How I do my graphics.

Pencil stuff Computer stuff Specific software I use

Okay, okay, this may be extremely egotistical of me. But it's conceivable that some people might want to know what I use to do my various drawings and renderings. I doubt it, but if you're reading this, it shows that you are interested, at least.

Seriously, though, a more important purpose for this page is that I should acknowledge where I get some of the resources which I've used from. I have used other people's work in the pursuit of my own -- we all stand on the shoulders of giants (or occasionally in their gangantuan footprints, but that's another story), and we should acknowledge our debts, right?

Okay, so how do I do it?

Pencil stuff

I usually use a Pentel Graph 1000 mechanical pencil in 0.5 mm, using 2B, 3B or 4B leads. I draw on basic copy paper. I occasionally use Rexel-Derwent colored pencils, or other pens I happen to have laying around. It's just sketching, what'd ya expect?

I also draw almost entirely from my imagination. I can't copy images from life well at all, but I'm able to pluck them out of my mind's eye and put them on the paper fairly accurately.

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Computer Stuff

Okay, this is the meat of the matter.

Oh, and a side note here: it seems pretty standard for people to put tutorials up on their webpages, describing how exactly they did various things. I won't be doing that here, though -- I assume that nothing I've done is that challenging, and especially not innovative. If anyone actually asks how I did something, though, I'll consider it.

My Computer

I recently got a new computer. It's a PIV 1.8 GHz with 1 GB of RAM and a GeForce 3 graphics card with 128 MB. It also has a DVD-ROM, CD-R/W, a 17" flatscreen CRT and a couple other cool little things. It's running Windoze 2000 in Chinese, so I can run some of the nifty games that come from Taiwan.

In addition, I still have a lot of nifty extras: a Wacom teensy little tablet (aka Graphire), a cheapo Acer scanner, a pseudo-ergonomic keyboard, the cheapest Iomega zip drive I could find, HP's cheapest printer, etc.

Finally, I haven't gotten rid of my old computer, which is a Wintel -- Pentium 350 with 256 MB RAM. I use it primarily for surfing, now, while my new computer is rendering or running Civ III or Morrowind. Both of my computers do their jobs nicely.

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Software

I use almost all low-quality stuff. I'm not doing this professionally, right? But what I have does the job pretty well. I have looked around a lot at the various 3D programs which are available, because my relatives got together and agreed to give me a program as a combination birthday/Chanukkah/Christmas gift. I am now the proud owner of one educational seat of Inspire 3D. Also, indirectly with help from my relatives, I have bought an educational seat of Lightwave 7.0. I doubt I'll be buying anything else anytime soon.

Anyway, the specific programs I use, in alphabetical, are:

• Anim8or.

  This is a nifty little freeware 3D program. I used to use it mainly for modelling meshes, back when my main rendering & animating app was Bryce. Anim8or's not a great modeler, but it's also free, so I can't complain. I would love to buy some sort of dedicated modeling package, like Rhino or Amapi or maybe even Amorphium, but in any case, I needed something which could do mesh modelling. The main reason is so that I could create single-object meshes of things which usually take 10 or 20 object in Bryce -- this would help rendering times a lot, though it would naturally hurt my budget.

• Aura.

  I got this along with Inspire, which was a truly phenomenal deal. I haven't used Aura much yet, mostly just for doing titles in mini-movies, but it clearly has a lot of promise.

• Bryce 4.

  This used to be my main 3D rendering and modeling program. It's designed to do landscaping stuff, but it's fairly flexible, and allows for booleans, which was usually enough for me. Now, though, I use it only to generate terrains, and Terragen does that better, to be honest. Bryce's main strongpoint is its procedural textures.

  In using Bryce, I've availed myself of the following resources:

  • Peter Sharpes' tutorials.
  • Meshes from the 3D Cafe.
  • Other meshes from Treeshark.
  • Even more meshes from Steve Lareau's Hilltop Design.
  • Textures from Chemical Studios.
  • Tutorials from BryceTech, the creator of which I've heard has unfortunately died.
  • Advice from various nice people on the KPT Bryce messageboards.

• Inspire and Lightwave.

  I finally got Inspire, the little sister of Lightwave, which was my birthday present, in the mail at the beginning of March, 2001. It's great. I haven't done much with it, but it's so clear how much more powerful than Bryce it is -- its animation abilities are much better than Bryce, its native modelling is several classes above Bryce's, its lighting abilities are excellent and it does surfaces far better than Bryce does. Of course, it doesn't have Bryce's great procedurals, but I think I've learned enough about making my own textures that I don't need Bryce's procedurals all that often. Anyway, I'm very happy with it.

  In September of 2002, I got one academic seat of Lightwave 7.0. I took a vacation right after I got it, and my USB has been acting up since I got back, so I haven't been able to use it much. Expect more from me, using Lightwave, soon.

  Some of the places and things I've used in the course of my studies of Inspire and Lightwave include:

  • Flay.com. This is probably the most important Lightwave/Inspire site around. They index almost all the good plugins there.
  • Reservoir 3D Center. This was one of the few Inspire-specific sites out there. Unfortunately, the site seems to have lapsed. I hope it'll come back one day.
  • Alternate Perspective's Better Space tutorials. They provide many, many helpful hints about space scenes and modelling.
  • Jesse DeGraff's Mini Hull Texturing Tutorial. Jesse's art is great, and even though his tutorial here is brief, it's actually very useful.
  • Lightwave Tutorials on the Web. This site indexes just about all the good tutorials for Lightwave which exist on the Web.
  • I would put a link here to Andrew Smallwood's website, but there really isn't one. I will put a link here to CG Focus, of which Andrew is a founder and editor. And: Thanks Andrew!

• Painter Classic.

  This came with the Wacom tablet. It's a good little program, and it allows me to draw quite similarly to pencil (or airbrush, etc.) directly with my computer. My wrist inevitably gets pretty pained when I use it with my graphics tablet, but then, I'm still getting used to it.

• Paint Shop Pro 6.

  This is my main 2D app. It's no Photoshop, but it does all the basics: cutting, pasting, image filters, file format switching, animation, layers, etc. Actually, to be honest, it seems like it does almost as good a job as Photoshop does, just without the price. But then, I've never used Photoshop.

  When I use PSP 6, I also use some of the following resources:

  • Axion's freebie lens flare filter. It does the job, and is free. That's pretty cool.
  • Some of the lens filters available on the PC Resources for Photoshop page.
  • The excellent filters from Mura Mucho! Fractal patterns, polar coordinates... Heck, with these filters, there isn't much PSP6 can't do!
  • Many of the filters from the Plugin Site. Some of their filters are crap, but many are very useful, and the free ones are, well, free!

• Terragen.

  I've only just started using this, largely because it's one of the best terrain generating programs around, and because it's free. I haven't done much with it yet, but I expect to use it a lot more in the future.

• Ulead Media Studio 5.

  I bought this for a pretty good price. Of course, considering it didn't come with manuals, it probably wasn't as good as I thought. But it does the job, and has a nice little package of transitions built in, as well as a minimal sound editor, extremely basic titling capabilities, etc. Mostly, it's just useful as a way to save out Quicktime and .avi format movies.

• I also use several different sound editing programs, but this doesn't seem like the place for them. If anyone's interested (Hello? Anyone there?), I'll put info up about them.

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This page (http:// www.jiawen.net/ howdo.html) designed and ©2000-2004 by Rachel Kronick. Last updated January 22, 2004.