Monday Morning Polyhacker -- Jan. 30

posted by Scott Hsu-Storaker at 12:00 AM

A Quick Roundup
Let's just get to the goods, shall we. Here's stuff we worked on this week.


































~---~

A Little Help Here
Around here we pride ourselves on our basic mission to help the indidev community by creating great artwork. But there is another aspect to that mission. Not only do we want to help people directly, but we also have put a lot of effort into finding ways to help other artists and developers help themselves. So, I was very excited this week when an artist answered my call from last week and offered to contribute to the goings-on here. Quite in keeping with the spirit here, he contributed a tutorial. And not just any tutorial, but one that I had long delayed writing because of a couple of gaps in my own knowledge, namely one on how to create textured files for use in the Torque engine. Check it out.

Texturing Basic DTS Files With Blender 2.4 (Thank you Khaine)

This is a great companion to our other tutorials and now completes a series of sorts that details the pipeline needed for creating basic files for Torque.

Beginner Blender: projection modelling (Thank you TRexian)

Beginner Blender tut for UV mapping (Thanks again to TRexian)

Creating Basic DTS Files with Blender

If you are an artist who has never tried Blender and Torque or if you are a developer who has never tried to create models, then jump in. Try it out. Follow the tuts. Get hooked!

~---~

Thousander Club Update
Well, it was a pretty weak week on the hours. A combination of a hangover from last week's cold and a particularly brutal workload at my day job knocked me flat every night. I'm not gonna cry over it, though. I'm just gonna move on.

Scott's 1000 hours -- 31.35
1000 models -- 108
1000 visitors -- 1016 in Jan. Dingdingdingdingdingdingding!
1000 downloads -- 293

Mission accomplished on the thousand visitors in just the first month. I won't be including this number in the weekly reports anymore since the goal has been met. I feel this has built a nice strong foundation that bodes well for the continued growth of this community. Thank you all for your positive energy.

~---~

How'm I Doing?
All of this is an experiment. This coop. This project. This blog. I jump-started this blog as a way to make our work more accessible to those outside our little group. So far, I'd say that this is working out pretty well. But, I'm going to pose this question to all of you. What do you think of this blog? I'm still new to this. I'm open to comments. If you want to make a suggestion, write a guest article or contribute in some way then let me know. scott(at)bowzizzer(dot)com.

~---~

Stay free.

~shs~

Artmerce Evolution

posted by Scott Hsu-Storaker at 12:00 AM

During the course of this project I have been asked many times why I do something a certain way. Why don't I do normal maps? Why don't I use this great tool? Why do I paint textures with lighting in them? Why did I put so much/so little detail into a model? Why don't I do it some "better" way? Sometimes the answer is because I am just plain ignorant of the best way. Sometimes it is because of good old-fashioned stubbornness, of which I lay claim to more than my fair share. But these are both lesser reasons, neither really get to the heart of why I am doing what I do here. Deep down, it all comes down to a seemingly simple answer -- it's about art.

Every time a question like one of those comes up, I need to do a little mental check and ask myself to define my goals here. Games can be a great avenue for an artist's creative expression. Whole new worlds can be created and explored. Some games are even vast collaborative art projects -- worlds being discovered and evolving in real time at the whim of participants around the globe. No game is really complete without this mass-mind involvement. Yet, at the same time, they are the engines that drive a huge commercial entertainment industry. These collections of little mathematical equations and dots on a screen are easily packaged and sold down at the corner mini-mall. It's easy to point to this and say "Commerce is a bad thing". "Don't commodify my art, man". I actually have little problem with my work being turned into something that will sell, as long as it is not a sell-out. Part of the fun of creating a product that can reach the masses is that there is a vast network of art participants ready to evolve the worlds we create. But, I have to ask myself, what I am doing here. Here at the coop, where I give my work away. Why do I do what I do? Is it art or is it commerce? Is it some hybrid, like commercial art? Prod-art? Art-merce?

The answer is that it is art. And that's that.

This is not to say that it is Art with a capital "A". I don't see it as something someone should stand around passively admiring. This stuff should never be hung in a gallery. What I mean by art is that this project allows me an avenue to filter the world through my eyes and send it back out to you with my own perspective on how I see it. You can appreciate it, you can scoff at it, you can take it and morph it to your own use, you can ignore it if you wish -- any one is an acceptable response as are any number of others. I won't mind any way. This is really just a way for me to relate to the world, and to communicate with other people. I want you to understand me and the best way for me to do so is to do it visually.

But commerce? Nope.

I made a conscious decision as I was pulling away from commercial projects last summer to make this a project that does not create a product. The work I send out to the void arrives to you "as-is", "no warranties of merchantability" is how I believe the open source crowd says. I create things to the best of my technical knowledge, trying to deliver objects that can actually be used by developers. I mean, I do want my work to be used and seen after all. There is craft involved in making this stuff. But, if it arrives without a normal map, or if it arrives in a format that a developer must import and export, I'm not going to lose any sleep. I purposely leave things a little raw in fact, because I expect everyone who receives my art to change it, modify it, evolve it. Think of my work as a nice neat little box of playdough cans, tools, and cutouts. It all looks pretty in the package, but the clay inside needs to be molded and played with before the substantive beauty happens. I am not providing to you a product meant to be consumed, enjoyed, and thrown away. I am giving you the tools and the raw stuff of creation -- it is up to you to decide its worth, value, and ultimate use. So, the answer to why I do things a certain way is that I am not here to manufacture a product.

Seeing as how I view what I do as an art project, I really care little about the most efficient path or getting something done on time or finding the "right" way to do things. I leave the efficiency for the stuff I don't want to do, like washing dishes (those of you who've chatted with me in the evenings are plenty familiar with my "time to do dishes" line). Anything to save time on menial tasks is well worth it so that I can concentrate on creating art. And there is nothing about the art creation on this project that feels menial or like a waste of time to me. I enjoy it all. My only real measure of how well I did something is if I can stand back, look at the model, and say that it is what I wanted to do. I also ask myself if I grew from the process of crafting it. If it meets those tests, then it is done. Often, I purposely avoid automated processes. I don't use tools that make things easier on myself. I believe that the very nature of my work utilizing a computer already relies on so many technological crutches that to add another one hinders my ability to give you my raw perception of the world. So, I avoid automated uvmap tools, I avoid making lightmaps, I avoid making normal maps, I avoid purchasing $2000 software. It's not terribly efficient. It eats up time. But it is the way I want it. The multilayered step-by-step process of discovering an object's complexities and intricacies takes me to another place -- my happy place.

My art place.

Stay free.

~shs~

Monday Morning Polyhacker -- Jan. 23

posted by Scott Hsu-Storaker at 12:00 AM

Busy, You Know
Another busy and productive week for the coop. I guess the best way to proceed with this roundup is to just go ahead and show you all what we've been working on.























I'll try to get up a zip file this week.

~---~

Looking for Some Partners-in-Crime
OK, I'll just come out and say it -- we're all a little nuts here. Well, at least I am and I know it. I like to give my artwork away and I love to see people use my work in their games and I don't expect anything in return. It's rare to find someone who is as passionate about this as I am and I've been lucky to find a few partners-in-crime to inspire me. As such, I have not been keen about recruiting artists to work alongside me. My thought on recruiting has been that if there is anyone out there that feels the same way I do about the democritization of game art then that person would naturally gravitate to us and would not need convincing. Well, you're here -- maybe you're reading this because you are an artist of this sort. If you are, then consider joining us. We've already got more source material than we can handle in a year's worth of work. And we have a huge backlog of models waiting to be textured, way more than I can finish at my glacial pace. Unlike many volunteer projects out there, your efforts will not go to waste -- your work will be released to the world and our models have already been put into active game projects in just the few short weeks we have been out in the public's eye. Join us if you will -- I shall say no more. You can reach me at scott(at)bowzizzer(dot)com.

~---~

Thousander Club Update
It was a really mixed week for me on the road to 1000. I was sick most of the week, way sicker than I was willing to admit. I had some good success during the week, hitting some of my mini-goals, in particular I was able to do 3 hours before I got home from work on Tuesday. But, alas, I paid for pushing myself hard when I was sick and ended up crashing big-time over the weekend. Again, I am learning a lot about myself, having hit another one of my limits. If I am healthy, I think this is doable still. The question is how to stay healthy while living at the edge of my physical limits or beyond.

Scott's 1000 hours -- 24.10
1000 models -- 99
1000 visitors -- 848 in Jan
1000 downloads -- 249

If things continue as planned and the visitors number goes over 1000 in the first month, I'm gonna stop reporting it every week. Maybe once a month if it seems appropriate.

~---~

See you with my usual jibber-jabber on Thursday.

Stay free.

~shs~

Screenie Heaven 1

posted by Scott Hsu-Storaker at 12:00 AM

I've said this on the forums, but I will say it here also. Whenever someone sends me a screenshot of my work in a game I am in heaven. There is nothing I love more about this project. That is why I am doing this after all -- to see my work used in a game. I don't ask for any money. I am not selling these models I make here. I'm not expecting to get anything from the people who visit here (although people clicking ads would be a nice way for the basic bills to get paid). But, there is one kind of payment I truly do like to receive. That is, people sending me screenies. If you got 'em, send 'em, link 'em, post 'em, whatever 'em. I just LOVE to see 'em. You don't have to do it, it's not a requirement of the deal, but it sure does make my day. I hope to make this a recurring feature here -- you can reach me directly at scott(at)bowzizzer(dot)com.

Here's a few recent ones that some friendly developers were kind enough to send along.

Alan from Really Really Good Things Studio made me a few screen shots from their project "Code Name: Monster Island" that feature our telephone pole. Judging by his description of how they are using some other stock assets and content packs, I think it shows how a great looking in-development game can be made using a loose network of indie content creators and devs (something I will discuss at length in a later blog).










locrian, from iNterstices produced some screenshots of the pipe valve he requested. And, most wonderfully, he actually added to it by creating a normal map for it.



See you on Monday with the usual roundup of things we've been working on.

Stay free.

~shs~

Please Report to the Baggage Claim Area

posted by Scott Hsu-Storaker at 12:00 AM

We all arrive here with baggage. I know I do. I'm carting along a long list of things, and, having been at this art thing for so many years, I know that list is longer than some. I've been associated with any number of projects. I've run a collective. I've run a business. I've been to art school years after I had already completed my first undergrad degree. I've worked in a research lab for six years. I have kids, debt, bills up the wazoo and more than a few excess pounds on my frame. It's stuff that has built up over the years. Each thing has colored the way I approach art as passion and art as livlihood.

Back in the day, I used to play D&D. Well, "play" is probably a misnomer. Mostly it was my friends and me sitting around making stuff up. We would diagram out maps, draw new characters, write stories and such. There was very little rolling of the 12-sided die (I wasn't kidding when I said back in the day). The figurines mostly stayed in their boxes. Looking back, it was pretty clear where my passions lay -- in the act of creation. One of the things I vividly remember was the concept of encumberance. There was a rating for how much stuff you could lug around. There was no real world correlation in this -- most of us would never be able to walk in plate mail armor anyways. It was just a number, and it affected our combat and travelling abilities in some elaborate, byzantine way that was not clear to us. None of us really paid much heed to it. Pick up another bag of gold? Sure.

In real life, though, what would that be like? What is the measure of our own personal limit of encumberance? We go through life acquiring things, experiences, knowledge and relationships. We cart things around in boxes every time we move... well, I do in any case. We keep emails from old friends. I carry around so much baggage, I sometimes feel smothered by it. When I feel saturated, I purge. My breaking points usually arrive whenever I go out and buy something I already have but can't find. The clutter has so enveloped my life that I longer have control over the mess. Still, I have a pretty high tolerance for clutter. I have vast reserves in my brain that can wrap around large clusters of information and I tend to keep things very free and loose. On the other end of the spectrum, I have coworkers that keep their desks so free of clutter that on Fridays I can never be sure if they are actually planning on returning on Monday.

So, I arrive here with baggage. My experiences and habits affect everything I do. They usually don't own me, but they do certainly explain why I do things a certain way. Maybe explaining to you how and why I work would help you to predict my actions. Here are some examples.

1. Hold on a Minute Parddner
I don't rush. I take things slow and steady and smooth. When someone yells "Frog!" I do not jump. I like to take my time to get things things done right and done thoroughly. I am patient and persistent (some would say stubborn) and think in terms of months and years instead of hours and days. It may seem too slow to outside observers, but you know what, I get stuff done. I get stuff done that I say I am going to do, and I get it done when I say I am going to do it. I have enough experience at project management that when I say I will finish something by September 27, 2008, I feel confident that it will be done give or take 2.5 hours. I know because I have actually kept track of that stuff for years at my work. It's my job to plan and deliver. If you find me lagging on stuff it probably has to do more with me over-promising to multiple people than it does having to do with laziness or inattention.

Where does this come from? I think a big part of it has to do with the fact that I was sick a lot as a kid. A lot a lot. Pneumonia, asthma, hernia, you name it. I learned early on that the best way to cope was to be as still as possible. Wait out the storm. Trick myself into ignoring my body and keep plugging away at something. I think this is where my love of art flourished. Art takes patience. You have to be able to know while you are shading the upper right corner of a picture what the bottom left will look like three hours later. I can focus for a long, long time.

The other big part of it has to do with events more recent. I have kids. Kids take a lot of patience, more than anything else I have ever experienced. Progress is so painstakingly slow sometimes. Then BAM! One day my kid climbs into bed with a book and starts reading. Watching the learning and growth process teaches me every day to keep pushing, keep trying, and keep believing that growth and change will happen. I've seen it happen. I approach every day with the confidence that life will progress and that long-term goals are reachable.

2. Jack be Nimble
This, here, is a far more recent addition to my life experiences. It shows up in a lot of different areas in my life these days, but I think the best example has to do with a collective business I help start 15 years ago. My friends and I, all artists, started up a collective to publish comic books. It was a great success and learning experience in many ways. However, over time, the vast network of people and projects we had built began to feel like a huge burden to me. I had lost my ability to affect any change within the group and I felt like I was carting around an elephant on my shoulders. It was hard to move in any direction other than down a path that the groupmind had set. When it did finally end its forward momentum, there was no clean way to stop it. In all, it took me almost 10 years to remove myself from the entanglements I had help create before I felt free to start up something similar again. Lesson learned. It is something that deeply affects the way I conduct myself in helping guide this project. I feel we should remain nimble. We should avoid any kind of financial debt. We should not overpromise things to clients. We should own as little as possible. We should, in fact, set things up so that there really is nothing to own. We should never become so committed to one path or so entrenched in one idea that we cannot change direction without losing work that has been done. That is why I chose a creative commons license for my projects. That is why I chose to do generic, flexible, portable environment models. We need to stay nimble and open to change. Those are my feelings at least, and I come to these ideas after years of experience.

3. Shed Encumberance
I have a little story for you about a recent experience that brought me to my clutter overload breakpoint. A couple weeks ago, I went to buy a new vehicle with my wife. We were taking our beat-up old hatchback to trade-in for what we thought would be maybe a few hundreds bucks. Nothing really, just a palatable way to free ourselves of money-sucking clutter. Things did not go as planned. On the way there, two freeway exits from our destination, "pop, sssssssssssssss". Blown something or other. After a couple hours of phone calls and tow trucks, we ended up limping to the dealership with a dead car with zero value. In fact, the only value we could squeeze out of it was the fact that we would no longer be paying insurance on a rarely used car. This worked out OK, but the lesson I learned here is to not wait for the breaking point. I need to step out of the hole I am digging before I need to climb out. As my love for this project has grown, the time available to work on it has been hard to find. It will become even harder to find as the arrival of mini-scott 3.0 gets closer. To commit further to this coop and deliver something concrete on my ideals, I have had to shed work. I have had to tell people I love working with that working with them will have to wait. I have had to disengage from promising projects before committing. I have had to say no to a number of great projects, some even offering payment. I feel that this is the only way to stay focussed on the goal at hand. Cluttering my life with too many different projects was resulting in denying myself the satisfaction of completing any of them. So, I have whittled down. What you are seeing here is now about 90% of what I am working on these days -- it is all I can handle right now.

4. Go Mini
I have a long history of unfinished work. I have worked on many many indigame projects and not a single one has been finished. I have been working on the sixth issue of my comic book for two years now. I have boxes full of art supplies, many unopened. I aim to change that. In fact, I have already changed it. Creating mini-projects that can be completed, zipped up, and delivered in a reasonable time frame has been a huge boon to me and my artistic development. My daily life is divvied up into 5 minute increments, especially on the weekends when I am at home with the kids. I have to fit my few hours a day of art time in the little nooks and crannies of my daily life. 5 minutes here, 20 there. Work on the train. Work late at night. Do the dishes, model a few minutes in the kitchen. Sitting in a nice comfy chair at a well-appointed desk for 4 hours straight has been out of the question for years now. Maintaining anything close to consistent focus on a project that will take me more than 5 hours to complete is damn-near impossible. The time it takes to build an animated character can get smeared across weeks or months and ends up feeling disjointed and incomplete. So, I chose to chunk the work up into little pieces. Each mini-project can be done and ready to distribute in a few hours at most. Content in packs are modular and can be switched out at will. Work on super-projects can easily be split amongst a whole host of contributors. I feel that if the coop is to thrive, work must be widely distributed over a large network of artists and that the work each person does must be easy to complete and portable. Again, this all comes from experience, the baggage I carry around from years of false starts. So far it has worked. This project has proven to be anything but a false start. Real results have been attained and my personal goals remain clear and focussed.

All of my experiences, even recent ones, color the way I do things here. Everything I have done and experienced affects the way I function. I will make no apologies for the way I conduct myself as an artist in this coop, but I may offer explanations, sometimes at great length. Hopefully I will learn and change as I grow with all of you. I just thought I would let you know about a few of the bags that I do carry with me and in what ways they affect how I proceed.

Stay free.

~shs~

Monday Morning Polyhacker -- Jan. 16

posted by Scott Hsu-Storaker at 12:00 AM

Welcome back. It's been a busy busy week for me here at the coop. Most of the work was concentrated on the grunt work of creating uvmaps for existing models -- I think I must have done over 30 uvmaps this week. It's something that is kind of invisible to all of you, but, when done well, it makes the job a texturing so much easier. Here, though, are a couple of examples of work that has progressed to either complete or almost complete stages.



Download the file and have some fun with it.



Almost done. I'll hopefully be posting the WIP file for the pack that includes this concrete pipe during the week.

~---~

Being so "out there" in the public eye is still a pretty new thing to me and I am never certain who will show up at my doorstep. So far, everyone who has stopped by and commented or made a request or offered to contribute has been amazingly responsive and enthusiastic. All of the interest in this project really inspires me to push hard on expanding the work that we are doing. This sort of inspirational involvement is exemplified by one team that stopped by this week and offered some encouragment. The Daggerfall Art Remake project aims to bring the fantasy world of Daggerfall to life using modern graphical hardware and techniques to be used in freeware Daggerfall remake projects or any other fantasy worlds. They put in a number of requests on the request line and may even throw some of their models into the mix. I love being able to meet and work with people who are as passionate about creating work that will benefit the whole community.

~---~

Thousander Club Update
The first week of the year for me was one of vacations and holidays. This past week, starting Monday evening, the quest for 1000 hours on art began in earnest. I didn't quite make my weekly quota of 20 hours, topping out at 12, but I did learn a few things about how to better achieve my goal. First, after accounting honestly for my time down to the minute, I am clearer on exactly how much time I waste doing things not directly related to art. I think I only spent about 60% of my coop time on art. This excess of time-eaters needs to change if I am going to hit my mark. Another interesting thing I learned was just an accidental side effect of something I arbitrarily did. I set up a simple spreadsheet to count up my hours and the way I did the calculations made it such that I had to start counting a new day at midnight. If you have been reading the blog, you may know that I work late, very late, well past midnight. Counting my hours this way caused a slight shift in perception for me. I started to think of this time as jump-starting a new day instead of as me limping across the finish line at the end of a long day. It is a positive feeling for me. I'm going to extend this another step and shift from staying up so late and getting up earlier to do work in the quiet time of early morning. There will be fewer distractions and I won't be fighting off sleep. So, I called off the late nights for this weekend in order to get some regular sleep and a leg up on the week. I'll let you know how it goes.

Scott's 1000 hours -- 13.77
1000 models -- 83
1000 visitors -- 551 in Jan
1000 downloads -- 167

I think that the 1000 visitors per month goal is going to be blown out of the water in the first month. The challenge will most likely be in trying to sustain that level of interest. I know I will often thank the people who comment or contribute, but I would also like to take a moment to express my heartfelt thanks to all of you who have visited recently. Knowing that my work is being seen and used delights me to no end.

~---~

See you with my usual jibber-jabber on Thursday, with maybe something little in between. I also have some plans for later in the month for something a little different.

Stay free.

~shs~

Nonphasic Sleep

posted by Scott Hsu-Storaker at 12:00 AM

There's an idea that has been kicking around the game development community for a couple months now, polyphasic sleep, the idea that instead of sleeping through the night a person sleeps in 20 minute increments every four hours or so, sleeping in total about 3-4 hours per 24 hour period. It got a kick-start by personal development blogger extraordinaire Steve Pavlina and a number of people in the indie circuit are giving it a go. Proponents who have had success with it claim that they are as rested and refreshed as if they had slept what most people consider "normal" hours. And, they get an extra 20-30 hours a week to do stuff.

Well, I've got a different method of time-saving sleep. It's something I have been doing for about 6 years, ever since the birth of my first child. I originally learned to do it temporarily while in art school, where there were no shortcuts to completing time consuming projects, but have over the years taken to doing it all the time. For lack of a better term, I am going to call it nonphasic sleep. Basically, I sleep about three to four hours a night. I get up early to get the kids ready for school, work and commute all day, get the kids ready for bed, do housework, and then start working on game art at about 11pm. I work until I pass out on the couch with my iBook sitting next to me. Sometimes I am gone by 1 am, but often I work until 3:30 or 4 am. I sleep a little on the couch, then go to bed. Usually this amounts to about 4 hours of sleep. It nets me a ton of time to work on stuff that I wouldn't be able to otherwise. The family and day job take up the rest of my life, and would be the entirety of my life if I did not steal time from sleep.

Strangley, though, my method does not produce the benefits of polyphasic sleep -- I do not feel refreshed during the day. I am not alert. In fact, I am often a zombie, especially when I am sitting in the long meetings I sometimes have to at work. Hmmm, I wonder why that is? Could it be I am not getting enough sleep? Does tripping over table legs, slurred speech and nonsensical babbling happen to you on a daily basis? Do you crash on the couch at 8pm every 8 days or so? Do you fall asleep with your eyes open when someone is talking to you for more than a minute? What? No, you say? Very curious.

Come to think of it, clinicians do have a name for this type of sleep pattern. They call it sleep deprivation.

I, however, refer to it as having kids

Stay free.

~shs~

Welcome to the Family

posted by Scott Hsu-Storaker at 12:00 AM

I have some exciting news today. Before I helped start this coop and all the open content projects, I worked on a long string of projects, most of which either faded away or changed into something so different that I was not able to contribute to them any more. What this usually means is that most of the work gets lost, put back in the drawer, maybe saved up for my portfolio -- in any case, the work loses any significant usefulness. Well, I am happy to announce that, thanks to Justin Smith of Sanctus Legacy who has kindly allowed me to donate a small portion of the work I did for him last year, I have been able to kick-start a new fantasy/medieval themed content pack. Here are samples of the WIP models, 21 new models in all.



The current WIP files can be dowloaded in this 900kb zip file and will live in the sidebar from now on. You can also follow along with the development of this open-ended content pack here.Enjoy!

The library of models in progress has now more than doubled in size since the beginning of the year. This bodes well for the ongoing progress towards our goal of 1000 models.

Stay free.

~shs~

Monday Morning Polyhacker -- Jan. 9

posted by Scott Hsu-Storaker at 12:00 AM

Welcome to the first installment of our weekly roundup of the latest happenin's 'round the coop.

The usual hibernation time of the holidays actually turned out to be a very productive period for us around here. An old friend from an old project, Nibbuls, stopped by and had a bunch of time to crank through a lot of great work. Also, the constant stream of Pacific storms finally produced a few breaks of sun that I was able to use to wrangle two new sets of source material for us to use as jumping-off points. So, here it goes.

~---~

We started up two new free urban models content packs, one for a local urban park that crosses Gilman Street and one, potentially huge, set for the South of Market Area (SOMA) in San Francisco. Nibbuls and I were kind of eager to start modeling some new stuff, so early in the day of New Year's Eve, we (well mostly Nibbuls) busted through quite a few.































There's been a lot more work going on, but I will leave that information for later roundups.

~---~

The first week of the blog has been great so far. I set the bar pretty high on getting the amount of content I wanted up here even though writing is something beyond my usual expectations for time spent working on coop projects. Fortunately I was able to use 5 months of work as a springboard to help kick it off. Starting this week, I plan to post new articles twice a week, this roundup on Mondays and my usual jibber-jabber on, most likely, Thursdays.

~---~

Thousander Club Update
As I wrote in my post about my goal to work 1000 hours on artwork for coop projects and more, I said that I would be reporting on my progress. Seeing that I was on vacation, weekend and holiday for seven out of the first nine days of the year, I'm OK with the progress so far.

Scott's 1000 hours -- 2
1000 models -- 62
1000 visitors -- 267 in Jan
1000 downloads -- 123

Stay free.

~shs~

The Road Ahead in Aught-Six

posted by Scott Hsu-Storaker at 12:01 AM

A question I ask myself quite often is "where am I going with this?" It's a natural question. It's a question I would expect to hear, and do hear, from the people who have expressed interest in helping out or who are already contributing to this project. It's not an easy question to address -- not for lack ideas, mind you. There are plenty of great ideas floating around through the ether and bouncing around in my head about where we can go in the coming years. That's not a problem. The problem is that the question implies that this is a question I should be the one to answer. It implies that I am the de facto leader of this loose confederacy of like-minded artists. I don't see myself as being in charge here. I've travelled this road before, more than once in fact, and I know from experience that I should not be viewed as the leader. Pioneer, maybe. Trailblazer, I hope. Moral center and standard bearer for artistic ideals and excellence, OK, sure. Experienced guide, that's as close as I can get. But, Man-in-Charge, nope.

So, asking where I am going and where I plan to take the Co-op are really two different things. I have some very definite and specific plans for what I want to do this year, and most of that I will do under the aegis of the Low Poly Coop. I'll get to those in a little bit. The biggest, most daring plan I have for myself, though, is to grow this group beyond what I can do by myself. I will say this many times over the coming year, and will work on making it reality over time, that the ideals of this project can and should live beyond my own personal involvement. I passionately believe that what we are doing here can have significant and long-lasting benefits for the commmunity and by extension, each one of us. And I want to see that thrive. It is a delicate balance. My own personal goals are intrinsically tied with those of the gestalt and I will want to push and pull the groupmind in directions I think are important. But, ultimately, the only way to allow this horse to run is let loose the reins. That, there, is my main goal for the year -- do what I can to help this baby grow.

More pragmatically, though, I do have a few concrete goals for the year. All of these are achievable by just having me plug away at the work day after day. I would love to take a few friends along with me -- it'll make the walk all that more enjoyable. But, I pledge to work on getting these done during the year.

1. Gilman. I plan to finish this content pack off and release it on August 12th. The number of models in the pack is still in flux, but I am hoping to have 50 fully textured models ready to be imported into your favorite game engine.
2. Increasing the infrastructure to allow for more artists to actively participate.
3. Spread the word. Get our names out there. Invite more artists to participate. Find more partners-in-crime who are as passionate about the open content philosophy as I am.
4. That's it really, the rest is all frosting.

~---~

This brings me to my next point, a kind of challenge to myself and to all of you out there.

The Thousander Club
1000 hours, 1000 models, 1000 visitors, 1000 downloads.
As part of these overarching goals, I am issuing a set of challenges to myself and the community as well by creating the Thousander Club. It is based off the somewhat well-know idea that practice is just as important as talent (I read about it on the great GBGames blog) and that mastery of a skill is achieved after 10,000 hours of dedicated practice. That even 1000 hours can lead to the level of experienced expert. I've probably devoted more than 1000 hours to modelling and developing art for games in the past year or so. But, it's been kind of all over the place. So, this year, I am going to focus. I am focussing on the Co-op. And I will be challenging myself to dedicate 1000 hours in 2006 to creating artwork for here. That's a lot. That's more than 20 hours a week, more even, considering the fact that I will be off the clock for a couple months when the new baby arrives. I am also requiring myself to only count art time. This blog does not count, answering emails or posting to the forums does not count, unless the forum post is specifically devoted to the creation and discussion of particular artwork. I don't expect anyone else to devote even a fraction of that amount of time to this particular project. But, I do challenge you to do this for yourself. Right now, the Thousander Club is a club of one -- just me. But, I would love to have some company. C'mon, join up with me, there's a certain comfort in doing things together. Pledge to devote yourself to working on your own project for 1000 hours this year. Keep track, I will. Give progress reports, I will . In a year, we can all look back and count ourselves as experienced experts. Think of the Christmas present you will be giving yourself in 2006 -- confident assurance that your skills can take you where you want to go.

I dare ya.

To go along with this, I have some challenges to throw out to the Low Poly Coop community. I can devote myself to the 1000 hours, but I would also love to see us accomplish some major feats in the coming year. Together. As a group. Take up a little of the challenge if you will. Or laugh it off as Scott's hubris and keep doing what you're doing. I know for certain that these are things that I cannot do on my own and I only really have my own drive and passion to offer up as inspiration to you all. It's really up to each of you to decide if this is something you want to devote yourselves to.

1000 models
I would love to see us have 1000 models completed by the end of the year. They don't need to be textured and I will be counting models that we did in 2005, but they should be done to a point that a game developer could download them and use them in some way. We have about 50 in the pipeline now and, if I do not spend much time texturing, I can crank out maybe over 200 myself, but it really will be up to how many artists contribute and how much time they can dedicate to the project. It is a pretty lofty goal, I know. But, think, with 1000 models this will easily be the biggest, most vital resource for free models anywhere in the community and will even dwarf many of the outlets that sell models. You could be on the forefront of a whole new movement and I will do my best to let the world know how your contribution is helping shape the way indie games are made.

1000 vistors
I really want more people to see our work. I wouldn't be doing this if I just wanted to keep my artwork shoved into the back of a drawer at home. The urge to show people my work has been strong for many years, going back to when I published my own comics in the early nineties. This stuff must reach an audience in order to be vital. I want more people to see it. So, I want to shoot for a goal of having 1000 unique visitors to our site each month. I think it is doable. As long as we keep creating quality art, people will come.

1000 downloads
In keeping with the idea of having more people see our work, I would love for more people to use our work. What we do is not just pretty pictures. The models are functional elements intended to be used in games, and in order to be used, the files must be downloaded. I want to shoot for having our work downloaded 1000 times by the end of the year. We are already up to almost 50 downloads, a lot of that is even on work-in-progress content packs. I think, once we get some solid, easily digestable, chunks of work ready for download, this number could easily grow.

~---~

I will be blazing my own path in this project. Anyone who wants to follow alongside is welcome to join. I will not be running this like most indie team managers do. I am not really in charge of anything here. I will keep the house clean and orderly. I will keep the lights on and the door ajar. I will work hard on improving my own artistic skills and voice. But, I will not be telling artists what to do. I will not be handing out assignments or setting milestones or releasing betas. I will not be drawing up contracts. Mostly, I hope that my example of hard, consistent effort and belief that quality work can and should be free will inspire others to do great work as well.

Stay free.

~shs~

Gilman Family Album

posted by Scott Hsu-Storaker at 12:00 AM

The holidays just ended and if your family is anything like mine you probably took a bunch of family photos. Well, I thought it would be the perfect time to do that around here as well. I went through one of our work-in-progress content packs and took screenshots of everything I could find. But first, a little background on why I chose this particular project as my starting point.

As I started planning my first themed open source library of prop models I thought about the things that resonate with me personally. The most natural thing that kept coming up was to work with my neighborhood. Gilman street is a strip about a mile and a half long and stretches through an amazingly wide range of urban living. From a waterfront horse racing track to bombed out post-industrial factories, trendy home-improvement outlet stores to overpriced fixer-upper working class bungalows, a massive gothic church to hide-away sculpture gardens. There is a wealth of material -- and it's my home.

The other inspiration for this project is the real Gilman Street Project, 924 Gilman street, an all-ages, non-profit, collectively organized music and performance venue. It is the birthplace of many of the early 90's punk bands such as Op Ivy, Rancid and Green Day and the spiritual home to a whole generation of DIY projects. I hope to one day live up to the greatness that is the Gilman and have chosen this name to remind myself to always keep it as pure as possible.

As part of this DIY spirit, there are a few rules I have decided on for creating this material.
1. All artwork created for this project will be freely available to the game community. Use it in your game (open source or commercial, either is fine), modify it for your own purposes, beat it up, smack it around. Just don't repackage it and sell it as your own. All usage must include documentation with complete credits. See the link to the Creative Commons license below.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

2. As much as possible, open source software should be used to create the material included in the library.
3. All material will be created from direct observation of real-world objects, which can be recorded in a variety of ways including photography or sketching. Source imagery should not be downloaded from the internet or scanned from publications and textures should be created from the artist's own photography or hand-painted. The goal here is to strip away as many layers of technological crutches as possible, aiming to get closer to the purity of the artistic vision behind all the pixels and mathmatical formulas.

Here is the family photo album as it stands today.



The current files can be downloaded from here and will always be available on the sidebar of this blog. I am planning on having the final pack done by August 12th, the one-year anniversary of when I started the project.

Stay Free.

~shs~

We're Turning 5

posted by Scott Hsu-Storaker at 12:00 AM

5 months old, that is. I can't be sure precisely on that. I am looking over some old emails that Terry and I were sending back and forth in July and August of last year and I see that we had been discussing starting some sort of "open source" 3d art project since mid-July or so. The closest I can get to an official date is the first post on forum on August 11. Well, just for the sake of simplicity, I'm gonna call the official birth date of the cooperative as August 1, 2005. I thought that today, on the occasion of the launch of this blog, would be a good time to do something I will rarely do here -- and that is look back on the path we've tread. It's only been five months, but there has been so much progress and development here that it feels like it could have been five years ago that we formed this little idea. In a way, I have been doing this for years. What I hope to accomplish in my time on this project is based on ideas that have percolating for over 15 years. Let me just take a moment to fill you in on where we've been and later this week I will let you know some about where I am going personally and the directions I hope this coop can grow. This is going to end up being more about me than any official party-line lowpolycoop propaganda, so stick with me if you are into that sort of thing.

Terry and I met, oh, about a year ago, while working together on a game project. Both of us shared a love for modelling with Blender and, over time, discovered that we both might want to contribute to work that would be freely available to the indie game development community at large. I, for one, wanted to help start this coop as a way to get my work out there and into the hands of people that would need it the most. We tried a number of different ways of working at first, and I'm sure we as a group will always continue to try new things, but the method that stuck for me was in creating free environment models, working towards producing some sort of cohesive content pack down the line. I pounded away at this and have been pounding it senseless ever since.

I know I am going to get into this over and over again as this blog progresses, but I do want to give a little insight into why I am doing this personally. I mean, what is in it for me, giving my work away for free? Well, I have been working on game and art projects for free for a long long time. It might even be likely that I have been doing this longer than some of you have been alive. Creating 3D art for games is still new for me -- I've been at it maybe 5 years here and there -- but I have been deeply involved in various group artistic pursuits for well over 15 years. I have always gained a satisfaction from creating art and having people see it. At a certain level, it does not matter whether I make money at it or achieve fame and adulation. At times I have chased the money, starting businesses and looking for jobs and I have met with success in some of the directions I have followed. I currently work as a graphic designer, a goal which seemed far off 15 years ago when I was working in a research lab and drawing comics after work. And that's great... up to a certain point. I've long wanted to create games as an artist and I still do. Whether that means working in a studio full time, hacking away at a hobby project at night or somewhere in between is really just a matter of timing, time and short-term money needs. I can get my art on in a lot of different ways. And right now, and for the next couple of years, creating projects and working in teams with achievable goals is the way I want to proceed. Mostly, I want to create game art and I want people to see it. I want to grow as an artist and I want to work with people that will help me grow. Money wouldn't hurt, of course, because it would allow me to get closer to my goal of doing this during more of my waking hours, but it is not the driving force for me here. It is part of my overall plan to make money either here with the coop or somewhere else doing something simlar and at some point I will talk to you at length about how I believe that providing stuff to the community for free is not the same as working for free. There are huge benefits to doing what we do here and a year from now I hope to be able to again look back and show clearly what those have been.

For now, I just want to say, I am doing this because I love it. It is fun. You should see the sparkle in my eyes when a developer sends me a screenshot with one of my models in game. You should see me sprawled out on the couch at 3am mumbling "one more tweak on that texture". You should see me hunched over my iBook on the train every morning. You should see me running for the bathroom because I forgot to pee while I was working. You should see me when I fall off my skateboard and I check the computer before I check to see if my elbow is broken. You get the picture.

I surprised myself when I recently looked back and counted the amount of work I had done over the first few months on this project. To date, I have created over 35 models, some of which I have completed and released on the forums. My work, a lot still in the work-in-progress stage even, has been downloaded over 50 times now and I have gotten great feedback and encouragement from people whose work I greatly respect. It's a real mix of emotions for me. I'm excited to have my work seen by more people, I'm more than a bit scared of what people will think of me and my skills, and way more than a bit humbled by the enthusiasm great artists have shown in wanting to work together with me on something I feel so passionately about. If nothing else comes of the project, this coop, this blog, this forum, or this site I will be thankful for the opportunity to meet and work with the people in the indie community. Just within the last month, a few artists have joined in the fun and have already done almost as much work as I did the first four months -- something that really excites me about the prospects for the coming year.

If you haven't visited the forums yet, please have a look around. There's a lot there. I know it can be hard to pick through something so dense and deep. The forum is very work-centric and, although it is organized pretty cleanly, there aren't really many signposts to guide you along the way. It's the gearheads hanging out in the garage, talking shop mostly. That's a huge reason why I am kick-starting this blog, to provide a showroom that is flexible and accessible. Also, now that a few other artists have jumped in and started producing some great work, the flow of new art has greatly increased. I felt that new and casual visitors may need someone to sift through all the information there and make nice, pretty little maps. The forums will still exist. That's where all the development work and communication will happen, and you are welcome to root around in it and see the growth of this project moment by moment. It could be quite educational if you are contemplating something similar. But for those of you who just want some updates on our progress and to get a little peek into the reasons why we do what we do, then visit here every week or so. I'll try to keep it light.

I am actually going to end this first post of looking back with a taste of looking forward. 2006 is a year so full of new territory, not the least of which is the expected arrival of my third child. I am really jazzed about the prospect of doing some great work with some great people.

This first week of the Low Poly Cooperative blog will be jam-packed with goodness. I will fill you in on some of what I am hoping for in the coming year, show you what we've been up to, and end the week with some exciting news. See you then. On to aught-six and the creation of the Thousander Club.

Stay free.

~shs~