So, it's Thursday at 1:02 AM. How is Javantea's Fate doing? Not so well. I procrastinated on working on Javantea's Fate until 11:00 PM Wednesday, two hours ago. Creating the characters took a lot of time beyond the two hours, so no this isn't quite how I wanted it to work out.
Secondly, this is a fluke because Anarchy Online's story started last night. I spent Tuesday night getting back into the rhythm of AO and then all of this night participating in the event. It was pretty cool and I'm glad that I went there. Also, there's a full movie to go with the even. Check the community site. It's a big download, but 20 MB not bad if you want to see a 30 minute CG rendered show for free.
It's exactly like I said. I'm so happy that I'm smart enough to do something right. But a lot of it is endurance. A few times, my computer was acting crazy. A few other times, I was acting crazy. One of the features in today's today's page was done manually since I couldn't get it done automatically. Can you see it? It's the trail on the rock. It was supposed to be alpha blended, but wasn't supported by my software. It would only take a few hours to implement it, but that would have been two hours too much. I'm not much up for staying up until 2 AM working on this. I've been doing that for the last four days or so. Of course, I'm sleeping until noon, so it's not making me sleepy. It's making me angry, instead. If you know me, you know that I get moody. I an normally very smooth, cool-headed, and intelligent. From time to time, I go into my unintentional Mr. Hyde impression and I throw myself against walls, furniture, and abuse myself in worse ways. It often happens when I'm not well fed. It often happens when I am forced to talk about war. My lesson for the day: "Don't start none, won't be none!" If you don't want something to happen, don't start. If it is something that you do not control (drunk driver heading towards you), then the quote works double: don't drive. But what if someone crashes their car into your house? Well, that's just silly. But so is not driving because someone might wreck into you. The odds, really for either are so low. If either happens, call me and I'll give you a dollar for proving me wrong. Kraftwerk is most definately the best music in the world.
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Here's the first scene. It's missing some things, but I'm happy enough to put it up here officially as the first page of the first scene. Hooray!
So what's my rant going to be about? My laziness? Naw, I'll wait a few pages for that. I'm going to rant about my wonderful system. Yes, My wonderful system allows me to forgo all artistic ability and simply program an entire manga from the triangle level. Indeed, everything seen (and more) was touched by me at the triangle or pixel level. I had to build the characters vertex by vertex, face by face. The textures I drew at the square, triangle, and pixel level. The layout maker I built from scratch and I handled everything there at the pixel level. But all this extra work required allows me to not work at all on the comic. I simply do a bit of drag and drop and there's the next page. ^-^. In the next few paragraphs, I'll explain the system.
Okay, so this is JF Final Scene 1, Page 1. I promised, I delivered. I even spent extra time making it work right instead of just making it work. Err, well half of the time. JF Final Scene 1 Page 1 may possibly change slightly. I did spend all of today working on it. What's the lesson? The first lesson is to learn is to create something smooth. Smooth things are those things in which rapid changes are not made. Yellow on black is a rapid change. Black text on white background is technically not smooth. If you anti-alias it, it becomes smooth. Other smooth transitions are: gourand shading vs. flat shading. Gourand uses a gradient. The formula for gourand is to calculate the color at a vertex and then on the surface between three connected vertices, the color is given by the distance from each color source. If v[a] = green, v[b] = yellow, and v[c] = blue, then between v[a] and v[b] will be green-yellow, between v[a] and v[c] will be cyan, and between v[b] and v[c] will be grey (yellow is green and red, so half green half red and half blue makes half grey). In the very center will be a combination of all three. You get the idea, though, right? It's very simple. Flat shading, however just takes each triangle and calculates the illumination of the face. Another way to get smoothness is to use radiosity. Radiosity is very slow if done normally. It assumes that all objects are light sources and reflectors. A light source hits an object and it bounces off and keeps bouncing until all the energy is consumed. This makes the lighting very smooth since it creates a lot of ambient light. Another smooth thing is n-patch triangle/quad tesselation. You start out with your average model and you take triangles or quads and you split them and move them in the direction of the normal. So a box would become a sphere under n-patch tesselation. I used that for a bad reason today. My program wasn't working. So I went into Microsoft MeshView and n-patch tesselated my Javantea model by a factor of one. He became a bit curvy. I don't mind all that much. But it's the principle that gets me. The model looks fine in MeshView, but it has black cheeks in my viewer. Why? I narrowed it down to the normals being placed incorrectly due to software vertex skinning. But I couldn't find any part of the software that would do that. Darn. The good news is that I finally got alpha blending to work. The bad news is that it only showed up twice and you really cannot appreciate it. Ugh. Oh well. I saved the text files, so I can redo it a million times if I want. It is so fast to redo a shot, it's no problem.
