Tonight is a lame JF, but last night's was worse. You won't find it using the VCR because it wasn't there. Last night I skipped Making Of JF for the first time in weeks. Of course, the whole last week has been a bunch of pictures full of excuses of why I'm not doing a real Making Of JF. So tonight's is the best since two nights ago. What I'm doing is I'm showing you a little of what I've been thinking recently. You know how JF is all 24-bit, right? It comes right out of the renderer through anti-alias resize and into your retina at as high a color as your computer can output. Well, these pictures are not 24 bit. The top left is lossless compared to 24-bit (aka the same as 24-bit), but there's only five blooming colors. The top right is a funny one. It is actually the same picture but colors changed to fit the uniform safe colors of the web. Interesting how the skin color is sandy/pink/peach. There isn't a yellow skin color. Which means anyone seeing a picture of Yakuzas using an 8-bit monitor will actually see Hawaiian mobsters. ^_^ So what is a guy to do? Diffusion is okay for large pictures, but not smaller ones. As you see below, the B&W diffusion looks terrible seeing the grayscale source to its left. What about 8-bit diffusion? It's rough. What's this I hear about 4-bit diffusion and palleted? Well, 16 colors is small, but that's what anime is about. You see you have, black, white, skin, skin shadow, shirt, shirt shadow, shirt 2, shirt 2 shadow, pants, pants shadow, hair, hair shadow, eyes, eyes shadow, shoes, shoes shadow. That's sixteen. For highlights, you can diffuse white with the material color. Why are there two shirt colors? Who's wears a single color shirt? So that says that 4-bit is possible. Is it preferrable? Well, how about some math? Say you have a picture collection that you want to distribute to the web. You have 800 pictures, 640x480 with 256 colors. That's 234.4 MB plus palettes. Would you believe that PNG compression is a factor of 14 on simple pictures such as this? So then you have 16.7 MB. That's hefty for a lot of downloaders, but it depends on if you want to just zip it or if you want to give it a hard navigation thing with pop-up ads. If your picture has sixteen colors, you can do 4-bit with no diffusion. You get an instant halving of all your bandwidth cost, 8.4 MB. That'd be nice, but it's very unlikely. Why is it unlikely? Simply because most people don't have two shirts, one pants, skin, black, and white. You need background, more than two characters, and the beauty of diffused CG. So you add a bit of diffusion around the borders. It looks good and some people like the old-school feel of a 4-bit diffuse anime picture. I know I sure do. Diffusion is not well liked by PNG. You see, PNG is based on zlib (the same thing as in winzip) which compresses using these pattern recognization things, right? How does it do it? The first thing it does is gets rid of patterns. If you type 123123123123123123123123, it'll type 123x8 and it'll decode it to type 123 8 times. You see how zip just takes something repeated and ditches it? It's linear, so it only works across the row, not down the column pixels. The second thing it does is looks for patterns within the patterns. If you have a box, it will see the pattern in that, and will repeat the row. Random diffusion makes zlib mad. There is supposedly no pattern to randomness, so a lot of random diffusion makes it heavier than the 8-bit. We certainly don't want to decrease quality in order to increase file size. Ordered diffusion is better, but only if it's got a solid pattern. Also, you can't have much of it or it won't get it at all. What zlib does after that is anyone's guess, but it doesn't decrease size very much. You can see how simple an algorhythm zlib is, right? In fact, it's absolutely awful! You see, the original 24-bit 3d CG w/ gradient had a compression of 6.74 under PNG. That's good for a gradient, full of color, and complex to boot, but check out the lossy JPG! It's 18 kb vs the png's 166 kb. A next-to-lossless JPG version is just 32 kb.
I'm doing okay, it's a rough week. This credit load is finally revving up. I had a midterm on Monday in History, a Lab yesterday, Midterm in EM today, Rough draft of my paper on gravity due tomorrow, and midterm in Mathematical Methods of Physics friday.
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Today's wonderful picture tells you that all the models have been successfully imported and situated. They aren't in the correct positions and I'm still wondering how in the world I'm going to make it happen, but that's not tonight's job. Tonight's lesson is: kick a few asses, take a few names, and move along. I remember a Seattle Police officer pushing a guy next to me for no reason. His name was Maloney. No shit, real name. I went to JusticeFiles.org and found that he is indeed a police officer in Seattle Police Department. I know that pushing someone does not fit into that line of "serve and protect" bullshit they talk about. Murder doesn't either. If you weren't aware, the Seattle Police have murdered six people this year, none of which needed to be killed. I know that none of the murderers have gone to jail. I know that the police chief has lied through his teeth to keep murderers from seeing any type of justice. I say arrest them all. Put them in jail with the non-violent offenders. Put them in with the violent sex offenders. Put them on death row. Put them back into the community without the privilage of ever owning a gun legally. Put them back into the community with a slap on the wrist. Send them to Idaho where they'll be safe from people who don't like being murdered. *shrug* Send them out with a badge, gun, and extra pay? Not in a billion years.
