a-step

Some places to get nice and simple themes:

• aausten
• adessive
• aerou
• arreter
• atonals
• baudelaired
• behindmylove
• benizora
• c0zy
• cindie
• collisions
• cyberment
• dianthus-s
• distances
• doucheywolf
• duckponds
• dystopie
• eicurisme
• eobseos
• ettudis
• excolo

(Source: ileu)

savannahhorrocks:

beastlyart:

unrepentant-extravagant:

1: What does their bedroom look like?
2: Do they have any daily rituals?
3: Do they exercise, and if so, what do they do? How often?
4: What would they do if they needed to make dinner but the kitchen was busy?
5: Cleanliness habits (personal, workspace, etc.)
6: Eating habits and sample daily menu
7: Favorite way to waste time and feelings surrounding wasting time
8: Favorite indulgence and feelings surrounding indulging
9: Makeup?
10: Neuroses? Do they recognize them as such?
11: Intellectual pursuits?
12: Favorite book genre?
13: Sexual Orientation? And, regardless of own orientation, thoughts on sexual orientation in general?
14: Physical abnormalities? (Both visible and not, including injuries/disabilities, long-term illnesses, food-intolerances, etc.)
15: Biggest and smallest short term goal?
16: Biggest and smallest long term goal?
17: Preferred mode of dress and rituals surrounding dress
18: Favorite beverage?
19: What do they think about before falling asleep at night?
20: Childhood illnesses? Any interesting stories behind them?
21: Turn-ons? Turn-offs?
22: Given a blank piece of paper, a pencil, and nothing to do, what would happen?
23: How organized are they? How does this organization/disorganization manifest in their everyday life?
24: Is there one subject of study that they excel at? Or do they even care about intellectual pursuits at all?
25: How do they see themselves 5 years from today?
26: Do they have any plans for the future? Any contingency plans if things don’t workout?
27: What is their biggest regret?
28: Who do they see as their best friend? Their worst enemy?
29: Reaction to sudden extrapersonal disaster (eg The house is on fire! What do they do?)
30: Reaction to sudden intrapersonal disaster (eg close family member suddenly dies)
31: Most prized possession?
32: Thoughts on material possessions in general?
33: Concept of home and family?
34: Thoughts on privacy? (Are they a private person, or are they prone to ‘TMI’?)
35: What activities do they enjoy, but consider to be a waste of time?
36: What makes them feel guilty?
37: Are they more analytical or more emotional in their decision-making?
38: What recharges them when they’re feeling drained?
39: Would you say that they have a superiority-complex? Inferiority-complex? Neither?
40: How misanthropic are they?
41: Hobbies?
42: How far did they get in formal education? What are their views on formal education vs self-education?
43: Religion?
44: Superstitions or views on the occult?
45: Do they express their thoughts through words or deeds?
46: If they were to fall in love, who (or what) is their ideal?
47: How do they express love?
48: If this person were to get into a fist fight, what is their fighting style like?
49: Is this person afraid of dying? Why or why not?



Hmmyes. Please inquire!

Have I reblogged this before? I think so, but it’s a good one. I need to do it for… someone.

I totally want to do this but am UNSURE what character to use - I’d like to post more about my characters and stuff. Open to suggestions, if anyone would like to know more about one of my characters!

(Source: ride-rpg)

7u7:

I’ve been playing so many RPG-Maker games lately so I’m gonna make a little recommendation post for my own reference, and for anyone who’s interested.

• Flesh Child - It’s an exploration-based game in the very early stages of development so there’s only two areas accessible, but what’s there is very original and very interesting (and fairly disturbing too).
• Yume Nikki - I know everyone already knows about Yume Nikki, but I’ll list it anyway. It’s huge and it’s beautiful, and it’s inspiring enough to have a whole wiki devoted to the fan-games it’s spawned.
• .flow - A pretty popular Yume Nikki fangame, with much more emphasis on horror than that game. Still focuses on exploring a surreal dreamscape to find effects, but it’s a little more lucid and outwardly scary. There’s a few jump scares, but most of its horror comes from the absence in between. Some great pixel art and character designs too.
• Ib - A story-driven horror adventure about a little girl who gets lost in a museum, where the way you interact with the other characters drastically changes the outcome of the story. Some good puzzles and memorable characters.
• Lisa - A big trigger warning on this one, and the only one I would say I didn’t actually enjoy. Because you aren’t meant to enjoy it. It’s meant to be disturbing and upsetting, and it’s very good at it. It’s not quite horror and there’s no jump scares, but it’ll leave you feeling uneasy for a while.
• The Mirror Lied - An abstract story that leaves so much open to interpretation, I don’t think I can even summarize it. It’s very short though, and it’s worth checking out.
• To the Moon - By the same people as The Mirror Lied, but much more straight-forward and, I think, more enjoyable. Some extremely well-written dialogue makes the characters feel very real, and it even made me cry. It’s the only game here that costs money, but I think it’s worth the price. The link leads to a trailer that summarizes it well.
• Penpals - A cute and short (yet deceptively unsettling at times) game that’s been floating around tumblr. The art is great and it’s full of weird little bits of personal wisdom.
• Schuld - A horror-action game where you start off as a man wandering through a dying world in which human limbs are the only thing of any value, and it only gets weirder from there.
• OFF - The link describes OFF far better than I ever could, but if I could only recommend one game here, it’d be OFF. Probably the largest amount of original content I’ve ever seen in an RPG-Maker game, it’s an actual turn-based RPG full of great surreal art and some kick-ass music.
• The Witch’s House - A puzzle/exploration game about a girl trapped in a house that tries to kill her in countless creative ways. You’re going to die a lot, but that’ll be nothing compared to how it leaves you feeling at the end.
• Space Funeral - I think this screenshot speaks for itself.

thepalaceofawesomestories:

Here are some of the most common openings I see, as they’re almost always a rejection:

• Waking Up: Avoid the first moments of the day, especially if your character is being snapped out of a dream.
• School Showcase: A character introducing the requisite best friend and the school bully
• Family Showcase: Introductions of parents, siblings, pets
• Room Tour: A character sitting in her room, thinking, looking over her stuff
• Emo Kid: A character sitting and thinking about all his problems
• Normal No More: A character lamenting how normal, average, and/or lame her life is, which is the writer setting us up for the big change that’s about to happen
• Moving Van: A character in the car, driving to his new house, hating every minute of it
• Mirror Catalogue: Looking at oneself and describing one’s flaws, usually with a self-deprecating voice
• Summer of Torture: A character lamenting how she has to do something that she doesn’t want to do (live in a haunted house, go visit Grandma, work at the nursery) all summer long
• New Kid: A character worrying about being the new kid on his first day of school or wizard training or the vampire academy
• RIP Parents: One or both parental units kicking the bucket suddenly and tragically
• Dystopian Selection: In the dystopian genre, it’s the day of choosing jobs, getting selected for something awful, being paired with a soul mate, etc.

These are very common beginnings and all I ask is that, if you choose to forge ahead and brave one, make it fresh.

(Source: writersdigest.com)

coelasquid:

I had a couple people asking me about mouth charts, so here goes. I want to preface this by saying that as with everything in art, there isn’t really a “right way” to do them, there are just things that work and things that don’t, and it’s important to understand why the things that work do and why the things that don’t… don’t. Personally, I find it extremely distracting when the teeth pop on and off and create a strobing effect like this;

Again, there isn’t a “right” way to do mouth charts (because some of the best comic effects come from really goofy, unrealistic, or overly detailed mouths) but if I had to guess I would assume this style of mouths came from thinking of the characters as static illustrations before considering what they would look like animated. When you look at a Family guy illustration (such as the ones used in marketing and merchandising), they don’t put any teeth in the mouths

So (and again, this is just an assumption) I think what happened was they decided they liked the imagery of smiling toothless Peter and decided to preserve it by only adding teeth when absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, that makes for distracting speech animation. They probably don’t think many people care that much (which I’m sure they don’t) and have decided it’s more important to make sure he looks as much like the stationary model they decided they liked as possible at all times (this is also the reason you don’t see the same deformation and antics that you used to in shows like the Simpsons).

I think the thing to remember about teeth is that only the lower ones will (realistically) move in your skull. Obviously cartoons aren’t bound to realism and there are plenty of situations where you could throw that rule out the window, but for the sake of learning the rules before you break them; Upper Teeth Are Rooted In Place.

(these are kind of scribbly but I guess they communicate the point)

People have all sorts of different mouths, some people primarily show their upper teeth, some people primarily show their lower teeth, some people are really toothy and show both sets, some are really tight-lipped and you almost never see their teeth at all (there’s a great bit on this in the Animator’s Survival Kit by Richard Williams), but the difference will always be in how the skin wraps around the skull. The lower jaw moves independently of the skull, fleshy parts of the mouth can move independently of the skull and lower jaw alike, but the upper teeth remain anchored.

There are a lot of different ways you can go about doing a basic mouth chart for a character. Almost any animation book worth it’s salt will outline the shapes you’ll need to start with (like this page from Preston Blair)

I’ve worked on shows that had cycles of everything from ten (the absolute minimum that will hit all the phonemes) to twenty mouths for each emotion. Here’s a (somewhat lopsided) chart I made for Blue with 36 frames (18 happy, 18 sad/neutral)

You can get by with one mouth per phoneme, but you can run into problems easing in and out of vowels that way (for example the “sh” that leads into “shoot” is not the same shape as the “sh” that leads into “sheet”) I usually figure out my chosen pallet of mouth shapes, so to speak, like this;

INB just indicates where I would add mouths to ease from one shape into another, how many you add depends on how smooth you want it to be. It gives you something a little like this;

I just kind of slapped this together in an hour or two a while back to test out the mouth, but it looks a little like this when you actually use it to animate with

Again, I cannot stress enough that these are not hard and fast rules and there are as many ways to animate a mouth moving as there are animators to draw them, but this seems to be a decent way to go about getting a solid selection to use for casual conversation that doesn’t pop and strobe.