Hello, what you are witnessing is perhaps the greatest unique thing to come out of my computer. You might say that it lacks artistic style and is ugly, but I certainly can't point you at anything else that I have created that is the product of so many productive hours. This is the cast of Scene 5 minus Javantea. Together they are approxmiately 5,000 triangles. They are all based on the same model, but each is slightly different. This is the product of my test last night to see if a GeForce2 video card could render an entire city in real time (30-60 fps). Before you shout me down, let me explain. I have this idea. I start with this TIFF heightmap that I got from USGS. I make a 3d terrain out of it. Then I use a roadmap TIFF that I also got from USGS to add buildings. The height of the buildings are gotten from a map that I bought of Seattle Business District. Then I have 100 models that I put in different parts of the city. I put a skybox and there is my city. What's wrong with that idea? Well, first of all, my GeForce2 will not render 100 models each with 500 triangles in real time. So I limit my rendered characters to 20. That's a big limit, but you'll see why I decided that. Then, I use Microsoft's MeshView to make my high-poly terrain (19602 triangles) into a statically reduced Progressive Mesh of 2000 triangles. That's a big reduction, but my Seattle map is fine with it. The truth is that cities are not curvy. Then I made a reduction to only render the 8 blocks of buildings that are closest to the camera's view (4 buildings per block). Since this is a a first-person cam and not a flight sim it won't need to see many blocks. Even the best view down a street won't need 4 blocks. A person can hardly see a half a mile down the street, especially in downtown Seattle with our curvy streets. That brings it down to 13024 triangles. At that point on the CPU side, we've only done API calls, 228 box-frustrum cull operation, 13024 backface cull operations, and the matrix-based rotation camera operations. That leaves plenty of CPU for animating the characters. Guess how many frames per second you get when you render a scene with 13k triangles and 10 skinned characters on a GeForce2? 41 fps. How do I know? Because that's what happening on the picture above. You don't see that below the apartment is the City of Seattle with a bunch of buildings. It totals 11,000 triangles. Last night it was rendering at 540,000 triangles per second. Amazing, huh? Well, you can see on this picture that it's only rendering at 20 fps. Why? Because it's 4x multisampled. I could show you the speedy version, but I like to break two barriers each night. It saves time. Also, I'd like to note that another limiting factor is resolution, right now. The higher the resolution, the slower it goes. At 1024x768, it goes fast, but at 1600x1200, it slows down to 25 fps. That's not too bad, but I want to keep up to 30-60 for smoothness for video. Yeah, I'm seriously thinking about releasing JF Anime. I really want it to be in medium, too. Then people will think: "new and fresh!"
O, ho ho. You thought I was going to give you some more bar charts, right? Wrong! I'm going to try to get a relevant Making Of JF page every night for a while. This one wasn't entirely done tonight, but the hair was. What is it made of? A sphere. Not a geosphere or bezier patches, nothing special. I deleted part of the sphere and what was left I molded around the head to become the hair. The rest of the body and head are slightly cool. The body is the new number 44 body type. The body, head, and hair weigh in at a very frugal 246 triangles. Some frugal pants and arms would make it a decent low-poly model. I'm not sure about how it'll animate, but we'll see soon, won't we? The skin is very simple. In fact, it's so simple, it's missing eyebrows. I'll throw them in when I add shirt and pants textures. I was thinking of using a 512x512 texture, but then I went with a 256x256 for now just arbitrarily. I don't want to have prejudices for or against this model and skin just because I decide to try a higher resolution texture. I messed with a 512x512 with the Jav model and I didn't like it very much. It's not very important since everything is scaled down anyway, but I always hope for better. If you don't understand the lesson of that, you should definately get thicker goggles.
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Good evening. I just looked at this tonight and I was amazed. Perhaps you are amazed also. Or perhaps you aren't, since you're here, aren't you? This picture says that people are actually reading this in large numbers. Looking at a few tables one click away from this image, it says that Google really likes my website. In fact, I'm so popular with google that they have swarmed my keenspace website with hits. The largest user for three months in a row have been Google bots. Three hundred hits in a month is excessive, but I don't mind. They have sent me 1 viewer in April, 8 viewers in May, and 2 viewers in July. What were they looking for? In July, someone was looking for "stegging". You remember stegging, right? In April, they were looking for "plugin cel-shading". Of course, I do a lot of cel-shading here. But I don't make plugins, sorry. In May, I had a doozy of misinfo out there: "directx8 draw sprite", "anarchy online account", "lith unwrap", "medium-poly resolution", "nuclear robot" (hahahaha), "onidzuka 85", and "pink fur bitmap". Oh man, that's funny as I can think. The draw sprite thing can be found at GameDev.net. Anarchy-Online account cannot be bought or sold here. Lith Unwrap has been converted into Ultimate Unwrap. Medium-poly models at high resolution can be found here from time to time. I don't do any nuclear robots, but I did write a rant about nuclear weaponry vs. giant robots. I have read a few Great Teacher Onidzuka and I wrote about them in the same rant as the nuclear robots, but not 85. The last one is a small mention that I gave to a pink fur bunny that is the marvel of modern pixel shaders. The wolfman, however, is a marvel of modern uselessness. I saw a really good vertex shadered grass the other day. It was very fast and looked fairly good. I think it'll be used in a game soon. Perhaps it already has. It's got a lot of really good uses (racecar driving, rpgs in suburbia or forests (kiddie games), lawnmowing sims). What it did was simply move the texture coordinates to right so that right underneath you was grass moving outward in every direction.
