Finished the Kuroko sketch.



The one came out okay. The body survived despite some rushed changes to the model to make it thinner. The facial expression is recognisable, which is what I'd been most worried about getting right. Head proportions and shape were a lot better this time, as well as position of facial features.

Kuroko's uniform isn't as interesting as Mami's, but there was a lot of fold and fall to play with; she wears a pretty baggy cardigan, so I did what I could to make it billow vertically (didn't really work, but the shirt did). There was also a limit to how high I could reasonably raise the skirt. :P Hair is done with a lot less referencing than the previous sketch (couldn't find any pictures of her falling, so I was pretty much on my own there). Wasn't sure what the fringe should be doing, so I just fanned it out a bit.

The needle throw worked pretty nicely (both the arm and the projectile spread). Definitely need to play around with weapons more. I got to play around with glossing the hair slightly because I didn't screw up the head so many times on this one.

Might do a BakaTest character for my next sketch… but the costumes aren't very interesting, so I might change my mind.

-Alex Birch

Okay, I've lost a few days from being away from computer. But whatever, I'm back.

Figured I'd do another drawing (I want to get faster at it). I've got a few characters I'd like to draw, but up next is Kuroko from 「to aru Majutsu no Railgun」. She has a lot of aerial fight scenes 'cause she teleports around so much, so I figured there was an opportunity for a more dynamic pose than last time.

So, here are my studies on free falling poses. I regretted not giving Mami any weapons in the last sketch, so Kuroko needs to be throwing needles in this one.





Eventually I came up with this full-sized wireframe:



The pose had to be compromised many times to make the balance make sense (I'd thought this wouldn't be a big deal in freefall, but it just looked wrong; she needs to look like she's in control). Consequently, it's converged on almost exactly the same pose as Mami's (though, hopefully when the flowing hair and billowing clothes are added, it'll get a sense of gravity). There might be problems using this model, since Kuroko is a lot thinner than what I've drawn. I'll probably patch that up when I texture her.

Despite the fact that there's a lot more smudging visible in this one, I can say that it went a lot faster than Mami's (got a lot of practice in on arms and heads that time). Got a head I was happy with pretty much first time, so the face should come out better, and I'll be able to gloss up the hair a bit.

That's my bit for today.

-Alex Birch, calling it a night

Heyo, thought I'd learn some Japanese for today, so I had a stab at translating some BakaTest. Here's the first interesting page:



[In this 「Summon Battle System」, perfected from an accident of science and the occult,]

"What's all this about a Summon Battle System?"
"Isn't it already quite wearisome… not just the fact that fighting art impossible…"

[「Summoned Beasts」summoned in compliance with test scores are able to do battle. It is the best, most modern system.]

"That person over there! Could it be Minami-oneesama of F-class?!"

"You can't escape now!"

[These Summoned Beasts are used to do battle with school grades…]

"Ku—! Miharu! There's no other way than this, is there..!"

***

That's my best stab at it. At first I thought a literal translation would be most informative, but some things needed localisation to be conveyed… Hideyoshi seems to speak all thespian (his じゃ sentence ending makes it go all Ye Olde). The 'oneesama' honorific means roughly 'honoured sister' (which in anime is more often reserved for lesbian crushes). I also had trouble conveying how formal the narrator was, using "である" instead of "です" (de aru is used in formal writing).

As far as difficulties with the lookups went… most of the difficulty in looking up Japanese words is knowing where they start and end. Switching alphabets is the usual clue, although there are exceptions to this… you can get false positives, like when hiragana is used alongside Kanji to conjugate words, or false negatives, when hiragana particles follow hiragana words, or when two Kanji words appear in a row. So it helps to be familiar with at least a few words, even if you don't know the meaning, just to know which part to look up. For example, for Miharu's long string of hiragana in the middle of the page, (そこにいるのはもしや), there are no alphabetical clues, but knowing some very basic particles and vocabulary lets us make reasonable assertions about what words are in there. We can make this tokenization just by homing in on the particles that we recognise: (そこ　に　いる　の　は　もしや), with only any ambiguity on the 'や' at the end, and it splits the phrase up into words that I recognise, and makes sense as a sentence. Ignoring the 'もしや', which I will come to later, it reads, “regarding that which is over there". I chose not to assume the 'や' to be a list particle because the context was not conducive to a list. A Google search suggested 'moshi ya' to mean 'could it be', so that's what I went with.

I think that's an appropriate amount of insight. I had to make some guesses, and go with logic in some places rather than knowledge, but it seems to make sense.

-Alex Birch (not easy to dictate much of this, so typed with left hand instead)

Finally finished adding the details to my sketch. This was done by observation, so it went a lot smoother than the last part, drawing the body without reference.



Pretty happy with it, but I didn't really get to play around shading, since I smudged over it so much trying to get the proportions right (all of the texture on the hair is just remnants of previous outlines for the head)!

It's probably too smudged to colour in, but luckily she's meant to be yellow, so the cartridge paper does half of that for me. :P

The face is pretty derp, but I figure that's okay for Madoka characters. :P Might be cool to do this as digital art at some point.

-Alex Birch, signing out

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibWLZziKFd0

For day 3, I decided to do a (video) talk on complexity theory. Honestly, I thought it would go better than this… what I've uploaded is the only usable part of over 40 takes. I had to cut out discussions on the sorting algorithms themselves, and couldn't cogently explain the significance of divide and conquer (which was half the reason I'd wanted to do this).

What's left is a possibly more accessible, abstract look at complexity theory, without any derivations or practical examples of sorting. I think I like it, but it's not as easy to follow as I'd hoped. I did learn a bit about podcasting though. If you watch the whiteboard, you'll notice where I've stitched together an explanation from multiple takes. I'd always wondered how podcasters managed to move around so much!

I intend to podcast again, but teaching is too hard to do on video. Maybe it was the whiteboard work, distance to camera, late (quiet) hour, or simply the fact that I didn't have room to pace around. Either way, it was really draining, and I'm not happy with the result.

- Alex Birch, over and out [dictated, not typed]

Okay, day 2 was a bit more taxing than I was expecting. But learned a lot in the process.

The idea was to draw a character from Madoka in a typically cutesy pose. I haven't done much work with proportion or perspective before, and posing is something I've never experimented with at all.

Here's a page of balance explorations:



The main thing I was trying to get right were the girly legs. That's mainly just keeping the knees pointing inward, and pushing out the hip a bit. The angled leg has to counterbalance the angle of the hip a little. I think I decided that the opposite arm needed to match the bend of the leg, and I just did whatever with the remaining arm.

Once I'd half-settled on a pose, I did what I could to work with it:



It's not great, and it's not finished, but it's probably the best figure drawing I've ever done without a reference—I'm a lot more comfortable with observational drawing. Maybe if I did one of these every day, I'd get pretty good at it… but even this much took hours (most of that got rubbed out, admittedly). If I'm still happy with the proportions when I wake up tomorrow, I'll try and throw some detail onto it; drawing the clothes is always the fun part, because proportions stop mattering, and you get to go back to observational drawing.

-Alex Birch, signing out [written with Dragon Dictate again]

Hey there, it's been a while.

I'm guilty of not having touched this website for a couple of years now. A lot of things have happened, and I've got some explaining to do.

About 2 years ago, I developed RSI from computer and piano over-usage. Most of this could be attributed to poor technique and posture—many of my muscles became imbalanced and tight, and were essentially fighting each other whenever I tried to use my hands. I gradually lost the ability to relax my hands, which caused a lot of damage. Doing programming tasks for my degree was hard, and doing any for my hobbies was out of the question.

I'm slowly mending, and I've learned a lot about biomechanics and ergonomics along the way. Right now I'm typing with Dragon Dictate, which is very useful for writing prose, or triggering shortcuts for navigating around the computer.

So, a brief update on where I am… I'm now studying Computer Science with Japanese at the University of Bath. It's a fun course, and the assignments are interesting. I've made multiplayer games, learned some very pretty number theory, and written an… interesting… music generator. Things are looking good, and if I'm lucky, I'll get to spend my year in industry in Japan.

Since I wasn't able to embark on any ambitious programming projects, I've been concentrating on my piano playing instead (I picked it up about the time of my last post). It's given me a lot of feedback on how I use my hands: if I play with bad technique, it'll sound bad, and I'll just end up hurting myself—but conversely, if I manage to stay relaxed, and play properly… it really fixes me up, and the sound benefits, too. When I realised my hands were going downhill, I took up singing as a fallback instrument. Turns out that the key to that was also relaxation, and working out muscle tightness. That's something that needs a lot of attention.

That fills in a bit of the past, and brings us to the present. We're still left with me being frustrated at not being able to work on my original hobby: game development. I haven't done anything creative, or produced anything for the site in far too long. So here's what we're going to do…

Original Content. Every day. That's no lie. It doesn't matter what it is… big, small, random, or annoying… just… something. I can still do videos, I can still draw, and to some small extent, I can still do a bit of music. I will write about stuff I'm learning, or maybe bore you with some details about RSI and tendinitis. Mostly I want to force myself to learn a bit of Japanese everyday, and get back into drawing.

That's day one. I'd like to remind you that this entire message has been dictated by voice, and transcribed entirely by software; computer science kicks ass. >:]

-Alex Birch, signing off.

Another sketch for my Flickr Gallery:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/25220800@N02/2810188162/

Might be worth doing a scan of this one, since it's photo-quality at the moment and I've made some amendments since I uploaded that.

GCSEs went pretty well. A*s in English Lit, Maths, Science, Additional Science, and Philosophy & Ethics; As in English Lang, French and Business Studies. B in Art (haha, maybe I should give up on my Flickr gallery. :P)

As far as games go... I've been working on a commission for my brother's school, which uses a MySQL database and accounts system (now that I've worked out how to do this, I could potentially use it to make games such as RPGs that save character stats to the server) for an educational game. Semi-finished, but lack of communication is making it hard to get off the ground.

I started trying to get some interface elements into Invasion 5, but it's not fun to do that in AS3, especially not with the custom buttons I had in mind. I've now also completed the switch to what I think is a Flash 10 development environment in FlashDevelop (believe it or not, I don't think there's any way for me to check if it's working), so in theory the game should be able to use GPU acceleration on a small handful of lucky computers. Development should be slightly easier now that I've got a bit more RAM (I have to run FlashDevelop in a VM, which used to be pretty taxing for my computer).

I think I've realized how to make a mode7 3D engine now (a post on Flash Kit pointed it out to me). Not only that, I think I know a way to extend it to support hills, which would get past the main limitation of this graphics mode. Not sure that I'll ever get round to trying it out, though.

Oookay, so GCSEs are over! :D

I feel like I did pretty well. I'll find out for sure in a couple of months. As a majority of my friends are out on a variety of holiday-related excursions, I've been able to give Invasion a bit of love. The AS3 version now has all six unit types incorporated into its engine, and I have to say... it's not exactly running slowly. ;) Even on the low-spec Eee PC I've got temporarily custodianship of, it's running very nicely indeed.

So, here's what I've got so far:

http://www.birchlabs.co.uk/Invasion5.html

(Note: might show the old file. If that happens, go to http://www.birchlabs.co.uk/Invasion_5.swf beforehand and refresh; this'll update your browser's cache).

Finally on track, then. :) Just gotta add the castle's health bar, deployment UI and a pre-battle screen and it'll be all but finished. I've still gotta put some new features in, and I'll decide on what those are closer to the time... chances are I'll just go with whatever's easiest to draw.

I also have some more photos of my GCSE art, which I'll put up on the Flickr page eventually. They were taken with a (broken?) camera, so some have some pretty serious colour issues, but for the most part it's fine. I'll endeavour to draw a bit more content of my own accord soon.

For those who're interested, Diablo 3 has been announced, and it's breathtaking. Trailers, screenshots and information available on http://www.diablo3.com. Should be a nice companion to the also-upcoming Starcraft 2. And those of you looking into laptops for the next school year should seriously consider investing in an MSI Wind. Great specs for a great price, and it's ultraportable.

Anyway, that's it for updates. Peace out.

Added a neat little Haruhi sketch to my Flickr Gallery:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/25220800@N02/2409569229/in/set-72157604348204415/

More to come (when I get more time).