Lakituthequick's occasional art

[Lakituthequick]

In which I post stuff I make. If I make stuff that is.

Table of contents
Mario Awards XI presentation BTS: M16 Favourite Item
Mario Awards XI presentation BTS: M8 Favourite Art Style
Unfinished Christmas 2017 art
Steamed Hams but it's swiftly dubbed in Dutch
Anniversary Announcements sprites: Lakituthequick, Turboo, Meta Knight
Anniversary Announcements sprite: Superchao
Anniversary Announcements sprites: Smasher, Lord Bowser
Anniversary Announcements sprites: MrConcreteDonkey, Stargazing
Anniversary Announcements sprite: NEXandGBX
Anniversary Announcements sprite: Shoey
Anniversary Scavenger user art and talk
The Holiday 'Shroomfinity Scavenger
Anniversary Announcements sprite: BBQ Turtle
Mario Awards XII presentation BTS: C4 Favourite 2017 Awards Presentation
Anniversary Announcements sprites: MsRetroGeek, Roserade
Anniversary Announcements sprite: Zange
Anniversary Announcements sprite: Power Flotzo

It's aMAZEing
C2. Best 'Shroom Section Artwork - Community Awards XI (2018)
Cappy
Goomba (Super Mario Bros.)
Frosty
Wall decorations of Lakitu's cloud
Blitty
Berry
Battle Card
Parabeetle + bonus content
Luigi's cap
Volleyball
Special Cup's crown
Poochy-Pup
Dry Bones' emblem
Piranha Plant icon
Master Hand
Cake
Smiley Flower + bonus content
Purple Pikmin
Snow Bunny
? Block + bonus content
Dodgeball
Megavitamin
Issue 150 cake
Pirate Guy's map
Puzzle Piece
Monocle
Peach Juice
Virus
Toad House
Origami Fire Flower
Neo Bowser Skyscraper logo
Coin
Party Pad
Strollin' Stu
35

 

[Lakituthequick]

Some BTS things for my M16 Favourite Item presentation from this year.

Basically what I did for that one is do a bunch of battles in MK8D and make screenshots of the MKTV replays.
This is harder than you may think at first!

Y'see, a lot of the things in my presentation aren't actually possible under normal circumstances. Take the following frame from my presentation:

There are multiple things here that don't quite fit.

1. How in the world are those characters placed so nicely in relation to each other?
2. Cat Peach can't actually slap other players in this game.

Lets help the first one out first.
By virtue of being on the Nintendo Switch, you get two controllers, so what I did is open local multiplayer and simply control both characters independently, and position them both where I want them.
That way I can do actions with Cat Peach while Pink Gold Peach waited for her demise.
Then I'd make the second player finish the race on their own with smart-steering and auto-accelerate.

The second is funny. First and foremost, I just threw a green shell at PGP with CP. That is the easy part.
But! That generates shell fragments! These can't be there! That would break the illusion!

Let's misuse MKTV's inability to rewind particles. Playing that part in slow-motion until all shell fragments are gone and then rewinding it solves the problem. But timing is still essential...

The same procedure more or less happened for all of the screenshots, especially the item box ones.



Now for the interesting part. The viewers paying just a slight bit of attention will have noticed that the Super Bell and Tanooki Suit aren't in MK8D at all. Yeah, those are CGI.

The Super Bell's screenshot was originally this:

For the Bell itself I wanted to use the model from 3D World, but they don't have that one yet on the Models Resource. So I downloaded the model for Super Bell Subway and took one of the statues instead. Had to retexture it but whatever.

Next thing to do was make it actually reflective and lit so it would fit in. That resulted in the following mess of lights:

But it mostly worked.

The set-up for Tanooki Mario was different. First of all, there aren't any stand-alone models of a Tanooki suit. So I instead posed Tanooki Mario from MK8(D) in an idle post, then got rid of the bones, and his face and hands, and closed the gaps.
Then I reused the lights from the Bell and added something so I could get its shadow and you get this:

The facecam is the one that captured the mugshot in the itembox.

Also in that frame is this banner:

Did people see it?

I think that covers most of the interesting things in this presentation.

We all know you aren't here for this presentation anyway. M8 will follow soon.

 

[Lakituthequick]

Now for my M8 Favourite Art Style presentation (y'know, the one in the Paper Mario style, with the tour though a museum).

Lets begin with a fun trivia fact. The name for the 3ds Max file is floorTest.max. I originally tested how the floor looked, but ended up building everything in that file and never renamed it to something more describing. The file is 2,76MB though, so I'll recognize it (which isn't hard as it's the only .max file in that folder).

So for the general museum look I went with this reference picture of Prisma Museum, from a Paper Mario: Colour Splash Let's Play.

So I started with making the floor in SketchUp as a single tile.

Then I threw that in 3ds Max and enhanced it with noise and bump maps to make it look like actual paper someone cut in pieces.

That is indeed wavy cardboard! With actual polygons to it! Luckily, making these kinds of waves can be largely automated my an object modifier.

The edges of pretty much all paper objects are softened by a texture shader effect.

Then you have the walls, which I also created in SketchUp first.

I did end up physically smoothing the baseboards because the shader wouldn't do it.

And a bunch of materials later:

I placed the characters first, but first want to go over the paintings.

The paintings are really simple pieces of cut cardboard, with the three features having some extra decoration.
Like the floor and walls, these also each have a slightly different noise over them, so no two paintings are identical.

For the lights, I put two lights for every room. One actually within the bounds of the room, and the other a distance away for the straight shadows.
In between the rooms I added big planes to prevent light from leaking in through other means than just the door.
For outside I also created a few brighter lights.

You can also see there that the backdrop is just a plane with a picture on it.
Oh by the way, you see that fence just outside the door in the first panel right? I may have cheated that a bit. Is still textured like paper though.

Now have a look at the characters!

As you can see, they aren't actually completely flat. They actually warp a little bit. This effect is actually animated, so the same character doesn't look exactly the same in any two panels. You can see that if I play all the panels in one image:

I also used keyframes for the panels. Normally those are used to animate things in 3D animation but I used a 'frame' for every panel here. This allows me to have the entire thing in one file and be able to quickly update all panels when I change one texture. (Quickly being relative, it takes about 15 minutes to render all panels)
As 3ds Max doesn't allow for objects to only exist for so many frames, I had to move characters literally behind the scenes when they weren't needed.

Now to admit a little thing. When I sent my presentation to Anton, I hadn't actually put anyone that signed up in the scene at all. This was because I only finished like, four or five of the simpler ones, but realised I would never be able to complete this on time.
So instead I put in some placeholders, but properly named internally, and submitted the thing like that instead.
Then I proceeded to complete that portion in the week between the deadline and the actual awards. The plus about having your own domain is that I could simply overwrite the images with the right ones and no code needs to be changed.

This is how the first panel in that version looked like. You may notice that the placeholders did largely resemble the users they were to be replaced with. This went for the entire presentation.

Now I know everyone is waiting in anticipation for standalone pictures of themselves, so I'll just throw them all in a spoiler.
All of them are facing left, so variants that only work facing right are actually mirrored (note GBAToad's cap and FTG's hat).
They are also all a multiple of 128 wide and high, so I could make the place in 3ds Max the right size by using a multiple of 1,5cm for the respective axis.

The difficulty lies in the fact that more people than I expected signed up with a character that wasn't in Paper Mario: Colour Splash.
The people that signed up having a sheet available were more or less guaranteed to be in.
This is also why DragonFreak and Alex95 were sadly not present in Paper form (but compensated by being paintings). I would have created paper versions, but time and difficulty together simply didn't allow me to. Sorry guys

Spoiler

Anton

BBQ Turtle

Cirdec
I went with a skirt instead of shorts, as shorts don't really work in this style.

Fawfulthegreat64
I only had sprites as reference, but I'm actually pretty happy with how this one turned out.

Freakworld
Gotta keep him the janitor. All non-JPEG art of him features him that way so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

GBAToad

Lord Bowser

Luigi 64DD
Later updated his outfit to have grey overalls instead of the bow-tie if possible, but I kept the bow-tie as it makes him more unique.

MrConcreteDonkey

Nabber

Neptune

Hooded Pitohui

Roserade
Initially made the left facing one, then realised that Roserade was facing right and the bouquets didn't match anymore, so I swapped the colours.

Shy Guy on Wheels

Shokora
I aaaactually didn't make this one really. It's actually from here, but I did edit it to flatten the colours and make the lines thicker.

TheFlameChomp

The Pyro Guy

Tucayo

Yoshi the SSM

Also, the painting you can see only a liiitle bit in the last few panels is actually a pass photo of myself. The more you know.

So, I hope you liked that little tour!

 

[Czario]

Nice! I'm gonna upload my sprites to Userpedia all in one image. I'll give credit to you, of course.

Also, what are the other paintings that are hard to see other than Alex95, DF, a thinking emoji, and yourself? One of them looks like Satoru Iwata in a Lakitu cloud with three balloons.

EDIT: Um, how do I keep the transparency? When I copy the sprites and paste them somewhere else, they're surrounded by black rather than the color that appears when I view the images in my browser. I'm not experienced with this sort of thing, so I don't know how to keep the transparency without it turning black.

 

[Yoshi the SSM]

Spoiler

Yoshi the SSM

They look great, but can I get a gif of the two images together (as in an actual walking gif). If so, great thanks. If not, oh well; had to ask.

 

[Ray Trace]

For the Super Bell, you could try browsing through the many different metal materials in 3DS Max to get an effect that looks nice. Personally, I would have added a bit of glare to the Super Bell to give it that metallic look you're going for; in your render the bell looked like it was made more of plastic than it did metal, and the reflection could have been toned down a bit. I think the Coin item has a good template to work off of to create a more convincing bell.

What render did you use for your scenes, anyway? Aside from minor nitpicks, I think you did a pretty good job with the rendering.

 

[Lakituthequick]

Also, what are the other paintings that are hard to see other than Alex95, DF, a thinking emoji, and yourself? One of them looks like Satoru Iwata in a Lakitu cloud with three balloons.

A blue Eiffel Tower silhouette and indeed Satoru Iwata in a cloud with balloons.

EDIT: Um, how do I keep the transparency? When I copy the sprites and paste them somewhere else, they're surrounded by black rather than the color that appears when I view the images in my browser. I'm not experienced with this sort of thing, so I don't know how to keep the transparency without it turning black.

Dunno how that happens but I have the same thing when I just copy things. Just download the images and open those in your editor.

They look great, but can I get a gif of the two images together (as in an actual walking gif). If so, great thanks. If not, oh well; had to ask.

Do note that there are normally three frames for Yoshi walking in PM:CS, so this animation actually misses a few frames.
Here's an APNG and GIF.

Spoiler

For the Super Bell, you could try browsing through the many different metal materials in 3DS Max to get an effect that looks nice. Personally, I would have added a bit of glare to the Super Bell to give it that metallic look you're going for; in your render the bell looked like it was made more of plastic than it did metal, and the reflection could have been toned down a bit. I think the Coin item has a good template to work off of to create a more convincing bell.

I used the scanline renderer for the two items, so I didn't have metal materials available.
Funnily, the material looks more like actual metal in the material editor than in the final render, that may be because of how I lit it.
Reflections were based on how the coins reflects, which is a lot, though admittedly should have been darker areas further down the bell.

What render did you use for your scenes, anyway? Aside from minor nitpicks, I think you did a pretty good job with the rendering.

Mental Ray. What nitpicks can I think of?

 

[Lakituthequick]

Look at that, I do a Fun Stuff section now! It's aMAZEing to be exact!

This month's maze is Cappy, which means I art'ed Cappy!

Also check out the maze I made him into here (The_%27Shroom:Issue_127/Fun_Stuff#It.27s_aMAZEing)!

 

[Lakituthequick]

Another month, another 'Shroom, another It's aMAZEing.
This month's edition is a bit 2D-series themed, and as such the maze is a classic 2D Goomba, which means I art'ed a... classic 2D Goomba!
"Art'ed" being used loosely, the most work was in making it snap to a grid, not the design obviously.

Such a simple geometry also makes it one of the smallest files I will probably ever be creating, being well under a kilobyte.

Also check out the maze I made this one into here (The_%27Shroom:Issue_128/Fun_Stuff#It.27s_aMAZEing)!

 

[Lakituthequick]

Merry Christmas! I did a new maze this month, and there is a corresponding artwork for it of course. This month it is Frosty, a Snow Spirit from an M&S game.

Also check out the maze I made him into here (The_%27Shroom:Issue_129/Fun_Stuff#It.27s_aMAZEing)!

Fun fact: I sent images to LB that are four times larger in both dimensions than usual, so both the maze and the solution are 4096px in size! Enjoy your super HD maze I guess!



I also helped LB out with a new scavenger hunt for The 'Shroom! Be sure to check that one out too! (The 'Shroom:Issue 129/The 'Shroom Holiday Scavenger)

I also have another thing in the works that was originally planned to be a special in The 'Shroom too... stay tuned for that!

 

[Lakituthequick]

I also have another thing in the works that was originally planned to be a special in The 'Shroom too... stay tuned for that!

Remember this? Neither do I!

This thing has been lying on a shelf since shortly after I posted that, but trying to finish it in the near future is not really that fitting anymore as it was a Christmas themed thing.
I don't really want to put it on that shelf until next Christmas without having shown what I did finish though, so I've rendered it out and will just show that!
And maybe finish it before next Christmas anyway.

Spoiler: Image (do open at full size)

I think it's pretty clear that this isn't finished as it is missing the entire back wall decorations (picture, fireplace, that sorta stuff), and this fancily dressed Toad that is standing in for a sleeping Poochy that I still have to create. But I am pretty happy with how the tree and presents turned out.



That said, see you next Sunday when The 'Shroom has been released and I have another maze art to post. I did a request for once!

 

[Lakituthequick]

Aaaand it's Sunday! For most of the world anyway! So there is a new maze for which there is art! Yay!

This one is a wall decoration in Mario Kart 8 and Deluxe, in Dragon Driftway and Dragon Palace, based upon Lakitu's cloud. This has been a request from Koops, which he sent to Meta Knight back when he still did the section.

Also check out the maze I made this into here (The_%27Shroom:Issue_130/Fun_Stuff#It.27s_aMAZEing)!



Completely unrelated from art but cool fun fact: I'm in the 'Shroom Staff now. Yay!

 

[Lakituthequick]

New maze which means new art! This time it's cats and cubes combined in the (square) form of a Blitty!

Also check out the maze I made this blo(c)ke into here (The_%27Shroom:Issue_131/Fun_Stuff#It.27s_aMAZEing)!

 

[Lakituthequick]

memes

 

[Lakituthequick]

Welcome to March! New month is new maze! This month: a berry, or Yoshi Fruit, or whatever they will be called after the discussion on that talk page is resolved.

Also check out the maze I made this into right here (The_%27Shroom:Issue_132/Fun_Stuff#It.27s_aMAZEing)!



In addition to that, Anniversary Announcements (The_%27Shroom:Issue_132/Pipe_Plaza#Anniversary_Announcements) is back! Give it a read while you're at it!

Contrary to what you'd expect from a section in Pipe Plaza, it contains sprites! For the new Committee Interviews sub-section, me and the interviewees will have sprites as mugshots.

Lakituthequick

Turboo

Meta Knight

Me and MK are edits of existing sprites, Turboo's sprite is entirely from scratch.
Anton's sprite was made/edited by Blocky or GBAToad for Awards Mafia last year, so I have no business showing it here!

 

[Ray Trace]

Some criticism, but for Turboo's sprite, M&L sprites rarely use black outlines to define form if the shape is contained within the sprite. They use darker shades of colors instead. The pink outline of her hat should be recolored red instead of black.

 

[Lakituthequick]

Some criticism, but for Turboo's sprite, M&L sprites rarely use black outlines to define form if the shape is contained within the sprite. They use darker shades of colors instead. The pink outline of her hat should be recolored red instead of black.

You are entirely correct! I may fix that if I think of it this or next week.

 

[Lakituthequick]

Whoops, it's already Wednesday! Last weekend there was a new maze, based upon a Battle Card!

Also check out the maze I made this into right here (The_%27Shroom:Issue_133/Fun_Stuff#It.27s_aMAZEing)!



Also in this edition of The 'Shroom is another set of Committee Interviews, with a few sprites!
2257 is an unaltered crop of an existing sprite, and Edo's is slightly colour corrected, but otherwise unaltered. Blocky's sprite on the other hand is about 70% original!

His face is an altered version of the round Boo's face, as edited by Ridge Troopa over at the Spriters Resource.

 

[Dr. Gold Dry Bowser]

Nice stuff here.

 

[Lakituthequick]

Wow it's already over a week since the last 'Shroom came out. I blame.. stuff.

So, new maze, new art, with this month: a Parabeetle!

And check out the maze I made this into right here (The_%27Shroom:Issue_134/Fun_Stuff#It.27s_aMAZEing) if you for some reason haven't already!

Bonus content
My process of making the mazes is always about the following:

1. Draw the subject in Inkscape using a set of predefined line properties (which ensures a consistent art style)
2. Export that as a bitmap and scribble the maze lines on top of that with a brush tool on a separate layer (often with a grid of sorts)
3. Import said layer in Inkscape and trace the lines with nice and smooth vector lines, again with predefined line properties

For the Parabeetle, this separate layer looks like this:

This time, however, I decided I wanted to try something different: print it out and use an actual pencil to draft the maze and a pen to finalise it. This is the result of that:

As you can tell, I didn't finish it. That is because using a digital layer is a lot more efficient as it turns out. But it was a fun thing to experiment with, so I'm not complaining.



With a new 'Shroom also come some new Community Interviews sprites!

Smasher

Lord Bowser

Smasher's sprite is a modification of an existing sprite from Partners in Time. LB's sprite was made by shrinking a sprite from Superstar Saga and then tweaking the pixels until it looked right, really.
Gamefreak75's sprite is his normal sprite, but with his hat twisted to make the sprite a little less high. No more modifications than that, thus not too noteworthy to list here.

 

[Lakituthequick]

Happy month of Luigi! To celebrate, this month's It's aMAZEing features Luigi's cap!

Check out the maze this became right here (The_%27Shroom:Issue_135/Fun_Stuff#It.27s_aMAZEing)!



This month's Anniversary Announcements also feature some new interviewee sprites!

MrConcreteDonkey

Stargazing

Both of these have been created from scratch, with a bit of reference to Peach for Stargazing.
There is also GBAToad's sprite, but that's just the sprite of Ms. GBAToad from Awards Mafia last year, with a normal Toad's face instead.



I also did the team backgrounds in The 'Shroom this month. Check them out in the paper!

 

[Lakituthequick]

And we're back! This month, It's aMAZEing features another sports ball, the volleyball! Here is the base figure!

Simple enough!

Check out the maze I made this into right here (The_%27Shroom:Issue_136/Fun_Stuff#It.27s_aMAZEing)!



Also this month is a new Anniversary Announcements with two interviews, one of which has a semi-new sprite!

NEXandGBX

This is mostly a recolour of an existing Lilligant sprite, but with some additional changes to the flower (it's a bit smaller than the original).
BLOF's sprite was made by herself, with my only change in the length of the spike on the helmet.

 

[YoshiFan2012]

Nice!

 

[Lakituthequick]

Fashionably two weeks late with this but here we go anyway. It's aMAZEing of August is the Special Cup's crown!
This is in celebration of the awards that happened this month, but also to celebrate this section winning the Best 'Shroom Section Artwork award! Thanks to everyone who voted!

Check out the maze I made this gem into right here (The_%27Shroom:Issue_137/Fun_Stuff#It.27s_aMAZEing)!



Although this month's Anniversary Announcements did not have Committee Interviews, it was planned that Shoey featured. I did make him a sprite however, and it'd be a shame if that went into the closet.

Shoey

And of course, thanks to everyone who voted for Anniversary Announcements in Best 'Shroom Section Design and got me in first here too!



Coming up next eventually:
[*]Awards presentation BTS
[*]Anniversary Scavenger design stuffs

 

[Lakituthequick]

I said I was going to post all the user art of Anniversary Scavenger in this thread and I haven't done so yet. So I'm doing that right now.
If you want drawings of the other cards, open an image in a new tab and try tampering with the URL. You'll probably get there.

Spoiler

Alex95

BabyLuigiOnFire

BBQ Turtle

Epic Nitwit

Fantanoice

Fawfulthegreat64

Freakworld

Gamefreak75

GBAToad

Hooded Pitohui

Koops

Lakituthequick

LeftyGreenMario

Lord Bowser

Luigi 64DD

Mariofan168

Meta Knight

MrConcreteDonkey

MST3K

Nabber

Roserade

Shadowshy

Shokora

Shy Guy on Wheels

Smasher

Stargazing

Superchao

Super-Yoshi

TheFlameChomp

The Pyro Guy

Toadbert101

Toadgamer

Tucayo

Turboo

Yoshi the Space Station Manager

It was an interesting challenge to make some of these drawings. Y'see, I can't really draw that well.
Thus, nearly all images have been created by importing a reference image into Inkscape, and I then traced it. This allowed for me to choose consistent line thicknesses and easily tweak individual components to complete the drawings.

However, not every subject has readily available art that I can simply trace. Some things don't have 3D artwork, others are not in a pose I'd like, some users are original characters with a capital O or wear clothes the character they are derived of don't.
For this reason I have also thrown together some models in 3ds Max, posed them, and then traced a screenshot of that. I also have in instances Frankensteined several artwork pieces together and filled in the gaps.

These also took a lot of time, which ate some of my plans for presentations I had and overal stuff I wanted to do, so I'm not doing this exact same thing anytime soon. I have plenty of things I want to do for the awards and I'd like to actually do them next time, including the thing I imply in this thread.
This is also the reason I'm not planning on running this game next year. But don't worry, I have plenty of ideas noted down for the next time. 2020 probably.

There is not really a deep story behind the visual theme of this Anniversary Scavenger. Last year it was stickers, with an album roughly based on the badge collection in Mario Party DS.
The obvious follow up was cards, with a theme strongly based upon Paper Mario: Colour Splash in all parts. Camwood called it, although I didn't do the paint thing yet.
I also did some funky things with the album such that you can click on the cards and the back button would actually correctly navigate in between the things, including the back button on smartphones. That was pretty fun to experiment with. Didn't work in Internet Explorer but it neatly falls back in that one.

So yeah, I hope you all like the free art of your OC's and the others as well! Thanks again for signing up and for playing!