You may say with some truth that this picture is as lacking as last night's picture was fantastic. However, this picture is a testament to my technical ingenuity. This is a screenshot from the upper left of my screen. But not my normal screen. You might notice that it contains some very odd looking icons. For example, "halfStats reset". Why would I have that on my screen? Because this is not my normal computer. This is my old webserver. I'm actually writing this in a Windows 2000 Pro Notepad. My workstation crashed today for good. It's gone to join the megaflops in the sky. For the past five days, it had been giving me trouble on boot. At first it would randomly reboot. The second day, the monitor wouldn't turn on during boot until five tries. The third day it would do constant rebooting for about two hours in the morning. Then today it wouldn't stay booted for five minutes. So I decided to do some work on it. I switched the power supply (the first suspect). That didn't fix it. I then put the video card into this computer, it works flawlessly. Then I put the hard drive in this computer. I tried and I tried and it wouldn't work. But that wasn't the problem with the other computer. The other computer had two severe problems, neither linked to the hard drive. So I tried putting this computer's video card into the other computer. Nothing. It boots to the password screen and freezes. A completely different problem from the previous. The random reboots are gone. So now I've decided that I'm going to use this computer until that computer gets fixed. Since I've swapped video cards, it should go at nearly the same frame rate. Of course, this is a 300 MHz, which means that it's not a speed demon. It's actually very slow. With Windows 2000 Professional and 128 MB of RAM, you can guess what nightmares I'm having. I don't mind very much though. If I can do half of anything, I'm doing good. But that's the problem. I can't do anything without my data. AltSci3D Manga Director is on that Hard Drive and that hard drive doesn't work with this computer. Why me? Have I done something to offend the CPUs? Is slavery every day for 1.5 years too much for them to handle? We humans don't seem to mind 40 years of slavery. Why can't these computers take a hint? Anyway, I've narrowed it down to the CPU or the Motherboard, neither of which I have enough money to fix. If I can't get that hard drive to work with this computer and I can't get that computer to get past the password screen, I'm SOOL trying to work on JF or my job.
Hello, what you are witnessing is perhaps the greatest unique thing to come out of my computer. You might say that it lacks artistic style and is ugly, but I certainly can't point you at anything else that I have created that is the product of so many productive hours. This is the cast of Scene 5 minus Javantea. Together they are approxmiately 5,000 triangles. They are all based on the same model, but each is slightly different. This is the product of my test last night to see if a GeForce2 video card could render an entire city in real time (30-60 fps). Before you shout me down, let me explain. I have this idea. I start with this TIFF heightmap that I got from USGS. I make a 3d terrain out of it. Then I use a roadmap TIFF that I also got from USGS to add buildings. The height of the buildings are gotten from a map that I bought of Seattle Business District. Then I have 100 models that I put in different parts of the city. I put a skybox and there is my city. What's wrong with that idea? Well, first of all, my GeForce2 will not render 100 models each with 500 triangles in real time. So I limit my rendered characters to 20. That's a big limit, but you'll see why I decided that. Then, I use Microsoft's MeshView to make my high-poly terrain (19602 triangles) into a statically reduced Progressive Mesh of 2000 triangles. That's a big reduction, but my Seattle map is fine with it. The truth is that cities are not curvy. Then I made a reduction to only render the 8 blocks of buildings that are closest to the camera's view (4 buildings per block). Since this is a a first-person cam and not a flight sim it won't need to see many blocks. Even the best view down a street won't need 4 blocks. A person can hardly see a half a mile down the street, especially in downtown Seattle with our curvy streets. That brings it down to 13024 triangles. At that point on the CPU side, we've only done API calls, 228 box-frustrum cull operation, 13024 backface cull operations, and the matrix-based rotation camera operations. That leaves plenty of CPU for animating the characters. Guess how many frames per second you get when you render a scene with 13k triangles and 10 skinned characters on a GeForce2? 41 fps. How do I know? Because that's what happening on the picture above. You don't see that below the apartment is the City of Seattle with a bunch of buildings. It totals 11,000 triangles. Last night it was rendering at 540,000 triangles per second. Amazing, huh? Well, you can see on this picture that it's only rendering at 20 fps. Why? Because it's 4x multisampled. I could show you the speedy version, but I like to break two barriers each night. It saves time. Also, I'd like to note that another limiting factor is resolution, right now. The higher the resolution, the slower it goes. At 1024x768, it goes fast, but at 1600x1200, it slows down to 25 fps. That's not too bad, but I want to keep up to 30-60 for smoothness for video. Yeah, I'm seriously thinking about releasing JF Anime. I really want it to be in medium, too. Then people will think: "new and fresh!"
O, ho ho. You thought I was going to give you some more bar charts, right? Wrong! I'm going to try to get a relevant Making Of JF page every night for a while. This one wasn't entirely done tonight, but the hair was. What is it made of? A sphere. Not a geosphere or bezier patches, nothing special. I deleted part of the sphere and what was left I molded around the head to become the hair. The rest of the body and head are slightly cool. The body is the new number 44 body type. The body, head, and hair weigh in at a very frugal 246 triangles. Some frugal pants and arms would make it a decent low-poly model. I'm not sure about how it'll animate, but we'll see soon, won't we? The skin is very simple. In fact, it's so simple, it's missing eyebrows. I'll throw them in when I add shirt and pants textures. I was thinking of using a 512x512 texture, but then I went with a 256x256 for now just arbitrarily. I don't want to have prejudices for or against this model and skin just because I decide to try a higher resolution texture. I messed with a 512x512 with the Jav model and I didn't like it very much. It's not very important since everything is scaled down anyway, but I always hope for better. If you don't understand the lesson of that, you should definately get thicker goggles.
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