Greetings, another Making Of JF in your face! Check out these nine videos. All together, it's 474 kB, but each video is around 57 kB. So it should be quicker than the PNG. Those buttons below it actually do what they say sometimes. I'm working on it. This is actually part of my wonderful RPG system. Video without windows controllable by script. Of course, it requires Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player 7. If you don't meet the requirements, click here for links to each movie. They're in DivX format, as I hope you already know. Click here for the codec.
Greetings once again my fellow human beans. ^_^ I'm back today with another Making Of JF Page. The lesson today is to follow up on what you hate yesterday. I was saying that all those developers who make cel-shaded stuff make poor quality stuff. So I went about proving it. I downloaded the nVidia Cg Shader Toolkit. At 70 MB, it's a bad download, since the compiler is 4 MB and the Browser is 4 MB, you'd think that the toolkit would be somewhere around 10 MB max. But each effect has a full program associated with it. It would seem like they could make it easier, but they don't. The way that I downloaded it was to get the compiler and browser, then the browser downloads the toolkit in parts. That's a bad thing because the toolkit is 70 MB compressed. That means in uncompressed parts, it's about 140 MB. So now what to do? I let it download a bunch of stuff and I got my cel shader, so I stopped it. I missed out on a bunch that I want, but I'm not patient enough for a 140 MB download of simple demos. The cel shading demo produced the two images above, so you can see a bit of what it's about. Let me tell you what it's about. The fact that it's purple and textureless is because it uses a vertex shader and a 1d texture to produce the shading effect. This can be remedied by making the 1d texture be the secondary texture. My video card does that, so all I have to do is program it. There inlies one of the two main problems. I don't understand Cg any better than I understood the assembly version of it. I'm learning, but not very quickly. I may have a cel shader in another program (definately not AltSci3D Manga Director 1.0 VB, possibly AS3DMD 2.0 CPP in the next few months, more likely AS3DCg 1.0 CPP in a few weeks). The other problem is, as you can see, there is no animation. Notice that DA11 is in the trademark Jesus Christ pose. It is possible, but I don't know if it will require another vertex shader or the current AltSci3D Manga Director animation system. I have an inkling that DirectX8 uses vertex shaders for its skinned meshes and lighting. What else could it be using, right? There's only one GPU that I know of. =) I did like two other things that I haven't seen before. The Grass demo was spectacular. Kinda. If it was swaying more and if it didn't slow down to 10 fps, it'd be cool for ... Demos... Really why would you want grass in a video game? Anarchy-Online does a pretty good job at doing patches of grass using cris-crossed triangles. It's sweet. If you play, you know exactly what I mean. The other way to do grass is a texture. It's not trivial to get it right, but a few video games that have grass have pretty decent grass. One of these pictures is not like the other. If you chose the non-purple one, your wrong. The one one the right is a different mesh from the other two. Can you tell? Of course you can! Because the other two have about 11,500 more triangles than the one on the right. That's a lot of fscking triangles. You can see how round it is compared to the other. I used Microsoft's MeshView for DirectX8.1 to make an N-Patches mesh. I just use this little scroll bar on the right to increase the number of triangles and it does all the smooth curvature stuff. I like it, but I don't like high-polygon meshes. My graphics card only does 1M triangle per second. Do the math and you see that five of those meshes (like in JF, for example) slows my computer to 15 fps. That is bearable, but not cool. I could go increase the frame rate by putting in less triangles. So there's a balance that I have to work. Of course, I am limited by more than just final poly count. I'm also limited by MilkShape3D's speed. It's not a big limit, but it slows to 5 fps when I have 20000 polygons no matter how fast my GPU is. Remember how I told you about the software vertex processing. So if I make a model like this one, it will be uneditable. I have to edit the texture, vertex placement, normal groups, and animation before that and I have to rely on MeshView to do it right. I can tell you that I'm not thrilled by that. This is the third mesh that MeshView has ever N-Patched successfully out of twenty and about ten hours of work. It requires perfect normals to work and that's a tough order when I rely on my shoddy knowledge of MilkShape3D and MilkShape3d's DirectX exporter. I can't complain, but it's been a long time coming to where I am. Going further seems like a bad idea. I'm having a hard enough problem doing what I'm doing now and that's not much. One interesting thing that should be a no-brainer is that the cel-shaded pictures alone are only a 17kB PNG with 16 colors. The Making Of Page Picture above is 104kB. That means that the nVidia logo and the gradient shaded is 87kB. PNGs work really well with simplicity. JPGs are better for gradients if you don't mind a bit of jaggies. *shrug* It's an interesting idea. Digitally perfect cel-shaded 3d images should be extremely low lossless size.
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Hi all. You expected that I'd miss yesterday's promise, right? It was July 4, so I'll blame it on that. Every day is really lame. I need to stop playing Counter-Strike, America's Army, and TFC. What is America's Army? I'm glad you asked. It's a video game created in part by the US Army that is given to US teens for free via my tax dollars. You can see the conflicts when I tell you that I'm a pacifist anarchist. Playing this game (or more accurately, not playing it) shows me that the US Government is unfit to claim rule over any individual let alone the world. It also shows me that the US Army is as desperate as the US Navy to recruit teenagers into becoming murderers. Shame on them. We anarchists wouldn't allow teens to become anarchists, if we weren't teens, and if we weren't anarchists, and if teen punks weren't so insistant on being called anarchists. I guess I'm no longer a teen anarchist anymore and soon I won't be a minor either. Another of my main arguments against government. The restriction of music to 21+ and movies to 17+ audiences is as much a crime as it is absurd. As if teens aren't intelligent enough to make decisions about what they see or hear.
Today's image is not very special. It's "cel shading" as a few people in the MilkShape3D Forums called it. It's actually outlining which is usually used in conjunction with actual cel shading in cartoons, especially anime and manga. I like it myself. The main thing that I like is the nose. With a bit of actual cel shading (and hilighting, of course), this would be pretty sweet. Actually, it's possible to do that in all of JF with the hardware that I have. Why am I not doing it? Because it's EXTREMELY technical in software. There is one awesome way and there are a few so-so ways. The awesome way has one example and it is only for OpenGL and uses software vertex processing. That would be possible if it were DirectX, but not easy technically. Then there so-so's are DirectX and hardware, but they look visually like arse. I hate to say it, but someone in DirectX dropped the f'n ball on this one. Their sample is extremely ugly code-wise and their algorhythm allows for the possibility that it will look terrible. I should rephrase that. Their algorhythm is positively discraceful with low-polygon models. Not only is the shading not cel, but the outline makes it look terrible. Beyond that, the examples are so very complicated that I'm not going to do it until someone gives me a little object that I can throw into the program and have it work on the spot. NVidia might have given me that, but not yet. They have developed Cg, C for graphics, a programming language that looks like C that is for their vertex and pixel shaders. It's a small step up from their assembly based language with zero added functionality. Why am I not bashing it? Because it comes with an object that allows you to do cel shading (if you can understand their nonsense language). Not bad but not yet. *shrug* No lesson about that, the lesson is a two paragraphs down.
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