If you keep checking for the latest JF, Scene 5, Page 3, You'll be unsurprised when you do go there and find something. Actually, if you check as often as you should, there's a bug in the UW Unix server that won't show it to you. The best way to check for JF is to type into your address bar: http://students.washington.edu/jvoss/javantea/latest.htm?random where random is a collection of numbers and characters that you haven't typed in before. I know, I know, nobody will ever do that, but that's what you get when you rely on others, right. Is that a question? Should I put a question mark at the end? But it's a rhetorical question. Ah, who cares... Wait, I've done it again! When will the madness stop. ^_^ Last one, I promise.
Today in Physics 227 - out of the blue - I came up with a brilliant idea to make a body that is made of seperate bodyparts that are connected by flabby skin. When the skeleton moves, the flabby skin stretches while the body part stays solid. That is how these arms are working. They aren't great, but they show the system. The system is not working very well. You can see that the armpits are flipped inside out. It's slightly better than the Jav model, but comparable to the Dojo Ambush perp model which uses a different system. I think this system will work pretty well once I figure out the correct placement of joints and vertexes. As for the vertex and triangle waste, it's pretty compact for all the detail that it gives. It's also pretty close to my vision of the human anatomy. That's a good thing. We all like being truthful to reality at some points in the process. Body dynamics is my area.
Tonight's lesson is that of perseverance. When something is all wrong, you know it's not worth it to keep going. Your effort will all go for naught as long as you refuse to give up. You hate yourself, you hate everyone else. Your ideas turn to that of evil-doing and evil-doers. You think that it would be nice to drive a BMW even if you had to kill an innocent person to get it. But then a ray of hope enters your life and for a while you cannot think of anything but it. You attempt to regain control of yourself. Rays of hope rarely last. In fact, rays of hope are often evil in disguise. You regain your senses. Itching in your mind the the thought that maybe that the ray of hope was just a ray of sunshine, harmless, helpful, necessary, and beautiful beyond compare. Your senses mean less to you, but your effort continues. You are driven to perform. A small victory here, a small bit of effort spent, a small pleasure, a bit of pain, but where are you now? You're further than you were at the start of the paragraph, aren't you?
So, what is this? It's not JF Scene 5, is it? No, but it's training for it. As you can see, we have a pretty simple scene. A guy, a billboard, a pillar, and a set of chairs. This is a scene that I ripped from Strange Days (one of my favorite movies of all time) VHS with my ASUS GeForce 2 card. It's one of the first videos that I've gotten from it since I don't own a TV or VCR. My neighbor lent me his VCR to grab an important video. I'm having a bit of trouble with my capture stuff. I'm going to mess with it. You know what that means, you should expect JF to be out of commission tomorrow. ^_^ Naw, I think you should expect Page 2. But what about this picture. We don't get to see the goon's face. Well, there's a reason. First off, it's the only picture with the gun in a correct position. Secondly, faces look awful when captured from TV. Thirdly, the background is nice. The picture is pretty small, I captured it at 320x240. It's odd because at 640x480, the capture program drops frames like nothing. But the solution is to compress before I save. The capture+compression program is saying that I have an invalid device. *shrug* So here I am with lo-res pic. But the oddest thing is that when it's not capturing, the picture looks good, but when it captures, it goes into 8-bit mode or something. It looks awful. But then when I compress it later, it looks much better. What is the problem? I think it's a header file giving incorrect color depth. But that should crash any program trying to read it. But now on to the picture. My simplifications are not very good. I just traced his body parts and traced the scenery. But a few interesting things pop out. First off, the floor is a perfect judge of position and orientation. We know that these lines are perfectly parallel and perpendicular. With that we can find the vanishing point, calculate the FoV, and the position of the camera. I like it. I should use that effect in JF. Of course, it won't look natural. You see, look at the lighting, shading, and shadowing. That's a huge part of it, right? The bright floor shining and the pillar is shadowing it, it's wild. Look how soft the shadow is, though. It's more of a darkening spot then a shadow. I doubt that a scene like this will be reproduced pixel for pixel in the next few years. But that's fine. I like real-time low-poly movies. Watching Jav busting heads together makes me smile. It's not even close to getting there, but I squelched out 90% of the memory leaks in AS3D today. That's not very easy. They should all be gone in a week. Then for more functionality. I need multiple Skinned Meshes, non-crashing videos, and better path stability. The skinned meshes ought to work, but they just don't. The videos I can make now crash most of the time and come out upside down and far too slow. Well, see for yourself [229 KB DivX]. Then there's the path system. As you can see in the movie, there's a white line across. That's an infinite number you're seeing. I don't know why, it must be the code somewhere.
