Nouveau Painting & 3D Math Book Review

I finally put enough time into my painting that I feel ok to press the stop button on it. I am sure a couple of month will roll by and I will find mistakes — but there is no better way to document your progress as an artist! That is how I rationalize it anyway.

I studied a lot of Mucha’s paintings and put some nice elements in it that made it look more “painterly”. One of them was putting a glaze over it that has a stippling of colors. Having perfectly flat colors in a painting screams that it was done digitally, so I minimized that by creating a layer, adding a noise filter, and setting it to a color burn blending mode. Some people solve that problem by adding textures as well.  Another good practice in painting is to try and avoid the colors white and black. They either look like you forgot to paint a spot (white), or there is a lifeless hole in the detail (using 100% black). Colors give things life, so I tried to make sure the overall feel was very vibrant.

It is actually going to be stretched over canvas, so the yellowish gold part on the outside is what the sides of the canvas will look like. I made a pattern of it using Photoshop. Using the offset filter is the best way to make it tile

3D Math book

I got a 3d math book in the mail a few weeks ago and have been excitedly reading it. I “finished” it a few days ago and wrote a little review on Amazon. There are few sections I will have to go back over once my brain cools down from some of the complex math. Even though the code parts were written in C++, I got the gist of what was going on. My overall understanding of how the computer interprets 3d objects, scenes, and rendering really solidified more. The two parts it goes into the most depth with is vectors and matrices. They had a good section on Quaternions, but it was a little over my head at times, so I will have to go back over it later.

Next post…

With my new knowledge level up, I thought it would be good to hit Unity a little more and get down and dirty with the code. I won’t rest until I understand a good planetary gravity system for a character! I did find a GREAT example in the locomotion system that Unity provides. Using Rigidbodies and the PhysX system is the way to go. I was using a character controller originally, but character controllers are pretty much impossible to have that type of functionality.

I am almost done with it actually. I will strip down the code for it (as much as possible) and explain how it works. Rune Skovbo Johansen is a great programmer, so he really should get all of the credit for all of the logic. I am really just explaining how it works. Next post should be coming shortly.