• Ian McQue
  (tags: Art sketchbook)
• Toks
  (tags: Art sketchbook)
• wood’n'art
  (tags: Art sketchbook)
• James Edwards Online
  (tags: Art)

I was just re-reading some of the latest posts on Jon Jones site, and I came across his thoughts on using a folder of Windows shortcuts to other folders.

Yes Jon, Yes. That’s something a lot of people miss, and I curse myself for not mentioning it myself.

I’m working on a fairly massive project, and I’m working with ingame characters, and cinematic characters, and stand-in cinematic characters, and exported data, and raw exported data, and the game, and the tools, spread over different folders, drives and network drives. I know where everything is (most of the time), but navigating that by going up and down and across folders is a nightmare. Programs like 3DSMax often store the last 8 or 10 folders you worked with, but at this point in time Zbrush doesn’t, so the act of finding a model and it’s textures to load is annoying. Not hard, or impossible, just annoying.

Like Jon, I’ve got a folder on my desktop called Game Shortcuts, and in this folder I have shortcuts to all my common project folders.

Incidentally, Jons site is full of useful little (and large) workflow and productivity tips, well work adding to your feed reader.

Now, back to Photoshop for me.

Whilst browsing Polycount, dishing out advice with my uncalibrated moral compass, I stumbled upon a link to 3dCreature. You should pop along to it for a good look.

This website is aimed at being a quick stop-over for digital artists to check out cool art and update themselves on news that matter. The content on this site is mostly tailored towards character art. You can also find news about the games and film industry. Let’s just say that the content has been filtered and streamlined so you can surf more in less time.

Eric Elwell has a new tutorial online covering basic game lighting. It shows how a model is affected by the deafult and advanced lights in the Torque engine, and will be followed by a texturing tutorial to take advantage of this knowledge.

Hawken King has updated his site, http://www.dadako.com/ in what I consider to be one of the smartest new looks that I have seen in a long time.

I may have to steal some ideas.

“Rick, how do you paint metal?”, “Rick, where have all the texture tutorials gone?”

Well Jimmy, the truth is that it’s been a long time since I wrote any, and my old ones are out of date. Fortunately I blatantly stole this link to Skinning Tuts earlier. So read it and learn something new. Incidentally, these days I do a lot of skinning, and by that I mean binding a model to a skeletal rig. That is something I probably could write a tutorial on – but with deadlines and holidays and then the long run up to the release of our next game, I’ll pass on that for now.

Robert Headley has just started a blog, Game by Design. So pop over and say hullo.

Now, it got me wondering – how many other game artists out there are blogging? If you know any, then let me know.

Edit: I’ve had one so far, Adam Bromell

Edit 2: Pete joins the fray - Stray Neutrino

There was a mail in my inbox today from CG Society, linking me to their new Wiki.

“Bringing all the facts from the CG world to you, the CGWiki is another resource available to you, covering movies, software, hardware, and more”

Technorati Tags: 3d modelling, Art, cg, cg society