Ah, more advancement of the Jav model. What amazing talent I have for slacking on the important stuff. Scene 5 needs finishing, but I'm slacking on the last model. Just like I'm at the Time Master level in Freedom Force and I start up a new game from the start. I try to justify that making myself happier will make success that much better, but I count chickens before they hatch. But on the purpose of the model, we see here that this is a medium-poly model of Jav's hair. It is low-poly in that it it doesn't spare many triangles. It is medium-poly because I could easily duplicate the triangle-expensive hair outline with a simple 64x64 texture. But why would I make such a model? Well, I'm thinking of making a system that creates textures. I want it to make something like this. I have a low-poly model and a medium-poly model with the same outer vertices. So the medium poly just has some added stuff. Then I put into LithUnWrap and it will unwrap the mesh onto a texture. Then I save that as a bitmap. Then I put the low-poly mesh into LithUnWrap and unwrap the mesh. It ought to go exactly where the medium did. Then I use the medium poly texture on the low poly mesh. So then I get a low poly mesh with a small texture. But then all I have is a flat texture. I might want a non-flat texture. So I use last night's cool high-poly technique to create a high poly model. Then I unwrap the lit, high-poly mesh onto to texture. Easy, huh? Well, trying it, it turned out poorly already. Hair is tough to do, but I'm going to have to work on it. Perhaps the arm muscles and chest will be better to do. But that'll require a medium-poly model that I don't have much expertise in. But that is where textures will increase the model beauty and and cost nothing. Possibly... That's what I like about uncharted territory. I don't know but I have a few of the tools and abilities required and I have the time to search for the rest. So my lesson to you today is: assault the uncharted territories with unequaled rigor and the fruits will be as much as you can carry and then some.
Dojo Ambush guy # 14. Sheesh. You'd think it wouldn't be so hard, right? Well, it's not and this is evidence to it. It's also evidence that I'm a slacker since I should have a fully skinned model with it. But oh well, it's not that hard to make a skin from a character design like this. It's a pretty good picture too, in my humble opinion. It started as a sketch in Optics Lab and then it turned into a Corel Draw vector bitmap. Of course, I didn't have a go-between. I mean that I didn't scan the picture in and trace over it like I should. I didn't even have the yellow notepad that I drew it on out of my backpack. But my memory is pretty good. One thing that I thought of is that this model would be good to have in high resolution. Why? It'd be cool to make his beard, eyebrows, and hair shaggy on the edges. I drew it with little jaggies around the edges on paper and it looks really good. So that is our lesson for today: simple does not always mean low-tech. To make a simple, yet interesting skin of a shaggy looking character, I have to go with higher tech than a non-simple model would. That's like employing vertex shaders to do cel shading. It's putting more technology into work to make it simpler. But isn't that waste? No, if you have a case where less technology makes more complex and harder and less beautiful (see Quake), then I say gimme a GeForce2 64 DDR. Of course, the GeForce 4 came out recently. Isn't it strange how graphics cards are just flying out of the range of necessity? Looking at the GeForce 4 demos (especially the real-time fur wolfman) make me ill to my stomach. It looks like heck. Why would they try to tout their card as the maker of such a terrible looking demo? Well, it all started with a pink fur bunny, but I say that the use of fur in graphics ends there.
***PageBreak1***
Hoo-wah! I'm especially happy about this because I've been trying to do it and never succeeding. Tonight, I thought I was going to do something lame or nothing at all, so this lets my hope shoot for the stars. Here's a little explaination. I have wanted to give JF characters actual texture to their clothing etc. The only thing that I can do with Corel Draw and Corel Photo-Paint is try to not mess it up. You saw my Jav clothing folds, right? /me spews chuncks all over the monitor. Aww, now I gotta clean that up. Anyway, I came up with a system a while back where I could model very high-polygon models and take pictures of them and then texture the low poly models with them. Sounds iffy, right? Well, the only iffy that I found is getting the right tools together. You can see that the base model is very simple. I made it out of an 8 slice, 4 stack cylinder. I did some edge flipping and some squishing, but that's it. It isn't as low poly as the Jav model or anything, but that's okay. Then I went into Microsoft's Mesh Viewer (it comes with the free DirectX 8.1 SDK) and selected N-Patch. I grabbed the scroll bar and threw it to where I could get 20 fps (900 fps is where it started). The cool thing about N-Patches in DirectX is that they use the normals of the vertices to interpolate the position of the new vertex. What's the end result? Curviness. It isn't perfect, so you have to give it patience or simplicity, but it does its job. So I went into LithUnWrap and made a blue texture with shinyness to 128 (of 128) and gave it a specular color of very dark grey. I previewed it in six different positions and there you see the result. It looks like rubber. Of course, Jav doesn't wear cyan rubber pants in 2014 or 2002, but with a bit of messing around, I'll have a better pair of pants, I assume. Add some time and I'll have a shirt. After a while, I'll have shoes (imagine modelling the actual shoelace from a long thin cylinder). I think it's a good idea. It isn't a flawless plan since it looks like the light is always at the front and side, but I might think of something. One major thing is the folds. I couldn't really understand folds until I saw this accidental tapering of the back of the shin. This shows how light interacts with such a complex system on a trivial level. Computers are all about plug and chug. A physicist does the integrals, figures out the equation that has one unknown variable per equation. It's not as easy as you think, but it's only four years of college. I hardly think that anyone who wants to understand it will have any trouble with it.
Today is all about Freedom Force. As I said yesterday, I've been playing it non-stop since you don't want to know when. Interesting things are all over the place. I think the most important lesson to be learned is that nothing is hopeless. This is something that I require myself to reaffirm from time to time. How do I do that? I play video games. You see, video games are supposed to be challenging. If they have no challenge, then why are you playing it? For the story? For the eye-candy? For the fun of having your friends watch you play for hours? *shrug* I play games because they present a challenge and they make me think while having fun. Freedom Force made me think a lot about hopelessness. It's a challenging game. On the easy setting, I'm having a bunch of trouble. Each villain is equally rougher than the last. I often end up having to use the shortcoming of the game design to win. Hiding under a giant duplication ray is actually the smart thing to do in real life, but for it to be fun, it should have machine gunners at the base of it or an electric fence. But anyway, I would die. I would say to myself: "This is nuts! How am I supposed to win? This is on the easy setting and I'm being clobbered." But then I thought: there's a lot of people who have beaten the game on hard and here I am complaining about the easy setting. So then I think, "I'll put a bit more work into cracking a few skulls together and then I'll get it." So I do and it works out. Doing things the hard way will get you nowhere. But giving up on a challenging task is hardly prudent. This can be carried onto real life. One may see that graduation is stacked against him/her, but doing it right, trying over, and sticking with it will win the battle. That is what a challenging video game should teach you.
