BTW, I've had some friends tell me that they read a lot of online material against the bills, but that they haven't been able to examine the other side of the issue as much. If you want to read just the bills for yourself and make your own independent decision, without any possible outside bias, comments, etc. from other sources, you can read the complete bills as they are written on www.govtrack.us/ Read SOPA here: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h112-3261 and PIPA here: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s112-968
Just scroll down to the "Bill Overview" section and click "Full Text" to read the full bill in its entirety.
This is great, but it reads more as metal than as ice to me, due to the high contrast. If you decreased the contrast and added a bit of green to the palette I think it'd look more like ice and not quite as metallic. :) Perhaps making some of the shapes that make up his form a bit more organic might help too, but I dunno...
IMO, the biggest reason there is little participation in the OGA weekly challenge is that there is no real motivation to enter. If people have some sort of prize or reward to compete for, not only will we get more entries, but people will be more likely to submit higher-quality entries in order to have a better shot at winning. Note that I'm not in any way suggesting a cash prize should be offered, I personally would be against cash prizes (if we even had the funds to do that anyway).
Now I've been hanging out at Pixel Joint for the past couple months, and the way they set up their weekly challenges is quite interesting. What they do is they have a point/rank system, where you get a certain amount of points each time you submit art, post a comment, rate a piece, submit news, etc. When you get to a certain amount of points, you advance to a new PJ 'rank'. For entering the weekly challenge, you automatically get 20 points just for participating. For the first week after the newest weekly challenge is announced, participants have that entire week to create and submit their art. The following week no more entries are accepted, but that entire second week is used to allow the community to vote for their favorite entries. At the end of that second week the winners (1st, 2nd, and 3rd places) are announced, and the top three finishers get trophies to add to their Pixel Joint trophy galleries "for all to see and envy", and the top three get an additional point bonus on top of the 20 they get just for participating. All those participants who didn't place in the top three get an "honorable mention" ribbon to place in their Pixel Joint galleries.
The thing about the Pixel Joint system is that by giving away rewards (PJ points and digital trophies) they encourage far greater participation in the weekly challenge than they would probably receive otherwise. I'm not sure whether or not it would be feasible to do this (or some form of this) on OGA (I know there is already some sort of point system in place, but it's rather ambiguous -at least I've always found it so), but basically, as I see it, the issue with the OGA weekly challenge boils down to lack of motivation. Provide a tangible benefit for members who submit high-quality art (or just submit art) to the challenge, and there's a lot more motivation going around.
> A tutorial from cure over on Pixel Joint. "This tutorial is designed to explain what pixel art is, what pixel art isn't, how to get started making pixel art and how to make your pixel art better." It's aimed for complete beginners to pixel art, but even some experienced pixel-pushers might find it worth their while to read through it. ;) Link: http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299
> The official list of tutorial links from Pixel Joint (there are dozens to choose from, and most of them contain useful information). Link: http://www.pixeljoint.com/pixels/tutorials.asp
I tested it out in Tiled, and it actually turned out fairly decent, imho (see the second preview image). The only thing that really bothers me is the fact that I had to turn off anti-aliasing in blender in order to achieve a crisp, non-blurry texture, so the lack of anti-aliasing might hurt the transitions a bit.
BTW, I've had some friends tell me that they read a lot of online material against the bills, but that they haven't been able to examine the other side of the issue as much. If you want to read just the bills for yourself and make your own independent decision, without any possible outside bias, comments, etc. from other sources, you can read the complete bills as they are written on www.govtrack.us/ Read SOPA here: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h112-3261 and PIPA here: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s112-968
Just scroll down to the "Bill Overview" section and click "Full Text" to read the full bill in its entirety.
This is great, but it reads more as metal than as ice to me, due to the high contrast. If you decreased the contrast and added a bit of green to the palette I think it'd look more like ice and not quite as metallic. :) Perhaps making some of the shapes that make up his form a bit more organic might help too, but I dunno...
IMO, the biggest reason there is little participation in the OGA weekly challenge is that there is no real motivation to enter. If people have some sort of prize or reward to compete for, not only will we get more entries, but people will be more likely to submit higher-quality entries in order to have a better shot at winning. Note that I'm not in any way suggesting a cash prize should be offered, I personally would be against cash prizes (if we even had the funds to do that anyway).
Now I've been hanging out at Pixel Joint for the past couple months, and the way they set up their weekly challenges is quite interesting. What they do is they have a point/rank system, where you get a certain amount of points each time you submit art, post a comment, rate a piece, submit news, etc. When you get to a certain amount of points, you advance to a new PJ 'rank'. For entering the weekly challenge, you automatically get 20 points just for participating. For the first week after the newest weekly challenge is announced, participants have that entire week to create and submit their art. The following week no more entries are accepted, but that entire second week is used to allow the community to vote for their favorite entries. At the end of that second week the winners (1st, 2nd, and 3rd places) are announced, and the top three finishers get trophies to add to their Pixel Joint trophy galleries "for all to see and envy", and the top three get an additional point bonus on top of the 20 they get just for participating. All those participants who didn't place in the top three get an "honorable mention" ribbon to place in their Pixel Joint galleries.
The thing about the Pixel Joint system is that by giving away rewards (PJ points and digital trophies) they encourage far greater participation in the weekly challenge than they would probably receive otherwise. I'm not sure whether or not it would be feasible to do this (or some form of this) on OGA (I know there is already some sort of point system in place, but it's rather ambiguous -at least I've always found it so), but basically, as I see it, the issue with the OGA weekly challenge boils down to lack of motivation. Provide a tangible benefit for members who submit high-quality art (or just submit art) to the challenge, and there's a lot more motivation going around.
Perhaps, if this is implemented, there could also be an option to sort art by the number of views/downloads?
Wow, very nice! Very high quality sound, too. If you don't mind my asking, what sample library did you use to create it?
Hey there,
A few more to add to the list:
> A tutorial from cure over on Pixel Joint. "This tutorial is designed to explain what pixel art is, what pixel art isn't, how to get started making pixel art and how to make your pixel art better." It's aimed for complete beginners to pixel art, but even some experienced pixel-pushers might find it worth their while to read through it. ;) Link: http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299
> The official list of tutorial links from Pixel Joint (there are dozens to choose from, and most of them contain useful information). Link: http://www.pixeljoint.com/pixels/tutorials.asp
I'm seriously loving these, the rendering job is beautiful. Very professional work! =)
Indeed. ;)
I tested it out in Tiled, and it actually turned out fairly decent, imho (see the second preview image). The only thing that really bothers me is the fact that I had to turn off anti-aliasing in blender in order to achieve a crisp, non-blurry texture, so the lack of anti-aliasing might hurt the transitions a bit.
Hi,
I'm trying to learn blender, so as a self-challenge I did a tileset using the tutorial you wrote on rendering isometric tiles: http://opengameart.org/content/flare-isometric-tiles
Hope it's useful. If nothing else, it gave some excellent practice. ;D
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