Below is the synopsis of my 21st birthday party. Big props to Oliver and Leigh Ann for sharing fun with me. Now, on to the lesson that I was too lazy to do yesterday. The picture on the left is the normal DA model, that I've been using since forever. It has a skin on it. Is it the one on the top right, bottom right, or neither? If you guessed bottom, you are right. Why? Uh oh, you can't answer short essay questions? Too many art history classes get you too used to multiple choice, true/false? Well, here we go. The two skins come from the same vector graphic. The lower one is darker than the upper one. Why is that? Because I anti-aliased both of them, but the upper one was twice the resolution. The one on the top had one-pixel lines and the one on the bottom had one-pixel lines, anti-aliased, that means that the upper one is averaged lower. Am I cheating? Sort of. Corel Draw has a line width system where you can choose infinitely thin or an actual thickness. I rarely use an actual thickness just because it's a pain messing with it. So this is how it goes. But there's another factor that you can't see as well. That factor is pixel width. Corel Draw uses an integer pixel resolution export system. So the smaller image will be less correct. It will not show that data loss very much after being anti-aliased, but the larger one retains most of the data giving blurrier lines. Why do I like the one that is incorrect? Because it has more solid lines. I won't do with blurriness even if it is more correct. JF needs sharp, crisp lines if at all possible.
Can you feel it? ... We always had a need for speed. Grow stronger, to grow faster, to longer. We always had a need for speed. Can you feel it? -- azzido da bass, "speed can you feel it"
While this picture may make it seem that I'm being lazy, I was actually pretty active today. Actually, it was one of my best nights in Seattle, which counts as one my best nights in my life. So I'd say that's pretty cool. What made it one of the best nights of my life?
Now this is a real lesson. Not only that of perseverence, but also in actual artistic value. This picture has all the parts needed to reproduce this style. What is this style? It is comic book style motion lines, particularly that of a very fast moving arm or leg. Figure 1a. shows the mesh of the object. Figure 1b. shows the intended effect. Figure 1c. shows you the texture of the mesh. Figure 1d. shows the alpha bitmap. All are to shown at actual size. How does it work and how did I create it? It works by having a bunch of straight lines on a texture and bending the mesh to curve. Then the texture looks smooth and curved. Adding more vertices would increase the curviness. So how did I do it? I started by making a box. Then I extruded it a few times to the left. I made sure that they were all aligned. Then I delete all the sides and the backs. Then I put the two textures in. Then I took the mesh and rotated each vertical row a certain amount. I rotated the entire thing 10 degrees and then I selected all but the far right and rotated that. I repeated this for all. Then it was pretty curvy. It wasn't perfect, though. Rotating around the center of gravity will cause errors. To get a perfect curve, rotate around a user-defined point. That works really well. There you have it, easy motion lines. So how do you implement them? You could spend weeks coding them into your Engine if you're an insane programmer or you can just do them in the model. Hiding them might be a problem, but you'll figure it out I bet. The semi-sane solution for motion lines in a professional video game would be to make it a subobject of the character, only visible during a certain animation. That is what most professional third-person games do with weapons. So all you have to do is call your motion line a weapon, which is almost is... Motion lines are only useful for extremely fast moves, such as helicopter kicks, uppercuts, and roundhouse kicks.
