Tonight I tried really hard to get something worthy of my viewers. I didn't get what I wanted, but perhaps you'll like this.. This is a continuation of the previous Making Of. I did a bunch of fixing with the shirt and I added legs. My idea was to completely accentuate the features. It worked pretty well. I'm particularly happy about the chest. I have been consistently disappointed with my previous chests. This one looks textured, possibly because I'm wasting a bunch of triangles. With some work, this might become a decent nude model. Not that there's going to be any nude models in JF, but partial nudes (sleeveless shirts, shorts, and torn clothing). The actual wireframe of this model looks like heck. I'm slightly embarrassed, but I made it while I was in limited capacity. If the skeleton doesn't make it look like Freddy Krugar, I'm going to be amazed. What can you learn about this? Well, one method that worked particularly well was was to work on one quarter of the body at a time. First, I did the left arm and left side of the torso. Then I duped and flipped to the other side. Then I connected the vertices and there was the top half. Then I did the left leg, duped, flipped and there was the model. Of course, then came the long task of making it look right. Often a perfect model will just not look right no matter what you do with it. Logically, if you put the vertices and triangles in the exact same positions as the Quake grunt, you'll have a Quake grunt, but don't think that your 1/100,000,000 is coming up in the next few days. Until then, copy. But if you do not want to copy, play Quake and your brain will copy and you'll say that you didn't copy and you won't break copyright law, but you will have.
Today you get a half lesson. I'm not quite sure if it's even going to be that. Read the next paragraph for the reason. This set of arms may look like every other one before it, but there's a difference. The palms face downwards when arms are stretched out. Usually I have the palms facing forward in a Jesus pose, if you will. Try putting your arms out and see where your palms go: down or forward. The truth is both. However, try it to your sides. Your palms go to your sides. Why? I guess that it's because it's a stable equilibrium, while I'm not quite sure of that. Now, try turning your hands from one position to the other. What's rotating? You wrist is. Tell me if this isn't exactly true because I'm not sure myself, but it seems correct to me. So the proper way to do it is to rotate the wrist/forearm when you need to turn the hand. In low-polygon, biceps have a thing with them that they squish to no width if you mess the shoulders up. The solution is to make the shoulder, the elbow, and their joint correctly. I guess that's why it's a half lesson. I can only tell you what the problem is and what a proposed solution is. I can't make a model correctly in my condition. I spent an hour trying to get the faces turned correct and it still looks like crud. Ugh. Even the hands look awful. I put a lot of work and triangles into those f'n hands! Look right! Sei richtig! So na!
I saw this woman on the street today and now she's immortalized on the web. As if she weren't already with her striking image. She's a vision of the 21st century. Blue shell (aka rainjacket), very professional looking pants and the curves that inspired this picture. In fact, the curves are all straight lines, no bezier used here. I call it a low polygon masterpiece. The two main things I saw was the presence of very separate objects (shell, pants, and person beneath) and the curve of her hips. I hate to sound perverted. Think of it as a sacrifice of social acceptability for the advancements of the arts. Her hips were wide (as they teach in manga books), but between the hips and knees, there was an funny angle. Her leg does not have a straight vertical line from side of pelvis to side of knee. It's a big angle. Anyone who missed this angle in their 3d model would end up with legs that did not look human. Check out this picture versus some of my others. I know for sure that my 3d models have straight lines from the hips to the knees. More on that in the next paragraph. So the lesson is: get those lines correct with human lines. If you want your comic to look good, feel yourself up in the least perverted way and figure out your own curves. For other people, you'll have to find pictures and people walking down the street.
Today's lesson is another look into the human body. I will detail my quest in the next paragraph, but here I will discuss my day's findings. The front and side of the face are often used as a foundation for a figure. In fact, it's been my foundation for almost every work I've done. However, it has not served me very well. So to deeper understand the situation, I took a top-view approach. The top view is often unhelpful, but using a contour model, it became much easier. Specifically, seeing the "slices" of the head apart from each other simplified the problem into a problem of structure related to size and angle. This is much easier than the side or front view where many facial features must be accounted for when generating a 3d model. For example, we can see in the the forehead slice versus the three nose slices the main facial feature takes precedence. The top of the nose can account for the eyes although it doesn't since I didn't want to add that feature. Often the angle between slices becomes hard to change, but the complexity is mainly with the subject rather than the system.
