! This thread serves as a test environment for these tutorials. Once an episode has been refined enough with feedback from the Athion community a more polished tutorial in video format wil be created. ! I'll be doing around 3-4 of these text based episodes first, before I start on the videos. Current planned subjects: -Lines and shapes -Color: hue, value and saturation -Space: big and small -Surfaces -Symmetry and asymetry -Cohesion -Contrast -Emphasis -Flow and Direction -Voxelsniper/Terraforming -Interior -Depth and Detail Alright so first off a quick introduction. I'm Triga and I've been playing minecraft for a good 3-4 years now and I've gathered quite a bit of knowledge when it comes to building in the process. And as such I thought I'd share this via this tutorial series. So here it goes. Lines and shapes: Let's talk geometry. There are two main types of lines, straight and curved. Straight and Curved You'll mainly use straight lines for buildings, and curved lines for organics, that's not always the case though. Lines always have direction, but more on direction later. Lines come together to form shapes like, squares, triangles, circles, etc. If you take that a dimension higher you get cubes, cylinders, prisms, pyramides, the list goes on. The important thing to remember is that your building can't consist of just one of these shapes with a flat roof. *example simplified* Castle This would be a bad example, see how the "castle" is simply a box, but if we add more shapes to the build we get... Castle Something that looks a lot more like a castle. See how the castle with towers looks a lot more visually interesting than the one without, and all we did is add more boxes. There are two types of straight lines in Minecraft, normal and angled lines. Normal and Angled When it comes to building houses angled lines are both more visually interesting, and harder to pull off. But when you feel comfortable making buildings out of normal lines, try angled ones, it's very fun and looks great if you know how to do it. There are also two types of curved lines, exact and random lines. Exact lines can be calculated like a semi circle for example. Random lines do not follow a specific pattern, random lines are most used in organic builds. Exact and Random Lastly I'll talk a bit about direction in lines and shapes. In 3d space there are 3 main directions, X, Y and Z. When using shapes, if the shape is longer in one, or two of these 3 axis the shape has direction. For example here's a picture of a cube, and the same shape but elongated in different directions. Direction Direction is a very important thing to master if you want your builds to look even better. It's also great to guide a player's eyes to certain areas of your build. I'll talk more about this when I discuss colors and values. So that was the first "episode" that I have planned nothing too hard to understand to get absolute beginners a good start. Let me know what you think of this episode, and what you'd like to see me cover in future episodes.
Certainly something that I want to do, but I'm not that good with VS myself :p might ask some help from other players once I get to the VS/terraforming episodes.
I'll definitely be covering those things aswell. And as I said in my first post, everything will eventually be in video format aswell, these text based posts are just to get some feedback.
Alright people, so here's the second "episode" to this series :D Color: Let's talk color. Color is comprised of three basic elements: -Hue: the ratio of Red, Yellow and Blue in a block -Saturation: the ratio of RYB and white in a block -Value: the ratio of RYB and black in a block HSV Hue is represented in a circle (0°-360°) this is also known as the color wheel. first there are the three main colors: Red, Yellow and Blue. Computer monitors and our eyes actually use Red, Green and blue, this is known as additive color. But for the sake of simplicity I'll be using RYB, subtractive color. Taking the three primary colors and mixing them with each others gives us the secondary colors, Green, Orange and Purple. Mixing those with eachother and the primary colors gives us the tertiary colors. Color Wheel Here's a represention of the colorwheel in minecraft. Color Wheel Atleast in the default texture pack minecraft's textures never follow the color wheel exactly, there are always differences in it's lightness or darkness, here's where Saturation and Value comes in. Saturation can be seen as the surface of your circle. Zero percent white gives you a pure color. 100 percent gives you white obviously. This is the saturation of your color. Saturation If Saturation is the surface of your circle, Value is the height of the cylinder made with that circle. Again, Zero percent black is a pure color, and 100 percent is solid black. Value Next I'll talk about different ways to combine colors: -Complementary -Split Complementary -Triadic Complementary colors are colors that are opposite of eachother on the colorwheel. Complementary Complementary colors usually look very nicely when paired together. Next is Split Complentary, this is when you take a color, and the two colors next to it's complement. Split Complementary Lastly are Triadic colors. In this case you take 3 of the 12 colors on the color wheel that make an equilateral triangle. Don't take the three primary colors though as those look kinda simple when used together. Triadic If you want to find some good examples of colors that go well together, try this website. https://color.adobe.com/explore/newest/?time=all There are two seperate types of colors, warm and cold colors. Red, orange and yellow are considered warm colors, while blue purple and green are cold colors. Black is usually paired with warm colors, and white with cold colours, there are exceptions however, black and white go with any color. And those are kind of the basics of color and harmony. As always feedback is always appreciated if you think I missed something or if I should go into more detail than this :D
to add to this here is a useful tool for finding colour matches that you can try and match up to minecraft based blocks https://color.adobe.com/explore/newest/?time=all
Oh this looks really helpful, I'll add it to the Color post (and of course I'll link it in the video aswell eventually) Thanks Sycoinc :D
It's nice to see someone actively trying to help the community! Hmu if you need a hand with anything.
I could help you with learning vs, if you want. Though I won't be on the server for a week after today but I could teach you sometime later
Alright update time :D Welcome to the third episode of "MC: Being Creative in Creative mode" Let's talk about space. One of the first things to note, is that as an object gets further away from the viewer, it diminishes in size, lost contrast, becomes less saturated and its color shifts to that of the background colour, which in most cases is blue. This effect is also visible in Minecraft in the form of a blue/cyan fog. Space can also be used to convey a certain mood. Big, open, clean spaces feel very cold, whilst small, closed and cluthered spaces have a very warm feeling. Spoiler Spoiler As seen in the last picture, height is also a very powerful tool to use. Very tall, slender structures tend to look big and cold. But low and wide structures convey a sense of warmth and stability. Height difference is also a very visually interesting element you can incorperate into builds. Spreading out your build over the vertical axis means that the viewer can never see everything in one glance, meaning that you'll keep someone interesed longer before they understand how the build works. Next episode we'll dive into surfaces and the visual texture we associate with them. And that will wrap up the basic elements of building. Afterwards I'll be talking about how we can use these elements to create principles. Also when I'm done with elements I'll start recording them. p.s.: Pictures are placeholder, and I'll have better ones in the videos themselves.
I'm not the best on the server with VS, but am certainly above the average player.... If you dont get somebody, i could teach all of the basics to a beginner, but wouldn't have much to say for more advanced users