Illustrator 2nd Edition

**abbews** · February 02, 2011, 10:26 AM

Introduction
Welcome to the second edition of the Illustrator!
As I promised, we have even more awesome content this month!

In the past week I've gotten my eye up for Minecraft. It's a fantastic game and it's great fun, even though the graphics are awful. And Minecraft is a good art lesson actually. It shows that it's not the graphics that are important, it's the idea. Something with great graphics without an entertaining and creative idea is boring. A good idea is the most vital part of art, although you still need skill to execute it well. Luckily we get both here at TWC, something you will see in this publication and on the rest of the forum.

With that said, I give you the second edition of the Illustrator brought to you by the awesome Illustrator team.

Happy reading!
- abbews

Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Competition Rundown
2. The Artist Lounge
3. Breaking Down a Video
4. Tutorial Wrap Up
5. The Community Driven Comic
6. Freebie of the Month

1. Competition Rundown

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Competition Rundown

Welcome to the summary of the POTW/UESW competitions here in the Illustrator! Killerbee and Luckylewis are here to provide the rundown on what our talented screenshooters have been up to this month!

POTW 225 & UESW 128

naxzul666 won the POTW 225 competition with his stunning painting of the majestic spartans. Other entries that stood out were the Killerbee' March through the storm, and Dirty Peasant's army of the dead.

In UESW 128, there was yet another tie in the UESW world. Voh Koh remained top alongside Dirty Peasant's Agincourt warriors

To see the competition results and submissions for this week, click here for the POTW and here for the UESW.

POTW 226 & UESW 129

Legless Lannes has triumphed the POTW 226 competition with an excellent cavalry duel with well used painting effect. Another remarkable piece was Halvar von Flake's entry, showcasing a lone warrior under the conflict of the sky

Meanwhile in UESW 129, Voh Koh' ensured he was the only one to take the top spot with a clean hit of his musket.MorganH's courageous pikemen was also a magnificent shot.

To see the competition results and submissions for this week, click here for the POTW and here for the UESW.

POTW 227 & UESW 130

POTW 227 was won by TheatroN, who showed the horrors of war with a gripping close up shot. The winning shot featured a company of line infantry under heavy bombardment. Other entries included Violator's elves releasing a volley of arrows and ♠ Marshal Beale ♠'s experimental attempt.

UESW 130 resulted in a victory for General Brittanicus. The foul barbians approached his men, forcing the General to release a tremendous amount of firepower. Other entries included Nanny de Bodemloze's watching officer and PvtGunny's unfortunate death..

To see the competition results and submissions for this week, click here for the POTW and here for the UESW.

POTW 228 & UESW 131

POTW 228 was filled with some absolutely wonderful content, including TheatroN's winning horsemen The competition had a wide variety of images, including Neige Noire's breathtaking views and Angus Young's Pyramids.

UESW 131 was also gifted with some excellent shots, especially General Brittanicus's most magnificent POV shot. Other stand out images included shokh's Ottoman fire and MorganH's Japanese charge.

To see the competition results and submissions for this week, click here for the POTW and here for the UESW.

Picture of the Week (POTW) & Video of the Month (VOTM) Leaderboard and Simplified Archive

VotM December
by Nanny de Bodemloze

The winner of the December VOTM was...

However, the tale of the tape is much more interesting. With a Christmas-themed competition, we were treated to "Snowflakes of Doom" by MasterBigAb, an epic tongue-in-cheek medieval tale, that brought us the creepiest Frosty I've ever seen. I'm still haunted.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

This VOTM saw a boom in M2TW vids, showing that with the right mods and CinEd mastery, even an older game can look just as good, if not better, than the newer ones. Desaturation and hand-held camera movement seem to the be ticket and the trend, as seen in naxzul's Empire Strikes Back, theatoN's Dark Skies, and kankkunen's Ride of the Englishmen.

A surprising and fresh addition to the competition was shohk's The Blue & The Grey video, from the ambitious ETW mod, a rousing and emotional presentation that glorifies the mod but de-glorifies the war itself. We hope to see more from him in the future.

Please rep the participants and LuckyLewis, for running a great competition month in and month out!

Video of the Year
Some 8 months ago or so, the Video of the Month competition started. Since then, we have been gifted with some absolutely fantastic videos across all the TW series. The competition has always been healthy with some excellent video makers competitors entering their some of the most creative work around in the monthly competition. I, personally, would like to thank everyone who has competed in these competitions so far and hope it continues into 2011 and beyond!

In 2010, we had 8 VOTM competitions. All the winning entries of each VOTM competition of 2010 are being automatically entered into the TWC Video of 2010 competition. The poll will last for two weeks

The reward will be a VOTM point and the winning video being put into a TWC front page annoucement.

Vote HERE

GC #103 [Sig of the Year]

The Sig of the Year is the GC everyone of us strives to win, its the greatest glory you can receive. Well at least until someone else wins next year

And the winner of this year is.. *drum roll*

The winner of 2010's sig of the year is Aanker with this excellent signature!

It's been showcased in the Illustrator so much I feel I don't need to describe it, enjoy looking at it instead!

An entry that caught my eye was Finlander's. We see a mystical samurai(it's actually Tom Cruise from The Last Samurai) in a fiery environment.

You can view the vote here.

GC #104 [Poster]

This theme has created some really amazing results, too many to showcase here.

The winner of this Poster theme was Legless Lannes, who emerged victorious from a deadly tiebreaker between him and Aanker.

This is Legless Lannes' poster that won the GC #104. It's a commercial for the mod "Napoleonic Total War III" and it's made solely from ingame screenshots. The screenshots are really well blended and the typography is great. A masterpiece.

Our world is melting. Something needs to be done. Those thoughts arise in my head when I look at Maяcel's poster for GC #104. The colours are amazing and really well planned out, the melting globe is great and the cartoon figures add some humour to this very serious and important message.

You can view the vote here.

GC #105 [Aviation (Planes)]

I love aircrafts, so much that I almost picked a Pilot Education for my high school choice. But I didn't want to move to the polar circle and away from the warmth in Stockholm, it's -12 Celsius outside right now! Enough off topic, let's move on to GC #105!

The winner of GC #105 is Maяcel;

We see a fighter(Harrier!?) closing in on us in sonic speed, ready to shoot us to oblivion! The action and focal is great in the piece, something that we always can expect from Maяcel.

Another interesting submission was this one. We see futuristic fighter aircraft sweeping the sky in a dream like environment. The submission lacks action though to make it interesting. The submission was drawn by Aanker.

You can view the vote here.

GC #106 [Photography (unedited)]

The Photography GC had an unbelievable amount of contesters! It's the so far biggest GC judging by contesters and was a huge success. We got some real brilliant photographers here on TWC!

The winner of the photo GC was me(abbews) and I can't describe my own piece, therefore my French friend Cedric helped me with that:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

"The winner for the Photography GC was abbews. His photo may seem simple and bare from the first glance, but rapidly, the excellent colour balance, clear focal and overall great quality of the photo really strikes out. You can't but be amazed on the amount of details in the grass and the beauty of the whole scene. A master piece!"

Well, Cedric and his big words ey?

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

apple's entry is a shot taken in Rome. The photo has a very calm and relaxed stillness, something that is rare in cities like Rome and hard to catch! It has great light and overall sharpness as well.

You can view the vote here.

2. The Artist Lounge

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Presentation of a workshop/artist ~ Aanker

Introduction

In this second Illustrator, i would like to present you a Key character of the Graphics Workshop and also of the Illustrator:

Say "Hi" to Mr. Community Driven Comic, namely Aanker.

But what does Aanker really mean ? I let the artist explain himself:
"Actually, Aanker is just a made-up name for a Dwarven fantasy character that was part of this
wonderful fictional world that a friend and I invented (and quite thoroughly so, may I add) some years back."

About the artist:
What to say about Aanker, except that he is a rather recent adept of the Graphics Workshop, his gallery being opened in July last year. There have been few artists to deserve as much respect as him during a so short amount of time.
The reason is quite simple, i encourage you to look at some of his work below:

The Goblins amass

About the artist's work:
Now that you are recovering from a massive pure dose of art, you realize immediately what is Aanker's specialization: drawing !
Please take note of the cheer amount of details, the nice comic feeling and great quality of this drawing. This is even enhanced by the fact it is left black and white.
It seems that Aanker was born with a pen and must have started drawing in his mother's belly. Another proof of this here:

Full Speed Ahead

To tell the truth, Aanker ~~is not human~~ also excels in using a tablet, thus drawing directly in a computer. To avoid a long sentence, I'll let you admire the result he can achieve with a lot of patience here:

Sci-Fi drawings

Again the same crazy amount of details and a style which seems very specific to the artist itself, so that, by a quick glance at the picture you can instantly tell that it's a work from Aanker. Please also note the soft and nice feeling put into the colours. They simply enhance the result without loosing anything from the drawing itself.

And what about the imagination that Aanker shows in every aspect of his art ? It seems unlimited, as well as his skills with the tablet:

Santa Claus vs Snowman

Of course, with such skills, Aanker is participating to a lot of Graphic Competitions, and he already won a bronze medal. Here is the kind of submissions he is able to produce (here for the Battle GC):

Battle signature - Sig of the year 2010

It was so good that it was elected as "Sig of the year" and Aanker choosed to use it as his personal sig.

Conclusion:

Finally i cannot conclude without saying that we are all very proud that Aanker contributes so much to
our Community, and i strongly invite you to join (if not done already) the Community Driven Comic,
which is born from Aanker's mind and has been kept alive by Aanker's hand and the many fans.

3. Breaking Down a Video

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Breaking Down a Video

Ripping Apart the "Underhill Diaries, Mexico City"

by Nanny de Bodemloze

Every experienced video maker here at TWC is asked almost daily to provide feedback on the works of beginner machinima artists. Feedback is sought usually on technical issues, but also often on presentation and overall impressions. It is a fine line between providing constructive criticism and crushing the soul of a budding director. There is no reduction in time spent on a video as you gain experience - you just learn to spend your time more efficiently and effectively - and so a beginner piece can take many hours of work. A new machinima artist will often have poured their heart and soul into an early work, choosing their favourite tunes to score it (sometimes clichéd), and any hint of negative feedback can feel like a dagger in the chest. So as a veteran, you want to help, you want your honesty to be useful, and you don't want the guards to have to confiscate the belts and shoe-laces. What to do?

With this in mind, I will deviate a little bit from form, and this month, instead of breaking down someone's killer award-winner vid, I'm going to rip someone a new one. I'm going to break-down one of my own earliest vids in the harshest way possible. Hopefully, as a new artist, you will then be able to turn a more objective eye on your own work, and use my mistakes as a learning experience.

Get ready for the beat-down.

The subject video is the second work I ever made: "The Underhill Diaries: Mexico City", a video made in support of my first AAR.

The Rig (at that time)

I was working with a P4 2.2 dual core desktop, 32-bit Vista (!!!), 2gb ram and an ATI 4850 512mb vid card, nothing overclocked. I was using FRAPS freeware to record, and MovieMaker for the video production. Not exactly a power-gaming rig, but not that much different from many student laptops in terms of rendering power.

The Motivation

Some guy had commented that my AAR lacked pictures, and that some visuals would spice it up a bit. That clearly violent and venomous assault on my artistic vision could not go unanswered, and I was determined to show him a thing or two. I decided that instead of pics I would give him video! Small point though: I had no clue how to do it. So armed with MovieMaker and a dream, I set out to conquer the world. (Every few months I PM the guy and thank him for his honesty)

The Beat-Down

The opening text is simple enough...I was pretty conscious of the limitations of MovieMaker (and my own ability) when it came to text graphics, so I figured simple was best rather than an attempt at flash that would just look cheap and cheesy in the wrong hands (mine). Score one for Team Nanny.

At 0:08, you are now hit with...a pan-flute! No folks, your ears aren't lying, that would be Zamphir's "The Lonely Shepherd", a track I loved in an obscure NeverwinterNights mod and just HAD to use it ASAP before someone else stole this gem (*cough*) of an idea. Sadly, it conjures up images of spaghetti westerns, a genre that would have been appropriate if my my AAR was tongue in cheek. However, the music clashes with the tragic seriousness with which I took my writing, and ended up sounding...bizarre. What I thought was a score that helped build the drama likely only produced giggles. This is a prime example of how your favourite music is not always great TW video music.

Next, you will notice the heinous sin of HUD noise and a FRAPS header. I had no idea how to clean that up at the time (it can be done with a black bar overlay add-on), but more likely at the time I was not terribly bothered by it, believing the audience could follow my tactical ~~incompetence~~ brilliance more easily with the visible radar. This screen noise is an absolute no-no and seeing it in this vid is like daggers in my eyes. It interrupts any immersion factor for the audience, and reminds them that they are watching a video game...actually it reminds them that they are watching me watch a video game (even worse).

"We know where all the enemy units are sir...that large object in the sky gives away their position!"

At 0:30, you see the first of many "unnatural" camera movements, as a sweeping aerial cam suddenly rotates downward. These unnatural camera movements (angles and movement that would not be possible in a real movie due to camera equipment limitations, and niggly things like physics and gravity) are one of the Deadly Sins of machinima, as they greatly contribute to the audience leaving that immersion space where they forget that they are watching a video game. It is jarring to the subconscious. The more offensive examples are found at 1:38 and 1:46.

Next, we are hit with another offense - overuse of transitions, and transitions used without consideration of why they are used. In "Mexico", you'll only find the cross-over (where the end of one clip overlaps with the beginning of another) and the blink (fade out/fade in). They are both over-used, and it gets grating by the end. Typically, the cross-over is used to imply passage of time or to demonstrate physically separate events occurring concurrently. The blink is often used to imply that events have taken place that you didn't see, allowing the viewer to fill in the blanks with imagination - sometimes needed when the imagination is better than the tools at your disposal, or to purposely slow down the pace for dramatic effect. However, these transitions were applied in this video randomly and too liberally.

By 0:54, you now realize that you will be watching much of the video in slow motion (thankfully not all). Slow motion can be effective, but as this video progresses, you see the effects of its overuse. When used sparingly and strategically, slo-mo can really help the audience focus on a key sequence. But when it is overused as it was in this vid, it drags the video down and the audience loses interest as they do not know what is important and what isn't.

"Camera crane #4 is down! It just got whacked by a tree!"

At 2:00 where the camera backs up, the trees (or other objects) appear suddenly in the screen, as if born from the lens itself. This oft over-looked error is called reverse-clipping, and while it happens quickly, it is picked up by the subconscious as not feeling natural. Another example occurs at 2:25.

At 2:04, we see the in-game map border (big red lines). Like direction arrows, unit selection colours, and game flags (not the flags the units are carrying, the ugly bobbing ones), these are more assaults on audience immersion, and must be edited out...no shot is so important that it should survive this. I should have re-filmed that sequence from a different angle, or 'staged' that sequence in a separate battle away from the border.

"We can't flank them sir...we just can't cross the thin red line."

Well into the video, you may be noticing that the camera is always moving. There are no stationary camera shots. Without more variety of angles and camera dynamics, the piece becomes visually boring and repetitive. The travelling sky-cam is an effective tool to quickly tell the "big picture" of a battle, but by over-saturating the video with this type of shot in a cinematic video, I was missing the point: the viewer wants to be entertained, not lectured. It is best used sparingly. As well, there are no close-ups and the camera is not unlocked. The right balance of camera movements and angles depends on the impressions and emotions you want for your audience, but in this video, the end effect is a one-trick pony, and you never feel close to the action.

A small positive is that I made an attempt to progress the story in the video with the progress in the music. It is possible to overdo this, and in this video it isn't very subtle. Better videos see a less obvious relationship between the action and the score, often using unorthodox music/sound effect/visual action ties (even being contradictory, which in the right hands can work very well). Many of Naxzul's videos master this delicate relationship, often juxtaposing our expectations with what we are actually watching (jolly music in the middle of a slaughter, for example). "Mexico City" is missing subtly and a deft touch in its use of the music.

Summary

Objectively, this video is very typical of a rookie video. It is clear that heart and soul have been put into the effort. However, the audience is blocked from sharing that emotion because the technical errors pile up. In retrospect, my frame-rates weren't too horrible - I had turned down my graphics enough to record with almost passable fps. Poor frame-rates are one of the Deadly Sins of vid making, and completely remove the audience from the immersion. But the other flaws, such as unnatural camera movements and screen noise are just too much to overcome in "Mexico", and the audience checks out of the pretend world after being constantly reminded that they are watching a recording of a game replay.

Thankfully, the folks here at TWC were too polite to crush my soul.

4. Tutorial Wrap Up

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Tutorial Wrap Up

New Tutorials & Resources

How to make Realistic Animated Snow in Photoshop

1. How to make Realistic Animated Snow in Photoshop

Learn how to make realistic rain for your picture by Remlap

Basic/Advanced Photoshop Tutorials

2. Basic/Advanced Photoshop Tutorials

Another still updated thread by xHerzoGx which also contains great tutorials for you, where you for example can learn to create rain on your photo

Basic - Photoshop time savers

3. Basic - Photoshop time savers

A great set of timesvaers in a thread that still gets updated by Grimbold'

"Zoom:
Instead of picking the Zoom Tool everytime you want to zoom in or out, simply hold down the ALT key, and scroll in or out on the mouse.
Another tip to scroll to..."

The Best Of: Modding Tutorials
This moth we are going to have a mooding-special tutorial wrap-up for you guys! This is made for you to get the hang of how to mod using 2d art. And if you're a newbie on this field, you can learn alot from the guys making these tutorials!

Making a M2TW UI (basics)

1. Making a M2TW UI (basics)
Learn how to get the hang of making a UI for Medieval 2: Total war by Cedric37

Skinning in Layers - advanced

2. Skinning in Layers - advanced
A great tutorial where you will learn how to master the techniques of skinning in layers, by Louis Lux

How To Make Seamless Textures (PS)

3. How To Make Seamless Textures (PS)

Learn how to make a great seamless texture, so you can make great textures for modding purposes, by Maяcel

Making Scale Armour

4. Making Scale Armour
Maяcel strikes again with another great tutorial where you will learn how to make awsome-lookoing armor for your units!

[Video][3D Studio MAX 2010] Unit creation for Medieval II: Total War

5. [Video][3D Studio MAX 2010] Unit creation for Medieval II: Total War

A great collection of 4 videos by S-te-Fanwhere you will learn how to make a unit for Medieval 2: Total War

5. The Community Driven Comic

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6. Freebie of the Month

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**apple** · February 02, 2011, 10:34 AM

Oh love the format.

**Louis Lux** · February 02, 2011, 10:34 AM

What to say, another brilliant edition everyone.

**cedric37** · February 02, 2011, 10:42 AM

Excellent work everyone, real nice reading

**EVYATAR** · February 02, 2011, 11:01 AM

WOW another great edition!
great work

**Killerbee** · February 02, 2011, 11:02 AM

Brilliant work everybody !

Also, all credit to LuckyLewis for the PotW section. He did all of it :thubsup2:

**MorganH.** · February 02, 2011, 01:08 PM

Again an Excellent and brilliant issue,an issue that holds everything ! Im gonna rep all 8 of you guys!

One thing though;the Username linked UESW and POTW screenshots,from the 'competition rundown',will just Not load for me,is anyone else experiencing this ?