Ah yes, 2:26 AM gives me another Making Of. You, lucky person get to see something very cool coming together and learn from it. Of course, the guy here doesn't have a head, but using AltSci Relative Face Manipulation System, MS3D, and Lith Unwrap, I'll have a head before you can ask "Scene Five next week?". The main part of this is the gun even though the skeleton is important and almost nothing was done to the gun, the gun is still more important. I'll give the thematic background in the third paragraph. The gun is found somewhere else. Do you remember our friend Sammuel and the Gang Members at the Rave? This gun without a skin was the gun that the Gang Leader was going to use on Sammy. Yes, Jav stole that gun away and the guy here is using a gun of the same manufacturer to shoot you. Heheh. Well, the gun *is* pointed at you, isn't it? And you can see it going off. If I had time to make a movie, I'd show you how awesome it looks. He cocks the gun, and fires a round. The feet do a little shuffling and there we go. One big thing is that this model has excellent skeleton. When the shoulders move, it doesn't mess up the arms. The hands work well, the legs don't get disfigured. The chest doesn't get messed up either. I think this is definitely my best mesh/skeleton combination yet. But the gun took about 10x as long as the skeleton. That's why I say the gun is more important. You see, I downloaded this program, Lith Unwrap and it's the bomb. It does perfect texturizing. In fact, from now on, that's all I'm going to use for textures. It works so well that I'm quite amazed. The gun uses a 256x256 Texture and has 46 vertices and 84 triangles. It's a marvel of low poly design. It's simple, it's curves are not very hard to make, but it signifies a gun from a mile away. Up close you can see, indeed this is a gun. Check out Lith Unwrap if you do anything with textured 3d models. It's definitely the most professional program that I've seen with stability, aesthetics, and mathematical prowess even though it's a tad slow. I'm not sure why it's slow, but I assume that there's something deep going on in it that isn't quite optimized (perhaps the line drawing function is drawing each line a hundred times?). Anyway, it gets the job done. I just selected the faces from the 3d perspective preview model (I wish MS3d had that feature), set the preview mode to bottom/side/top/front, click the menu Tool, UV Mapping, Camera, repeat six or fewer times. Then I export to BMP and I texture it. Then I'm done. I did the gun texture in MS Paint. Heheh. It still turned out okay considering!
This body will be the most used part in Scene 5. You'll see why when we get there. It was a tough job, but someone has to do it. Since I have no helpers or support, it's up to me. So, this started out with a low polygon, high detail vector graphic in Corel Draw. I intentionally exaggerated the features because I wanted it to look like a human form. It actually started out as a girl, but it ended up being far too bulky. So instead of messing around for an hour to make it look girlish, I decided to make it more manly. So I pulled in the hips, mellowed the angles of the chest, and messed with the arms. There were plenty of problems with the original. Since it was a front view, it left an awful job for the side view when I got to MS3d. Simply enough, I just traced the Corel Draw Vector Graphic into MS3D (a very easy process, I might add). Then I extruded it, capped the back, mirrored for both sides. Then I had a 3d person, who had a flat front and back. So I brought the sides in and out, back and forth. In MS3D, you just get used to pulling vertexes where they ought to be using the side view, front view, and guess and check. I assume that 3D Studio MAX 3, 4, Character Studio, etc have stuff like bezier spines, but in MS3D, you can't cop out like that. It's quality low-poly or the road. In the latest version of MS3D, Mete introduced my favorite new function, split 3 and split 4. The split 4 isn't very good, but from time to time, it does the job with a push here, a shove there, and a few added faces. Split 3 made those legs. I had an awful pair of legs and I was about to delete the entire thing when I remembered split 3. So I split two of the faces into 6. Then I deleted four faces and joined the vertices. I'm sure that if you use split 3, you also use this method. It essentially splits 2 faces into 4, very useful when you you have something flat and you want it curvy such as my legs. Hehehe, errm, that's a grammatical error. I have uncurvy legs, but my model has curvy legs (just look!). Anyway, push this vert, pull that vert, a couple regroups and here you have it. The problem was that I didn't have time to make a texture, so the stupid shirt and pants look like they're black satin. *punches himself* No on in JF wears black satin.
