Today's picture is pretty simple, it didn't take more than an hour. It might have taken less time if I hadn't painstakenly pressed for accuracy in my measurements of my own real-life limbs. I taped feet markers on the wall and used a piece of tape to mark each body part on the wall. Then, I just translated it into a skeleton using MilkShape 3D's wonderful arbitrary movement interface. You see, I just place every joint on the zero and move it upwards N units where N = 10*(feet + inches/12). That gives me a perfect system. From measurements of a person's body, I can make a skeleton. From the skeleton, I can stretch a mesh. I can draw a picture from a photo of a person or from my imagination. From a stretched mesh, texture, and skeleton, I can have an animated character. That's how 3d Animation works. There's a lot of work getting all of those working together, but just look at JF. I think using the body40e model sized to fit different people with different bodytypes, I'll be able to make all of JF. Of course, you've seen the body44 model and you might think that I should ditch the body40. But It takes a lot of work to go from where body44 is to where body40 is. Body40 is where I want to be right now. At least for Jav. The DA model was really good. It worked well with different models scaled very slightly differently with different skins. The Rave Kiddie model worked fairly well for as early as it was. The Jav models have all been less than satisfactory. Really, I always hope for more, but the Jav models have always lagged behind the secondary characters. But you should think about this idea: models ought to be based on reality. While faces are a whole different story, making awkward looking bodies doesn't work. Whether you're making amateur pr0n or manga, it's important to understand what your characters feel like. That's why I like the skeleton system so much. You only rotate the bones. No deformation is possible from the original model. So unlike poor manga, the character looks the same every time through. But getting it right the first time is the important thing. A measurement of a person that looks like your perfect character is the best way to do it. Don't take a picture. Bad idea. Why? Because a camera is a point source that distorts everything except for directly what it's pointing at. That's why the Seattle P-I got away with making a 1.5 foot fish filet knife look like a 1.5 meter samurai sword. They put the camera at such an angle that made it so distorted with the Seattle Chief of Police behind with his arms above his head so that anyone who saw it claimed that it was not the same sword as they saw in real life. 3D projection ont 2d is not a substitute for actually measuring with a ruler. Some people prefer metric, but I only have a good transparent ruler with metric units sandwiched between English units in tenths and sixteenths. *shrug* The lesson for today is to analyze. Use reason, fail-safe methods, and brute force measurement. No sort of algorhithm is going to tell you the right answer for what your character's body will look like. The golden rectangle won't help you here. No book is going to look right when you import it into your 3d program. You'll end up cursing and wasting time. The right way is spend a year on it. If you don't have a year to spend learning stuff, buy the time of someone who already has. If you don't have either, you don't have what you need. I've spent a year and a half and I've developed a 3d engine, learned c++, ported the engine to c++, created a bunch of models, made five scenes of a comic, and made 181 Making Of JF Pages.
It's only 86 kB, so there's no worry about waiting an hour for a 2 second video. Those buttons below it actually do what they say. Tt requires Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player 7. If you don't meet the requirements, click here for the movie in your favorite avi viewer. It's in DivX 5.02 format, as I hope you already know. Click here for the codec.
This picture may not be the discovery of the 20th century, but it is very interesting*. Anyway, this is simple game theory. It took five minutes to do, but it's implications are substantial. The game is such: you have an object. After a certain amount of time, the object turns into three objects (it has two children). A limit is that the children can be placed to the north, south, east or west of the object. The object only reproduces once. The children are objects as well, so after that same amount of time, they reproduce. This continues on until an object cannot have two children. As you see, I've iterated 5 generations. You see that there are two fifth generation children that can only have one child. The rest can have two children. This is a very interesting game because it has a definite end given the limitation that it ends when a child can only have one child. It ends at five generations. So the object model would be something like:
Scene 6 is on it's way to your doorstep. But this shows exactly how long you have to wait. The skin of the roads is an actual map of East LA. If you don't remember or haven't seen it, click here to see where I got it. It's the same thing, without the colorful background. But this is projected onto 3D surface and has buildings on it. You can see that the buildings don't quite match up perfectly, but you won't notice that when I put a road texture instead of that map texture. What did I find out a few days ago? That East Los Angeles is flat. With the exception of the hills to the north and northwest, it is as flat as can be. So I measured out six kilometers east to west and six kilometers north to south and called it Jav's Anarchist Geodome. My apologies if I misrepresent this city. I have this idea that this character lives in Downtown LA underneath a geodesic dome in the year 2014. So I'm rebuilding this city in 3d and putting a dome over it. Then it becomes Jav's Anarchist Geodome. But people won't call it that. It'll just be Dome 7 or East LA or eastside in slang. A few things to note are: I-5 to the south. You may have missed the fact that I was unable to convey in Scene 1 that the Warehouse was right next to the I-5 freeway. Also, you'll notice that there is a pretty monotonous street pattern. There aren't many deviant paths. But one of the biggest problems I had was that the neighborhood was built at an angle to north-south and east-west. That makes it very difficult to work with in MilkShape 3D. I was thinking it might be easier to rotate the bitmap than to rotate the buildings. To the north of East LA, there are hills 70 meters tall. Using my Terrain works, I made it happen. You can't see it here, but you'll hopefully see it in Scene 6. It ought to look really natural and stuff. Next up is the actual Dome. The dome isn't in place, but it looks like this page. There'll be traffic lights that look like this page. There will be Jav's bike that will look like this page. There will be an SUV that looks like this page. There will be a car that looks like this page. The first two pages will look like this page. There will be a park that might look like this page. There will definately be a kitty that looks like the one on this page (with the addition of fur and face). There might be something else in there, but who knows, eh? The lesson for today, I've decided, is that there is a time and a place for everything. You can do one thing for just so long. Then you move on to the next. That next thing has its time and place and you do that next. Today there was a time and a place for getting my computer working. There was also a time and a place for finding a job. There's also a time for working on Scene 6. Things happen like that. It's good how things happen like that. When things stop happening like that, start changing them. Sometimes sitting in front of a computer all day will produce less computer-related stuff than sitting in the park all day. If it's the right time for playing in the park, by all means take the day off.
