Greetings fellow human being. I'd like to give you a pair of brief ideas. The first is motion blur. Above is my attempt to do a bit of motion blur special effects. I simply took two screenshots and superimposed the later image above the earlier image with transparency set to around 60. This is okay, but not up to my standards. For it to work for Scene 1, it will need to be absolutely spectacular. Then, I'll anti-alias it down to half a page and it'll look fair. It really isn't cool that I have to slave over something for days and days to get it perfect and the format of the comic book makes it look like I didn't try at all. But that's okay. Perhaps it'll just happen anyway -- it often does. So how does one do a correct motion blur. Well, to find that out, I set up my camera at 10 frames per second and danced a jig. I looked at it and it wasn't just two picture superimposed. It had a picture for each pixel in between. So say that the left side of my face is at pixel 32. If in the next frame, the left side of my face is over at pixel 45, I need to take 13 pictures and blend them all. Usually, it's only three or four pixels. But in this picture, it's twenty or forty. Then I'd get actual motion blur, I think. This is a property of physics. The retina or a camera pixel takes a time average of energy. That is how televisions and monitors can work with scanlines. However, remember that I'm doing a comic. Looking at my favorite comic (which is a good reference for fighting scenes), Gunnm aka Battle Angel Alita, I find the answer. Comics use motion lines. It's actually a rule or something if comic books have rules. Ever since the early days of superhero comics, they have been using lines to show movement. You actually only need to render what you want once. You have to draw a group of lines from where it was one unit of time ago until now, usually an arc. Sometimes if it's unclear where your character is, you can render twice or three times to show your reader. So that will be a challenge to myself: make motion lines that look good.
Check both high and low versions. They are different. Why? I dunno.
Before you freak out seeing something unusual in the upper left hand corner, I'll explain it to you. This is nothing more than the binary hierarchy up to generation six. It's the same picture as is on that link, but it is just the data. But there is no actual data implied in that piece. The colors are the same so if they mean anything to you, then you're smarter than me. However, if I had blacks and whites in such an so that it held six bits of information, would you notice it and could you decode it? I'd say no to both. First off, I would not put it in a field of blue. I'd make it dark grey in a field of black somewhere inside of a gradient. Then no one who wasn't looking really hard could find it. The NSA's got nothing on this type of encryption. But how do you decode six bits into something useful? Six bits isn't even a character. There are 64 different combinations that can be held with six bits. however, two of those are impossible since they require all bits high and all bits low. You couldn't see it at all because it wouldn't be there. Well, I could assign each of the 62 combinations to a phrase. But that would give away my intentions. Could I give away my intentions covertly? I could put each combination onto a random MOJF. Then when I put that combination into another image, you would check every MOJF for that combination and you'd have the secret message. But if wanted to steg just six bits, I could do it manually and store it as the low bit in the first six bytes of my image. Then it would be untracable and easy for someone who knew the system to get the info fast. But then if the NSA understood the system, they could crack it fast, though. Of course, I've got nothing to hide.
Hi there. These two pictures are not from the new Scene 6. You might notice if you're a keen reader of JF, that this is kinda like scene 1, except everything is different. You see, I have this idea that scenes 1-5 are not the final version of JF Comic. They are a rough draft of the JF Comic. Since I'm such a terrible artist, I used the first five scenes to learn the ropes. Now I have criticized myself and created better models so now I can redo the entire thing. If you told a normal comic artist that their work was substandard and that they would have to redo it all, he/she would say, "You are completely insane!" You see, normal comics take many hours. Three to six hours per page is not unusual. For JF, it's similar, but different. I am not a normal comic artist. I am a programmer. Instead of using my immense talent of which I lack, I made programs that do it for me. I made these programs so that I would not have to draw really anything. I do have to do a whole lot of dragging and dropping and a small bit of number-crunching. But really, To produce 5 scenes with 17 pages, I put 200 hours into programming, 100 hours into modelling, 20 hours into skinning, 5 hours into direction, and 50 hours into useless Making of JFs. Doing the numbers, you see that I could have finished all 24 scenes (128 pages) of JF by now if I were to have to spent only 20 hours per week on JF. You see, a lot of the slowness you see is not the hard work that I'm doing everynight, but rather the fact that I'm playing games, learning electromagnetism, and doing other fun things. But that's okay because I am so much more talented in programming than modelling. That's why the models look bad. So after all that time, I have models that look good. Now I have to do everything over. I also have a program that works 100%. Had I done all 24 scenes, it would have been a huge accomplishment, but would achieve nothing since I'd have to do it over again. So now, my 6-month plan is to put 5 hours into programming, 20 hours into modelling, 5 hours into skinning, 20 hours into directing, and 5 hours into Making Of JF rants. That allows a lot of time for studying. It also allows for me to set a goal to produce JF Final Draft scenes 1-15 by March 1st. That is a rapid pace, but I think I can do it if I push myself to do more directing. This Making Of JF page is the first step. For each scene, I have to get all the characters lined up in semi-correct positions. So then I can just drag them around. None of the four characters (Jav, EG1, warehouse, Seattle) will be exactly how they are now in JF. I plan to use the Dojo Ambush model for EG1. I plan to use the Jav 40 model for Javantea. I plan to give some backsides to those Warehouse walls. I plan to use the new Los Angeles terrain model (with dome at night) instead of the Seattle terrain model. Of course, I have a few extra characters, but adding them is just a copy and paste maneuver. So, that is how JF Final Scene 1 will come together. I'm going to work on Scene 6 still because people want to see something new, but I'm going to do Scene 1 simultaneously since the very nature of 3d modelling permits it and encourages it.
