These two images are the product of simple calculations from two images. The effect that it's supposed to prouce is shadow effect. Not a shadow, shadow, but rather the effect of ghosting when a person is moving very fast. It doesn't happen in real life very often (especially on semi-stationary objects such as a martial artist), but the effect is supposed to do something for the comic. My comic is lacking in the effects and motion departments so I decided to kill two birds with one stone. The photo on the left is (A-B)+A and the photo on the right is (A-B)+B. You might think that A-B+B = A, but obviously it's not a true system of addition and subtraction. A-B is the subtraction of the two root images. Then adding A or B, I get the two shown above. I like the effect myself. The tones that make up the shadow look like water or fog or a ghost. The coloring of the shadow's hands is interesting to me also. The beige is mainly yellow which is made of green and red. The background is a light blue with a bit of green. What do you get when you mix them? Greenish goop. The shadow's eyes are interesting also. It's red, but it goes behind the eyebrows on the right. On the left, it shades the white eyes a bit. I think it's a nice touch. My lesson to you is to use those image calcuations in your paint program. If you know what to do, you should be able to do it easily. If you know what you want, you can always look at the preview window. Don't confuse my advice to mean that you should use the effects. Blur, sharpen, emboss, edge find, etc are all worthless for the most part. Anything that can be done with those tools will destroy an image and will require far more extra work than just doing it in 1600% zoom mode.
Greetings fellow human beans. Today will be short and sweet with a little bit of fun at the end for good measure. This new body is based on muscles, the previously discovered joint system, and simplicity. I was hoping to make it so that it would look good at all angles during animation, especially the shoulder joint. I didn't get it perfect, but it seems to be a small step towards a better model. I now know what will not work. Perhaps there's a mathematical or qualitative reason why no matter the skeleton, my skin will crumple. That would suck, but it seems logical. So my plan was to just make curvy muscles and detatch each body part from each other so that they can move independently. I'm almost certain that is the way to go. It adds an extra 8 triangles or so, but it's worth it. Whenever Jav's arms are at his sides, they become thin as squished taffy. Not cool. So this model rectifies that so that the bicep, the forearm, etc never have less volume than any other time. The only squished triangles are the flesh around the joint. That's fine as long as it doesn't fold the faces like it's doing every so slightly in this model. There's one temp fix to that and that is to restrict joint movement. But then your characters can't have his/her arms at his/her sides... My temp fix and lesson for you is to move the verts, move the joints, test, retry. If it doesn't work, that just means that your geometry isn't correct, so correct your geometry until it works.
If you don't want to hear what I have to say about real life, but would rather learn about this model, skip to the last paragraph.
Tonight is a continuation of a vector bitmap thirteen days ago. You might remember that this character was inspired by FFX Titus. I have a poster of him in this pose on my window. I think that the symbol will have to go for use in Scene 5 Page 5. We don't want Square or people who like Square to think less of JF just for my simple jaunt into unoriginality. I'd like to mention that this skin is 256x256. Who does 256x256 textures anymore these days? I'll tell you who: me. That's who. You can't get simplicity and softness with higher resolution textures. I have to use lower resolution textures just to take out the jaggies. One would thing that using more memory would make something look better, but that's only in the case that you have something to show. I do not. A person is a person and little more. I could give people striped t-shirts, spikes on their clothing, or whatever, but I don't want to. JF has strict standards that something is not to become more complex than it really is. None of the characters here are supposed to be major fashion hounds or tv stars, so they should wear normal clothes and have flat color faces, simple lips, simple eyes, circles for irises. Even that gets far too complex when in a real comic. If I could take out some detail, I would. But the detail that is too much is usually the background. I want to show really important stuff in the background, but I just cannot without stretching JF into 10 pages per page. Of course, that would allow me to put more detail into animations, which currently lacks heavily. I'm thinking about it. How can I put more animation detail in without making it stupidly long? Today's lesson! I think that should be that simplicity is created by solid concrete ideas. You start with a box, you add lines, circles, boxes, curves. Then you color it in and there it is. But if you want simplicity, you have to remember that knowing what you want is more important than doing what you want. If you cannot control your hands, control your mind. It is, in fact, your mind that controls your hands. That's my main thing in all of my artistic work. I cannot seem to learn how to draw well and the drawing tools all confuse me, but my clarity of mind allows me to consistently create what I intend, by trial and error. Luck has little to do with it. My main friends: perseverence and statistics. My hard drive can tell you that a large number of monkey can produce JF given a long enough time span. But one weasel - me - can produce JF in a small time span given his intelligence and cunning.
