Can you feel it? ... We always had a need for speed. Grow stronger, to grow faster, to longer. We always had a need for speed. Can you feel it? -- azzido da bass, "speed can you feel it"
While this picture may make it seem that I'm being lazy, I was actually pretty active today. Actually, it was one of my best nights in Seattle, which counts as one my best nights in my life. So I'd say that's pretty cool. What made it one of the best nights of my life?
Now this is a real lesson. Not only that of perseverence, but also in actual artistic value. This picture has all the parts needed to reproduce this style. What is this style? It is comic book style motion lines, particularly that of a very fast moving arm or leg. Figure 1a. shows the mesh of the object. Figure 1b. shows the intended effect. Figure 1c. shows you the texture of the mesh. Figure 1d. shows the alpha bitmap. All are to shown at actual size. How does it work and how did I create it? It works by having a bunch of straight lines on a texture and bending the mesh to curve. Then the texture looks smooth and curved. Adding more vertices would increase the curviness. So how did I do it? I started by making a box. Then I extruded it a few times to the left. I made sure that they were all aligned. Then I delete all the sides and the backs. Then I put the two textures in. Then I took the mesh and rotated each vertical row a certain amount. I rotated the entire thing 10 degrees and then I selected all but the far right and rotated that. I repeated this for all. Then it was pretty curvy. It wasn't perfect, though. Rotating around the center of gravity will cause errors. To get a perfect curve, rotate around a user-defined point. That works really well. There you have it, easy motion lines. So how do you implement them? You could spend weeks coding them into your Engine if you're an insane programmer or you can just do them in the model. Hiding them might be a problem, but you'll figure it out I bet. The semi-sane solution for motion lines in a professional video game would be to make it a subobject of the character, only visible during a certain animation. That is what most professional third-person games do with weapons. So all you have to do is call your motion line a weapon, which is almost is... Motion lines are only useful for extremely fast moves, such as helicopter kicks, uppercuts, and roundhouse kicks.
Greetings fellow human being. I'd like to give you a pair of brief ideas. The first is motion blur. Above is my attempt to do a bit of motion blur special effects. I simply took two screenshots and superimposed the later image above the earlier image with transparency set to around 60. This is okay, but not up to my standards. For it to work for Scene 1, it will need to be absolutely spectacular. Then, I'll anti-alias it down to half a page and it'll look fair. It really isn't cool that I have to slave over something for days and days to get it perfect and the format of the comic book makes it look like I didn't try at all. But that's okay. Perhaps it'll just happen anyway -- it often does. So how does one do a correct motion blur. Well, to find that out, I set up my camera at 10 frames per second and danced a jig. I looked at it and it wasn't just two picture superimposed. It had a picture for each pixel in between. So say that the left side of my face is at pixel 32. If in the next frame, the left side of my face is over at pixel 45, I need to take 13 pictures and blend them all. Usually, it's only three or four pixels. But in this picture, it's twenty or forty. Then I'd get actual motion blur, I think. This is a property of physics. The retina or a camera pixel takes a time average of energy. That is how televisions and monitors can work with scanlines. However, remember that I'm doing a comic. Looking at my favorite comic (which is a good reference for fighting scenes), Gunnm aka Battle Angel Alita, I find the answer. Comics use motion lines. It's actually a rule or something if comic books have rules. Ever since the early days of superhero comics, they have been using lines to show movement. You actually only need to render what you want once. You have to draw a group of lines from where it was one unit of time ago until now, usually an arc. Sometimes if it's unclear where your character is, you can render twice or three times to show your reader. So that will be a challenge to myself: make motion lines that look good.
