Corpsephage's Blog

Shadows are formed when an opaque body comes into contact with light from a light source. We often think of the Sun and lightbulbs as the chief sources of light, producing photons when the atomic electrons are excited by way of heat. The truth of the matter is that all visible objects are sources of light. As light bathes the Earth, all objects reflect light, with what we know as color being the different electromagnetic wavelengths formed when light collides with stop STOP STOP. It happens every time. Click a video on YouTube about shading – any video – and 0.5 seconds in they start throwing words like “refraction” and “occlusion” at you. I’m not a scientist; I don’t know what all them big fancy words mean. I just wanna draw cartoons, for God’s sake. Here's what I know about shadows as a newbie - 1: they exist, and 2: they go where the light doesn't cuz something's blocking it. Let's just get right to it. I'm using Paint Tool SAI 2 for all this, but I think (or at...

I'm quieter about it than most, but I'm one of those people to whom Halloween is a religion, and as such it's my favorite time to create. I recently made this image in the spirit of the season, and as I went I decided to take screenshots of what I was doing so that I could show others my methods. I've been drawing "seriously" for about three or four years now, and it's kind of annoying because I'm not seeing a tremendous deal of improvement. Hopefully by breaking it down into pieces I'll be able to see areas in the method that need improving. Also, if any fellow amateurs come across this, I hope it helps encourage them to keep trying for themselves.

  Anyone going into games development for the first time in the past few years will have heard of Brackeys - back when Unity was the indie dev's weapon of choice, the Brackeys channel contained some of the most intuitive and comprehensive tutorials for the engine on the Internet. What it had, and still has, over many tutorials out there is quite simple - it explains things in basic English . I can't tell you how many times I've opened up a tutorial just to have a bunch of words thrown at me that mean nothing to someone who hasn't touched the engine before (which I have in the past, but not without a ton of mistakes and misunderstandings). It's one thing to just copy down what someone else is doing, but if you don't understand it or how it works, you're not going to be able to make your own game because you're not going to know what's going on or why things fit together this way. Brackeys retired his channel in September 2020, but like an Arthurian ...

Look up "worldbuilding guides" online and you'll find no shortage of possible questions to think about when designing your world. The problem is, these questions are endless and a lot of them can get pretty specific. “How does a planet with two moons deal with werewolves?” “What kind of insurance would a spaceship need?” “Do wizards have a union?” My own rule one of worldbuilding is this: do you really  need to worldbuild? Of the three "pillars" of storytelling (worldbuilding, characters and plot), worldbuilding is the easiest one to skip. If your story takes place in the real world, it probably doesn't need an explanation. Even if it doesn't, it still might not. Honestly - I wouldn't start with worldbuilding. I'd start off with getting a plot and some characters together first. In fact, you'll probably get your worldbuilding from writing the above two. If one of your characters is a wizard who upsets the wizard union, then you can start thin...

I've done a few Blender tutorials before, mainly focusing on dragging out low-poly models in edit mode. However, when it comes to character creation, most people I've seen use a different method - they use sculpt mode to build up a character model like play-dough. You can go into sculpt mode with the same menu you use to access edit mode. For this model, I've been following along Keelan Jon's video, "Blender Sculpting Tutorial for Beginners - Stylized Head Sculpt Blender Tutorial" . I more or less follow that video completely wholesale, except I do something a little bit different with the hair, which I stole primarily from PixelicaCG's video "Ultimate Guide to Creating Stylized Hair in Blender" , though many other tutorials use a similar method. I'm assuming you already know the very basics of Blender: adding objects, switching between modes, modifiers and such. If not, I have another tutorial that covers most of it here .

 I've been investing a lot of time and energy over the past couple of years learning how to create things - drawings, animations, music, 3D models, video games, the works - and the ultimate goal of all this is to get a story published in some form. But there's one very key thing preventing me from fitting all these pieces together: I am  terrible  at coming up with stories. Don't get me wrong, I can write - I can describe characters and places with flowery language, I can come up with jokes and everything - but I have no idea how to string all these characters, places and jokes together into one coherent narrative with a beginning, middle and end. If you gave me a pre-established story or plot outline and asked me to sprinkle it with dialogue or worldbuilding or gags, I could probably do so, but if you asked me to come up with a whole story from nothing, I'd be lost. So I've looked high and low across the Internet to find some guides on how to structure a story. Her...