This pose took me five minutes to do. First off, it's made from another animation. Secondly, it's just a simple animation. There's nothing special about it. It's part of Scene 5, Page 5, I believe. One thing I'd like to point out is that Javantea has gangly arms. Just look at them! Why did I do this? Is it comic imagery and hyperbole? No, it's measurements of me using a ruler. My arms are actually that long. If you've ever played basketball against me, you'd see that I am not only tall and thin, but lanky. I wouldn't say that's a bad thing. For superheros, it's a good thing to have more reach than anyone else. If you can get a punch off while your enemy is out of his range, you can dominate many fights. Not only have I practiced this, I've used it. I won't say when, but my good buddy Dave knows. Let me tell you that a bruise or black eye is only good when it's the other guy who gets it. But beyond natural physical attributes, I am working on training. I'll give you a bit of an intro into fighting, specifically street fighting. The first thing is that hits are important. If you hit someone, it will have an effect. If you miss or the punch is blocked, it will do nothing. But deeper than that, the damage output to the hitpoints of most people is extremely high. That means that they can deal out, but not take in. So if anyone hits the other person, there is immediately a huge favor towards the attacker. One hit can disable a person completely. Five hits can put a person into a coma. On America's Deadliest Chases (or something like that) they showed a man sucker-punch a female officer five times. She went into a coma and doctors didn't expect her to live. She came out of the coma, but she was lucky. This guy's damage output was one fifth of that woman police officer's hitpoints. The same is true in the inverse, though. Police officers often beat innocent people to death with their clubs hitting them five or fewer times. Given all that information, what is the most important attribute to train: strength, stamina, agility, dexterity, intelligence, or wisdom? I would say that intelligence is. Dexterity is a close second. Agility is after that. Then stamina and strength. Why do I choose it this way? First off, intelligence sometimes avoids a fight completely. But more than that it allows you to understand your opponent's strategy and attack them where they are vunerable. Dexterity is pretty important because you need to be able to attack swiftly or your opponent will block. Agility is important because your enemy will definately be attacking you. It is easier to fight aggressively, so most of the opponents that you will face will require high agility to dodge. Stamina is also good for long battles along with hitpoints. Of course, you'd need a huge increase in hitpoints to make it more important than agility. I put strength last because seeing how few hits can kill an enemy, we do not want one punch kills. I watched a documentary about the 10-dan martial artist of Holland. He was patrolling the streets for bad people when he saw two guys up to no good. He and a friend of his were in an alley and when they confronted him, one of the guys hit the 10-dan martial artist in the foot with a sledgehammer. It really was extremely painful. The guy that attacked him backed off, but the 10-dan martial artist attacked the second guy with one punch to the top of the head. It split the guy's head in two and killed him instantly. There you have a case where a master of the art has much strength as well as skill and intelligence. Given a non-lethal situation, he could not choose a non-lethal solution. After that, the 10-dan martial artist decided to teach his students only the ways of non-lethal combat, especially the diffusion of intense situations. So I say that hitting a person once in the chest or head ought to hurt him (and disable them depending on how many hitpoints they have), but certainly not kill him. That doesn't even speak of defensive tactics. In certain circumstances, defensive positions and actions can be taken so as to prevent an attacker from successfully attacking you. What Jav is doing here is clotheslining someone. He's using his bodyweight to knock a guy off his feet. That is certainly a way to disable someone temporarily.
These two images are the product of simple calculations from two images. The effect that it's supposed to prouce is shadow effect. Not a shadow, shadow, but rather the effect of ghosting when a person is moving very fast. It doesn't happen in real life very often (especially on semi-stationary objects such as a martial artist), but the effect is supposed to do something for the comic. My comic is lacking in the effects and motion departments so I decided to kill two birds with one stone. The photo on the left is (A-B)+A and the photo on the right is (A-B)+B. You might think that A-B+B = A, but obviously it's not a true system of addition and subtraction. A-B is the subtraction of the two root images. Then adding A or B, I get the two shown above. I like the effect myself. The tones that make up the shadow look like water or fog or a ghost. The coloring of the shadow's hands is interesting to me also. The beige is mainly yellow which is made of green and red. The background is a light blue with a bit of green. What do you get when you mix them? Greenish goop. The shadow's eyes are interesting also. It's red, but it goes behind the eyebrows on the right. On the left, it shades the white eyes a bit. I think it's a nice touch. My lesson to you is to use those image calcuations in your paint program. If you know what to do, you should be able to do it easily. If you know what you want, you can always look at the preview window. Don't confuse my advice to mean that you should use the effects. Blur, sharpen, emboss, edge find, etc are all worthless for the most part. Anything that can be done with those tools will destroy an image and will require far more extra work than just doing it in 1600% zoom mode.
Greetings fellow human beans. Today will be short and sweet with a little bit of fun at the end for good measure. This new body is based on muscles, the previously discovered joint system, and simplicity. I was hoping to make it so that it would look good at all angles during animation, especially the shoulder joint. I didn't get it perfect, but it seems to be a small step towards a better model. I now know what will not work. Perhaps there's a mathematical or qualitative reason why no matter the skeleton, my skin will crumple. That would suck, but it seems logical. So my plan was to just make curvy muscles and detatch each body part from each other so that they can move independently. I'm almost certain that is the way to go. It adds an extra 8 triangles or so, but it's worth it. Whenever Jav's arms are at his sides, they become thin as squished taffy. Not cool. So this model rectifies that so that the bicep, the forearm, etc never have less volume than any other time. The only squished triangles are the flesh around the joint. That's fine as long as it doesn't fold the faces like it's doing every so slightly in this model. There's one temp fix to that and that is to restrict joint movement. But then your characters can't have his/her arms at his/her sides... My temp fix and lesson for you is to move the verts, move the joints, test, retry. If it doesn't work, that just means that your geometry isn't correct, so correct your geometry until it works.
If you don't want to hear what I have to say about real life, but would rather learn about this model, skip to the last paragraph.
