. It has funny chimpanzees!:

https://youtu.be/DIUPy3RsM8M

For those wondering about the class itself and whether it would be right for them, here is a link to the website:

https://www.storyxperiential.com/

It is a paid class, about $250 US for adults (there is a cheaper version for children, and wisely they separated the “minors” version of the class from the “adults” version, though of course the kid’s version requires your parents to pay for it), but I personally feel it was worth the extra money for the California industry career advice from people actively working on Pixar’s upcoming movies or movies for any of Disney’s other studios, especially the more “realist” presenters who recognize how exclusionary Hollywood can be and how much extra work we may have to put in if we don’t already have industry/celebrity connections to easily slide us into a posh Hollywood career. It was certainly more structured than 99.9% of free YouTube tutorials.

So yeah, as you can see, I have been intensely productive on art for basically the entire first half of 2023, and as much hard work as this class was, it didn’t stop me from uploading weekly on both Newgrounds and YouTube. On one hand, this was simply because I’ve been unemployed for quite a bit since finishing up “The DogSh!t Boys” for SirJeffofShort back in January (although I have been constantly looking for jobs on top of all that, ultimately getting one that starts in June), so be prepared for me to slow down a lot on the content as I get back to work next month. On the other hand, disappointingly my Switch’s battery basically died and now I could only play my Switch games on TV, meaning once work starts again I could basically only play my current gaming obsession, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom once a week at most (at least until I make enough income to justify buying a refurbished Switch Lite or something), so you might be surprised how much I’ll still post out of sheer boredom (my iPad where I do my illustrations and sculpts has a better battery life than ALL the Switch models combined).

On the third, freakish, AI-generated hand, I think I’m finally ready to start working on a massive, possibly year-long project again after recovering from “The DogSh!t Boys” and the storyboard class, so regardless of how busy I’ll be or how much time I’ll get to play Zelda I might slow down on posting so much simply because I want to work on something that takes more than a single Saturday evening to fully complete. Can’t make any promises, but I am dabbling in RPG Maker 2003 after being inspired by the “Octillery” games here in the Game Portal as well as simple pre-rendered 3D sprites similar to Golden Sun or Moon (which I’ve always found to be really charming). First, I want to prioritize getting the game design right, first, because the last thing we need is another “style-over-substance” video game, even in the indie space. It is EXTREMELY important that the game doesn’t have annoying random encounters like the RPGs of old. I’ll try to get a demo done soon, maybe upload it on the game portal here plus a downloadable version on itch.io, but the demo will have to be about 90% complete before I can feel comfortable showing it to the public, I don’t want to over-promise and have this become the next “Cube World” or “Yandere Simulator” and destroy all the goodwill I’ve accumulated online.

Whatever happens, stay “tooned!”

What It Says On the Tin