My eyes are swollen shut as I write this, so bear with any mistakes I make. I've slept twenty hours in the past four days and I'm genuinely tired. This picture was made somehow with minimal use of my eyes. Have you ever tried something different like that? My lesson for today is to try something new. In English Comp 101 at SFCC, my professor, Barbara Williamson had us write a journal every day. It became the template for Making Of JF rants if you didn't guess. One of those journals I will reproduce here now. I didn't date it, but I dated the second journal as 09/18/97. Add 43 days and you get November 17, 1997 or so. If you want to read more, I digitized a few of the topical ones in the index of my old personal website. Beware that all the info is very out of date. If you want recent personal info, JF is the only place to go.
This is a new face for you to look at. I know how bad the Dojo Ambush faces and Jav's face are and how very repetitive they are... Can you blame me? I'm working a cast of hundreds. How am I supposed to give you a quality page per month if have to make a whole new face and body for each character. Right now, I'm doing the very slightest bit of mixing and it's costing me days. I remember back when JF was MWF comic. Ya, funny idea for about a week. Then I skipped a day and made up for it that weekend. Then I skipped a day and didn't make it up. Then I skipped a week and whined. Well, duh. Then I skipped a month and started this daily lesson thing. I think JF comic pages are done in close to every two weeks since then. And here we are. Scene 5, Page 5 is coming soon. It's going to be fun. Then Page 6 will be another big step. Hopefully I can reduce the necessary work before then. Then Scene 6 will be craziness. I'll figure it out.
Ah, digitization of Dojo Ambush guy #14. How nice. (Once again, I ask if rhetorical questions like the previous sentence require a question mark. What about questions like the two questions in the perenthesis?) *cough, cough* I guess you want a lesson front and center, right? Well here it is: Skins are easy. Meshes are inherintly hard. So if you're smart, you'll do more skins than meshes. This is a new skin and a new type of skin. Also, I messed with the mesh a bit. to accentuate this guy's pecks. Not for hentai purposes. He's simply a very upper-body strength type of guy. If he has wimpy pecks like Jav or the grenade launcher guy, people will wonder why he's flexing his non-muscles. Yup, this guy will flex his muscles in Page 5 or so. At least, that's what I'm thinking. What did I do to make this skin better than others? Well, I took the vector bitmap from the other day and added close to nothing to it. I split it up and made the face large. I arranged it all so that it fit into a 512x512 square. Then I tried it out. Of course, the first few times, it didn't work. There are some difficulties turning something 2d into something 3d. That problem is mainly due to 3d things usually having six sides. So that means that unless you have a symmetry, you have to make six copies of everything. Of course, that's what I've done for a lot of stuff. The sides are not as important, so I can just ditch them for the most part. The top and bottom are rarely seen, so I can do without them. That leaves front and back. Not too hard, huh? Well, this guy had those pecks I talked about earlier. Not only did I want the mesh to show big pecks, but also the shirt. The shirt needed to fold at the pecks. So I did that. It didn't work perfectly at first, but a bit of work made it happen. I also put a tattoo on the guy to show off how huge his biceps were. I wanted it to be on his shoulder, so I had to put it on the top view. It was a bit of a mess, but it worked out fine. I just put the tatoo on an open spot of the skin and then mapped from the top view of the bicep to the tattoo. So my lesson to you is to make four skins per model. I name them DA14asl, bsl, csl, dsl. You might notice that the names coincidentally match a few silly acronyms such as Alternative Scientific Losers, Beat Silly Losers, Catch Stupidity + Laziness, and Digital Subscriber Line. If I ever make five skins, I have the acronym, English as a Second Language. Don't ask what acronym I get for the sixth skin. Really the acronym is due to a, b, c, d skin low. You see, I make everything in Corel Draw, so I make a skin and call it DA14as.bmp and then I use Corel Photo-Paint to resample to a low resolution.
Ah, more advancement of the Jav model. What amazing talent I have for slacking on the important stuff. Scene 5 needs finishing, but I'm slacking on the last model. Just like I'm at the Time Master level in Freedom Force and I start up a new game from the start. I try to justify that making myself happier will make success that much better, but I count chickens before they hatch. But on the purpose of the model, we see here that this is a medium-poly model of Jav's hair. It is low-poly in that it it doesn't spare many triangles. It is medium-poly because I could easily duplicate the triangle-expensive hair outline with a simple 64x64 texture. But why would I make such a model? Well, I'm thinking of making a system that creates textures. I want it to make something like this. I have a low-poly model and a medium-poly model with the same outer vertices. So the medium poly just has some added stuff. Then I put into LithUnWrap and it will unwrap the mesh onto a texture. Then I save that as a bitmap. Then I put the low-poly mesh into LithUnWrap and unwrap the mesh. It ought to go exactly where the medium did. Then I use the medium poly texture on the low poly mesh. So then I get a low poly mesh with a small texture. But then all I have is a flat texture. I might want a non-flat texture. So I use last night's cool high-poly technique to create a high poly model. Then I unwrap the lit, high-poly mesh onto to texture. Easy, huh? Well, trying it, it turned out poorly already. Hair is tough to do, but I'm going to have to work on it. Perhaps the arm muscles and chest will be better to do. But that'll require a medium-poly model that I don't have much expertise in. But that is where textures will increase the model beauty and and cost nothing. Possibly... That's what I like about uncharted territory. I don't know but I have a few of the tools and abilities required and I have the time to search for the rest. So my lesson to you today is: assault the uncharted territories with unequaled rigor and the fruits will be as much as you can carry and then some.
