drafting

[ritaxis]

Today I am doing an outline and first draft of a floor. I have a very miscellaneous stack of mostly-green tiles of many sizes, all rectangular (from 1x1 to 12x12 square, including all the stops between except for 5, 7, 9,10, and 11: and 3x6,3x8, 4x6, and 4x8), I have a tile saw, and I have a bare floor, 6-9x16-7. YesterdayI sorted the tiles by color and size, and today I am laying them out for pattern, meanwhile mixing up the color and size sort again. After I am sure I am doing something that works, I will stack the tiles by color, size, and quadrant of the room, sweep up the crud, and begin laying tile. I think I will get as far as the stacking today, maybe to the first stripe of the floor. Yes, though I will be staking tiles by quadrant, I will be laying tiles stripes, from the outside in (considering the side where the three! doors are to be the inside, along with the stripe at the center of the room). The center of the floor is the setting for a mosaic, which I am still planning as I look at what I have, but which will be vaguely representative of kelp. Kelp is the tree of life, really, whatever anybody else thinks.
So I was thinking about the way I draft things. The way I do an outline usually is to do a short treatment -- either a long short story length or a fragment -- it looks like a failed short story. When I see what I've got, then I can plan the real novel. THat's sort of what I've done with the tiles.

So I'm taking a break because the hand therapist says you really must, and I woke up with burning sensation from my fingertips up past my elbow this morning, presumably from stacking tiles yesterday.



They rushed into the biggest room of the golden house, which had tables running all the enormous length of it. Down the center of each long table there seemed to be a garden, a weedy, smelly, messy garden which dropped flower petals and seeds and leaves all over the tabletops. More and more of the odd small people -- and also many odd larger people, and some very large people too -- came in from doors all around the sides of the room and took their seats, some of which were tall and stilty so that small people could reach the table and some of which were low slung so that the larger people could fit there.

"Come on," said the Mustard Fairy, dragging Katie across the room by her elbow. At the other end of the room was a dais, which was bright green and decorated with weedy yellow flowers ("I know what those are," Katie thought. "Those are wild mustard flowers. I always thought they weren't really mustard, but if the Mustard Fairy has them on her dais, they must be!")

Comments

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

The way Sims 1 graphics works is this: you get a view from an angle looking down on the scene. You have four views. So it's a kind of suggesting-3d situation, but actually 2d. Different Sims fans make items in different ways. Since each item has its own little program embedded in its file, as well as however many parts and states and the four views (though some items have two views and some have only one, it's quite a bit of information that it carries around with it. People prety much have to make new Sims objects right on top of old ones. There's a process called "cloning," where the file is opened up into its subfiles and exported so that a person can modify the pictures or even, if they are up to it, modify the programming. The object is renamed and reimported to the game as a new object.

Some people do the graphics in 3d programs, and use the correct (or sometimes not so correct!) views to import to the object. Some people make drawings or paintings and scan them in. Other people draw the p[ictures in Photoshop or Paintshop. Other people combine bits of graphics lifted from photographs or other sources in order to make the pictures. Still other people -- the majority -=- use the graphics made by others and just change the colors or layer graphic textures on to the objects.
Go here:

http://www.sims1.thesimsresource.com/items/sets.php

Scroll down.The sets made by Secret Sims are made with a 3d program. The sets made by Fairywitch I think are made in 2d. The set made by Steffieb is an example of recoloring. All of the objects in the set were made by changing the colors of existing pieces.

You can also see, by looking at these sets, the angle of the scene.

Go here:

http://www.strategyplanet.com/thesims/sas/

This is possibly the premier "retexturing" site. The proprietor, who goes by the name of Bunny Wuffles, takes photographs of old buildings and furnishings and works them onto objects from the game. And she writes about the history of architecture, too.

As for Savoie -- I don't think that bath looks sensuous, and I don't think that floor looks warm. It takes more than a curve and some wood to make a place cozy.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

The Sims furniture does seem to suffer from process problems; one needs to have a source of complex forms as input to the process and they are very difficult to achieve from nothing at the drawing board. If I were doing furniture sets for the Sims, I would probably work from photographs and design drawings of actual furniture. I think I've figured out the projection, by the way.

As for the Villa Savoye, I am going to stop using it as a bad example until I've actually visited it!

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I know what the projection is, but the name for it has dropped out of my brain, and I can't find it. There are people who just go ahead and draw the items, especially when they are not furniture, but plants or something. You can usually tell someone who does it in 3d: their work is less realistic, full of weird bent tubes and strange doubled surfaces and glass where nobody would put glass and wood on shapes that would be silly to do in wood.

A lot of people do work from photographs and design drawings. Particularly since there are those people who put together sets of historically or otherwise thematically interesting items: Craftsman, or Renaissance, or Mexican, or Japanese (there's an especially attractive set of Japanese Art Nouveau pieces done by a very skilled and talented artist), or specific designers.