bc-programming

despite being absolute crap with Audio editing, Music creation, and mediocre in many respects for graphics, I still persist in creating things.   Lately (as I write this) I’ve taken...

despite being absolute crap with Audio editing, Music creation, and mediocre in many respects for graphics, I still persist in creating things.

 

Lately (as I write this) I’ve taken to the creation of images related to the popular “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic”. To be clear, I’ve been creating images,sound, and music in various programs with varying degrees of success for some time, usually out of necessity; the original ‘Poing’ (by which I mean of course MY Poing game and not the earlier game of the same name that I swear I had no idea existed before) needed sound, and music. For the sound, I ended up using a tone generator, which sufficed at the time, as well as downloading a few free sounds, and ripping WAV files on my thinkpad laptop using NESticle. The music was also a few free MIDI’s I found lying around the web. Which it turns out were actually non-standard, but I digress.

 

More recently, BASeBlock, and to some degree BlackSpaceX (a game which I’ve placed on hold for now) have required a number of images, for sprites and animations. a lot of the time I stub it out by just plopping a video game sprite in, for example the Suzie from Megaman (weird eye thing). They also needed splash screens.

 

For baseblock, I originally created a splash screen in Paint Shop Pro 9:

 

Which did the job, doesn’t look too bad, and certainly serves it’s purpose. It also makes a cameo for the original POING splash screen, created if I recall in Paint Shop Pro 5 or 6. (you can see it in the background) After a while I decided, why not have it choose from a selection of splash screens? So after implementing the functionality code-side, I added this splash screen:

I’ll be honest though, I don’t like it as much as the first one, which also happens to appear as the fill of the text, which in retrospect was kind of pointless. Oh well.

As I noted however, I came to like MLP, and so created some references to it. These references can be seen in this video.

 

However, over time, I decided that that wasn’t enough, and so created this splash screen as well:

This is probably my favourite, strangely enough. This one also appears the most rarely, as the idea is kind of that it could be an “Easter egg” much like a few others I’ve tossed in.

Even that wasn’t enough though. Having worked in Paint Shop Pro for so long, and particularly Version 9, which all the above were created in, I abhorred the idea of learning Photoshop. However, I dove in anyways. After much cursing, I actually managed to create a 2880×1800 wallpaper for each of the mane 6 characters of the show; listed in order of their creation to try to show that I seem to get a bit better with each:

This was the first one I made, it’s also my first time evar using photoshop for more than a few minutes. The balloons and streamers were a huge pain in the ass, but as I worked on this I got more adept with the program and started to understand some of the different paradigms it uses as opposed to Paint Shop Pro or Corel Photo Pro.

I had one down, and 6 to go. Next, I created one for Rarity:

This one looks a hell of a lot nicer. I abandoned my original idea of giving each pony a relevant middle name, this decision was based on some ponies only having a single name (Rarity, Fluttershy) which would mess things up. So I decided to hell with a overriding theme, and just messed around and went with what grokked well. The gemstones in the background look particularly awesome, if you ask me. The face in the background was a more recent addition, but I feel it looks good that way.

Next on my list was Fluttershy:

And if you ask me, this is damn near the best one of the six, with the possible exception of the Rainbow Dash one. The butterflies were a nice touch, in particular, although I should probably revisit it and make them more consistent in some fashion.

After fluttershy’s wallpaper, I had no idea how I was going to top that, or even make something of equal coolness. Which was pretty much a prerequisite with regards to rainbow dash. Somehow, I feel I managed it:

.

I mean, come on. That’s bloody awesome. At this point, I feel I took a step backwards and made an inferior wallpaper, but it still came out fairly good. I meant to include some sort of skynyrd reference to Tuesday’s gone but I forgot. I did add a label in the bottom left corner, heh.

This one is markedly less awesome than the rainbow dash one, but still fairly cool. I may have to revisit it at some point and make some refinements.

I’ve since also created a Nightmare moon one as well:

UPDATE: I also created a solid colour version of each, except Rainbow dash’s:

 

Solid background versions:

Before I started these wallpapers, I had made several Signature bars (small, 350×20 pixels) for a number of the show characters. Why? I don’t know. I felt like it. Now the wallpapers offer a much different set of problems to a tiny signature bar; my wallpapers here were 2880 by 900 pixels, whereas the signature bars were a scant 350×20 pixels, meaning that I had very little space to work with.

My first signature bar, which also happens to be my first piece of MLP related media, at least chronologically, was a “generic” MLP signature bar:

After that, I created one for each of the mane 6 characters:

Still not content with my assortment, I created one for each of the CMC:

And then I ended up creating a few more:

And, more recently (that is, today) I created a commentary video of the first episode. Why? No reason.

MLP First Episode commentary

Update:

Moar Pony wallpapers can be found on my dA page . By “more” I mean nearly 80 wallpapers. srsly.

1. Brony here says:

   February 1, 2012 at 8:08 PM

   How you did the Rarity one!?!?!
2. BC_Programming says:

   February 2, 2012 at 8:00 AM

   I used 3ds max. First I placed a plane, and created a custom material that was a mottled blue colour. Then I placed several hedrons with varying sides/edges/etc to act as gemstones, and applied the appropriately set materials for Sapphire, Emerald, Diamond, etc. to them. I rendered that to 2880×1800 (my preferred wallpaper res, double my screen). opened that in photoshop, and I used a filter on it that I forget (I believe it was posterize, if I had to guess). The text is just a standard Photoshop text object with layer styles, and the rarity vector is pretty much the same story. The larger Rarity image that appears to be “in” the background (which as a result of material editing sort of looks like a liquid) was placed above the 3ds-max image layer, and set to only blend when the layer beneath it had a gray value above a given value.