So, we have another Making Of JF. The computer lab that I'm working in is very close to empty. How nice. I can work on a very contraversial and erotic piece and not get any flak. ^_^ Okay, maybe it's not all that erotic, but it certainly is a woman type anime character. And anime is always rated 'NR-Mature', so it must be pr0n, right? Right. I drew this a long, long time ago. I think it was either one or two years ago. You see how the hair is not very good. This was drawn before I understood how to draw the back side of hair. Hehehe. A bit of history, I drew it on top of a mountain, Mount Si near Seattle, Washington, USA. It's a one day hike (8 hours there and back, I think) and it's very popular. The trails are maintained by a very committed group of hikers. A few guys in my dorm house decided to hike it. I brought along my pad and pencil and drew this. When we got to the very top, it was snowing, a bit windy, and it was a great view. Although it doesn't show it, there was a 360 panorama and it was pretty sweet. No city in the distance, no freeways that I remember. We cooked something or another and ate a feast. I ate a bunch of ramen, I remember that my friends ate a whole pound of cheese or something like that. Hilarious. "Good times" is the phrase my roommate used for nearly everything good or bad and it really characterized our trip and really our whole year of fun together. We played ultimate frisbee, Counter-Strike, Black and White, and Diablo 2. That was part of the reason that that year was the most fun year of my life. But also because I started AltSci3D Manga Director.
Making of JF # 195
Making Of JF 196 2k2 08013
This might or might not find its way into Scene 6. It is, however, the product of an hour or so of my investigation into a 3d modeller that only does architecture and is very frugal and easy to use. I simply went into MilkShape3D and built this house using mainly the mathematical methods. I also tried to keep track of exactly what I was doing and what would be hard for a program to do. One thing that is very important in architecture is ability to place doors and windows. MilkShape3D has a tough time, but since it is very flexible, it allows me to make a very low-polygon house. Two windows and one door, Indoors and outdoors, 100 faces with a single 256x256x8 texture. That is a frugal house. Of course, if you want to render 100 of these houses, you'll slow down your cpu majorly. And that is a frugal house. A five room house would take about 200 faces. That would bring a GeForce2 down to 20 fps or less. So what does a person do? Number one: portal culling. You simply split the house into two meshes: indoors and outdoors. The indoors can be very, very complex because they won't be displayed when you are outdoors. The outdoors has to be 10-20 faces. The outdoors will be displayed along with every other house when you are outside. When you walk through the door of a house, though, the indoors for that one house is rendered. It can be up to 5000 faces on a GeForce2. This is a version of what is known as portal culling. It is usually done with indoors-only games like Quake or Anarchy-Online missions and such. When you walk through a door or open a door, the program notices it and will display the stuff inside. As I said, each indoors can have 5,000 faces and plenty of textures if the target platform is a GeForce2. Windows like the one shown are a problem, though. How can you have windows if you aren't rendering the indoors? Well, check out the other windows. They are grey -- that is how. Perhaps a program could be made to render the indoors of buildings which you can see the window, but that's a bit much for me. You see, a city could have 2000 buildings each with 2000 faces indoors and 20 faces outdoors. Then at any time, you only render 20 outdoors and 1 indoors. You may think that I'm just blabbing about this "idea" I have for a new demo screenshot, right? Well, today without the aid of a c++ compiler, I wrote most of that lossless terrain compresser I was talking about. It's super fast (I assume since it's only 2 million if statements total for a 20 k triangle terrain) and it is very simple. I also wrote the code for a Accelerated Particle-2D Terrain Collision prediction algorithm. That will not only work for automobiles, but also NPCs, characters, and cameras. On the topic of cameras, I wrote the idea for a perfect camera which I have most of the code for. You see, cameras are hard to do. The FPS WASD system does not work well enough. I have an idea for a camera that will reduce calcuations by 1000%. It will use accelerated particles, but that's all I'll say for now. What I will say is today's lesson: produce. Even if your computer crashes while you're typing an inspirational paragraph, you must produce to be creative. Notice that the root word for creative is create. A misunderstood slacker is just a loser, but an artist who is misunderstood for his/her deranged work is creative loser. Even if what you create is "deranged", "evil", "stupid", or "ugly", go for it. Everyone who is creative must start somewhere. Those who are not creative do not have to start anywhere, but that's because they go nowhere. Must I brag about building my autobiographical website at age 14? What about AltSci.com at age 16? What about getting my AA degree 10 days after I graduated high school? It is the fruit of a creative mind that is the best stuff on Earth. I would not trade for money, fame, or power. Of course, I would trade javantea.com for my next month's rent, but that's a different story*.
