Dojo Ambush guy # 14. Sheesh. You'd think it wouldn't be so hard, right? Well, it's not and this is evidence to it. It's also evidence that I'm a slacker since I should have a fully skinned model with it. But oh well, it's not that hard to make a skin from a character design like this. It's a pretty good picture too, in my humble opinion. It started as a sketch in Optics Lab and then it turned into a Corel Draw vector bitmap. Of course, I didn't have a go-between. I mean that I didn't scan the picture in and trace over it like I should. I didn't even have the yellow notepad that I drew it on out of my backpack. But my memory is pretty good. One thing that I thought of is that this model would be good to have in high resolution. Why? It'd be cool to make his beard, eyebrows, and hair shaggy on the edges. I drew it with little jaggies around the edges on paper and it looks really good. So that is our lesson for today: simple does not always mean low-tech. To make a simple, yet interesting skin of a shaggy looking character, I have to go with higher tech than a non-simple model would. That's like employing vertex shaders to do cel shading. It's putting more technology into work to make it simpler. But isn't that waste? No, if you have a case where less technology makes more complex and harder and less beautiful (see Quake), then I say gimme a GeForce2 64 DDR. Of course, the GeForce 4 came out recently. Isn't it strange how graphics cards are just flying out of the range of necessity? Looking at the GeForce 4 demos (especially the real-time fur wolfman) make me ill to my stomach. It looks like heck. Why would they try to tout their card as the maker of such a terrible looking demo? Well, it all started with a pink fur bunny, but I say that the use of fur in graphics ends there.
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Hoo-wah! I'm especially happy about this because I've been trying to do it and never succeeding. Tonight, I thought I was going to do something lame or nothing at all, so this lets my hope shoot for the stars. Here's a little explaination. I have wanted to give JF characters actual texture to their clothing etc. The only thing that I can do with Corel Draw and Corel Photo-Paint is try to not mess it up. You saw my Jav clothing folds, right? /me spews chuncks all over the monitor. Aww, now I gotta clean that up. Anyway, I came up with a system a while back where I could model very high-polygon models and take pictures of them and then texture the low poly models with them. Sounds iffy, right? Well, the only iffy that I found is getting the right tools together. You can see that the base model is very simple. I made it out of an 8 slice, 4 stack cylinder. I did some edge flipping and some squishing, but that's it. It isn't as low poly as the Jav model or anything, but that's okay. Then I went into Microsoft's Mesh Viewer (it comes with the free DirectX 8.1 SDK) and selected N-Patch. I grabbed the scroll bar and threw it to where I could get 20 fps (900 fps is where it started). The cool thing about N-Patches in DirectX is that they use the normals of the vertices to interpolate the position of the new vertex. What's the end result? Curviness. It isn't perfect, so you have to give it patience or simplicity, but it does its job. So I went into LithUnWrap and made a blue texture with shinyness to 128 (of 128) and gave it a specular color of very dark grey. I previewed it in six different positions and there you see the result. It looks like rubber. Of course, Jav doesn't wear cyan rubber pants in 2014 or 2002, but with a bit of messing around, I'll have a better pair of pants, I assume. Add some time and I'll have a shirt. After a while, I'll have shoes (imagine modelling the actual shoelace from a long thin cylinder). I think it's a good idea. It isn't a flawless plan since it looks like the light is always at the front and side, but I might think of something. One major thing is the folds. I couldn't really understand folds until I saw this accidental tapering of the back of the shin. This shows how light interacts with such a complex system on a trivial level. Computers are all about plug and chug. A physicist does the integrals, figures out the equation that has one unknown variable per equation. It's not as easy as you think, but it's only four years of college. I hardly think that anyone who wants to understand it will have any trouble with it.
Today is all about Freedom Force. As I said yesterday, I've been playing it non-stop since you don't want to know when. Interesting things are all over the place. I think the most important lesson to be learned is that nothing is hopeless. This is something that I require myself to reaffirm from time to time. How do I do that? I play video games. You see, video games are supposed to be challenging. If they have no challenge, then why are you playing it? For the story? For the eye-candy? For the fun of having your friends watch you play for hours? *shrug* I play games because they present a challenge and they make me think while having fun. Freedom Force made me think a lot about hopelessness. It's a challenging game. On the easy setting, I'm having a bunch of trouble. Each villain is equally rougher than the last. I often end up having to use the shortcoming of the game design to win. Hiding under a giant duplication ray is actually the smart thing to do in real life, but for it to be fun, it should have machine gunners at the base of it or an electric fence. But anyway, I would die. I would say to myself: "This is nuts! How am I supposed to win? This is on the easy setting and I'm being clobbered." But then I thought: there's a lot of people who have beaten the game on hard and here I am complaining about the easy setting. So then I think, "I'll put a bit more work into cracking a few skulls together and then I'll get it." So I do and it works out. Doing things the hard way will get you nowhere. But giving up on a challenging task is hardly prudent. This can be carried onto real life. One may see that graduation is stacked against him/her, but doing it right, trying over, and sticking with it will win the battle. That is what a challenging video game should teach you.
This pose took me five minutes to do. First off, it's made from another animation. Secondly, it's just a simple animation. There's nothing special about it. It's part of Scene 5, Page 5, I believe. One thing I'd like to point out is that Javantea has gangly arms. Just look at them! Why did I do this? Is it comic imagery and hyperbole? No, it's measurements of me using a ruler. My arms are actually that long. If you've ever played basketball against me, you'd see that I am not only tall and thin, but lanky. I wouldn't say that's a bad thing. For superheros, it's a good thing to have more reach than anyone else. If you can get a punch off while your enemy is out of his range, you can dominate many fights. Not only have I practiced this, I've used it. I won't say when, but my good buddy Dave knows. Let me tell you that a bruise or black eye is only good when it's the other guy who gets it. But beyond natural physical attributes, I am working on training. I'll give you a bit of an intro into fighting, specifically street fighting. The first thing is that hits are important. If you hit someone, it will have an effect. If you miss or the punch is blocked, it will do nothing. But deeper than that, the damage output to the hitpoints of most people is extremely high. That means that they can deal out, but not take in. So if anyone hits the other person, there is immediately a huge favor towards the attacker. One hit can disable a person completely. Five hits can put a person into a coma. On America's Deadliest Chases (or something like that) they showed a man sucker-punch a female officer five times. She went into a coma and doctors didn't expect her to live. She came out of the coma, but she was lucky. This guy's damage output was one fifth of that woman police officer's hitpoints. The same is true in the inverse, though. Police officers often beat innocent people to death with their clubs hitting them five or fewer times. Given all that information, what is the most important attribute to train: strength, stamina, agility, dexterity, intelligence, or wisdom? I would say that intelligence is. Dexterity is a close second. Agility is after that. Then stamina and strength. Why do I choose it this way? First off, intelligence sometimes avoids a fight completely. But more than that it allows you to understand your opponent's strategy and attack them where they are vunerable. Dexterity is pretty important because you need to be able to attack swiftly or your opponent will block. Agility is important because your enemy will definately be attacking you. It is easier to fight aggressively, so most of the opponents that you will face will require high agility to dodge. Stamina is also good for long battles along with hitpoints. Of course, you'd need a huge increase in hitpoints to make it more important than agility. I put strength last because seeing how few hits can kill an enemy, we do not want one punch kills. I watched a documentary about the 10-dan martial artist of Holland. He was patrolling the streets for bad people when he saw two guys up to no good. He and a friend of his were in an alley and when they confronted him, one of the guys hit the 10-dan martial artist in the foot with a sledgehammer. It really was extremely painful. The guy that attacked him backed off, but the 10-dan martial artist attacked the second guy with one punch to the top of the head. It split the guy's head in two and killed him instantly. There you have a case where a master of the art has much strength as well as skill and intelligence. Given a non-lethal situation, he could not choose a non-lethal solution. After that, the 10-dan martial artist decided to teach his students only the ways of non-lethal combat, especially the diffusion of intense situations. So I say that hitting a person once in the chest or head ought to hurt him (and disable them depending on how many hitpoints they have), but certainly not kill him. That doesn't even speak of defensive tactics. In certain circumstances, defensive positions and actions can be taken so as to prevent an attacker from successfully attacking you. What Jav is doing here is clotheslining someone. He's using his bodyweight to knock a guy off his feet. That is certainly a way to disable someone temporarily.
