What about this page of JF? Well, it's a combo of 3 screen captures from MeshView from Microsoft's DirectX 8.1 SDK. It's Javantea (duh) and it shows how useful Meshview is (not extremely). The first one is Jav unedited. The second one shows strips, adjacency, and creases. The third one is Jav with 48600 triangles instead of 486 triangles. Not very impressive, is it? Of course not! Well, it changes 10 or 20 pixels, but that's not enough for me to consider 48600 triangles. However, I might just triple the number triangles and try that out. It's not a very good idea to increase number of triangles for no reason, but in this case it might help shading. It may also change 5-10 pixels for the better. That'd be a decent number for the increase. But increasing evenly can create unneeded additions, so I have my work cut out for me. Well, gotta get to sleep, 2:39 AM Saturday night (aka. Sunday morning) and I'm writing about Evas and creases.. You get the idea.
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You might or might not recognize this shot as Box 2 of Scene 1, Page 1. I resampled the original screenshot and put a different caption to give a funny little quip. What's so special? Well, what's that stuff in Jav's hair? It's a drop of sweat, just like in real manga. Sure, I can draw a little bead of sweat in Paint, can't I? It's not 3d, but technically, everything on the computer is 2d... It's just not rendered. So sue me, I had time restraints. However, I'm working on a system that will allow me to add sweat drops, etc to JF. Have you seen Jav's Super-Punch yet? It's worth a look!
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This picture is the product of a new system I'm working on. It's the Relative Face Manipulation System (RFMS). For every awesome 3d manga, you need at least a thousand systems. RFMS is just one more. It's currently in Corel Draw, but will be ported to Visual Basic soon. It's a pretty intense system. You put in points for the boundary of the face and join them together. Then the system allows you to move the points very carefully and scientifically. I have a whole page of explanation for it. From low-poly models to super-hi-poly models, this system will be great. It'll use an n-patch system, which is popular to use these days. The n-patch system allows a modeler to model on the cheap and then tell the program to beef up the polygon usage by a factor of two, ten, or a thousand. This method was seen in a picture of Jav just a few days ago. I'm thinking that this guy is just going to be a bystander in one of the scenes. With RFMS, he was done in five clicks. Now, he needs to be modelled in 3d, given a body, and animated, but that's all really just busy work. This guy is done for all intensive purposes.
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So, what is this? This is a continuation of yesterday's picture. As you remember, I had a decent looking Corel Draw vector graphics picture and I wanted to use it. Well, this is the first step of using it. Since I have limited time, I only modelled the front half of his head, but the rest will show up eventually. You can see how 3d easily conforms to anime standards because anime is based on 3d. If anime were to deviate from 3d, it wouldn't look good at all. That doesn't say that gag characters (you know when the artist draws their character as a little runt-sized wild Tazmanian Devil-looking thing?) don't mess everything up, but oh well. But that's beside the point. The point is that a person doesn't need to know much about anime to turn a decent front faced model into a decent 3d model. Next picture I'm going to make the sides of the head and attach a generic body. Who's body? Well, the Rave Kiddie body is the newest, so that's what it'll be. I might try to change it a bit so that I can get some random variation in characters, but not much. In case you didn't read the previous caption, this guy is going to be an extra character for Scene 5, a VERY important scene. Why is it important? If you've read and remembered every news article, I say that JF loses the politics in Scene 5. Big somethings are happening behind the scenes at JF.
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