Oof. JF is down, but not out. I'm going to focus on school only for two weeks. If you're a savvy web surfer, you should see my mangled face below. If not, click here. It's only 376 kB, so don't worry.
A thousand more apologies for more missing Making Of JF pages. I'm in one of those creative slumps. It's all my university's fault. They expect far too much from me. Of course, it's my fault that I'm taking 22 credits. If I pass all of my classes, it'll be the first time in the history of the universe. On to the picture and the lesson. This is Los Angeles 2014 minus a lot of details. It has the main things: buildings, a geodesic dome, sky, and stoplights. The buildings are shameful as usual. The streetlights are beautiful yet almost completely hidden. The geodesic dome is pixellated big time, but what more can a poor boy do? I like the semi-transparency because it gives a decent presence of the dome. The new part of the equation is the buildings and sky in the background. I just threw a bunch of rectangles randomly onto a texture and there it is. The sky has a gradient, but you can't see it for two reasons: it's a soft gradient and two gradients added look like one gradient (light is the other gradient). The good thing about this technique that I'm using now is that how many times will I actually be able to make a full scenery picture in JF? Never, so it is a moot point of whether the scenery looks terrible. I'll leave that for JF Final Draft.
After skipping two days (of a weekend, no less) and skipping on my promise to give you JF Scene 5, Page 5, I crawl back with this. I'm not going to delude myself and say that everyone was e-mailing me to ask if JF is finally gone. No, everyone who doesn't come here was really quiet about it. I don't care. This isn't for you anyway. I call it "Teach yourself philosophy in 210 days", or maybe therapy minus the thousand dollar bills, or maybe one of those stress management classes without the touchy-feely losers that talk about letting the anger out.
Have you ever faced a day of uselessness? You have two choices: work hard to make it worth something or let the day go by. I decided that the latter was the worse. But now looking at the fruit of my work, I am not too sure. This is a very simple diagram of what the end of Scene 5 and the beginning of Scene 6 will look like from a top-view. It doesn't tell you what you should get tomorrow, but oh well. You only have to wait a day, hopefully. This is a pretty important technique that I like to use. I wish I could do this in AS3D Manga Director 1.0, but it's half way implemented into version 2.0. Of course, 2.0 has it's own HUGE problems. So I'm going to keep doing things the hard way. And I'll keep slacking. Hopefully I can skip fewer days though. This week was derailed by a very frighting prospect: flunking an essential physics class due to a week of indescresion. So JF suffered the loss of three days. But you don't care! You want to know what this picture means. Orange is a hot color, it's used for evil. Blue is a cold color, it's used for the hero. Green (which contrasts well to orange and blue) arrows are bullets. Big squares are buildings, small squares are vehicles, lines are paths. t0-t3 relate positions to times. So t0 happens first, then t1 the SUV stays where it's at while Jav runs across the street. You can make the necessary assumptions on the rest. The lesson (which I've forgotten for most of the week) tonight is that clear diagrams are worth a thousand words. Describing a simple world is very tough while drawing it is easy. So when you're working on your design of something very complex, don't describe it, draw it. If you have to describe it, describing a picture is easier.
