First and foremost… Hello World! Next is an image to get your attention… Second, never in my wildest imagination I’ll be doing what I’m about to tell you today…
The image you see above is for an Otome project where I Uncle Mugen is currently part of. We’ll go back to this later… Read the rest of this entry ?
OK… I know I’m hell bent on streamlining on optimizing my workflow in creating BG’s and reusable trees is an integral part of it but you see…. after using and abusing the same tree template for 5 years in so many backgrounds and graphics… I too get sick and tired of looking at them…I need to try and do something fresh…
I know, I’ll try and draw trees manually… easy right?… Err… not quite…
I’ve been using and abusing the same set of template trees for so long that I haven’t drawn any trees manually and I’m beginning to wonder… do I still have what it takes to draw a tree… manually?… No use procrastinating and better get to work…
An hour later (which is a long time) I managed to make this in Photoshop 7… Hmm… Seems passable, not to mention I can manually change the colors and hue of either the leaves or the trunks since they are layered and independent to each other unlike the previous template which is nothing but tree images photoshopped to hell and back to make it look like hand drawn… maybe I should draw more trees manually… what do you think?…
Anyway, in case you wanted to use the Tree Template for whatever project you are doing, you can grab it HERE…
So here I am again getting my feet wet in my ultimate quest to create a set of procedures that will enable non-artistically talented people like me to create beautiful BG’s via Sketchup with the least amount of time and effort and recently I stumbled on a phrase that I’ve been hearing for a while…
This is a sample of a baked texture in Sketchup… it looks good but the fact that it took me hours to manually draw those shadows in the texture tells me that I needed a software specifically dedicated to the task if I want to make full use of baked textures.
Baked Textures…
So what is baked textures?… I’n layman’s terms… the shadows, bumps, and everything else are now hard embedded on the texture. Now in theory, pre-rendered baked textures in sketchup means you now have the real possibility of moving in-and-around sketchup’s default interface at full speed while having beautifully rendered textures that only needed to be rendered once and only once… and this is why I’m interested in it. Just imagine… you can use and reuse the same scene both for BG’s and angled CG’s for Visual Novels and OELVN’s without even going to Photoshop and post process… just simply put camera, export image and ready to use… that is so time saving and very very convenient… not to mention you can now use sketchup’s default video and batch image export to create dynamic moving bg’s very easily. Read the rest of this entry ?
Studio Mugenjohncel 