Ah, you didn't think I'd make it. But I did. This is the lesson for 2/2/2002 or 2/3/2002 if you think about relative time and viewership habits. I'll get to that later. For now, let's marvel at this little puke of a picture. It started out as a geosphere. Remember how I told you last time that sometimes extruding and manipulating of normal objects can make good meshes? Well, this is another example. It looks like heck, right? Well, I didn't do much to it other than splitting four faces, flipping a few edges, and moving almost every vertex. The idea is that you have a sphere that has vertices at regular intervals. It works well for construction, especially 6 mile diameter domes, but heads? Not very well. I messed around with it and got a face type thing going. Then the eyes went wacky. So I tried to fix it and it ended up with crazy looking bugeyes. So I did a bit of messing with it and it turned into glasses. So I selected the faces and regrouped and gave it a 90% black material. Not too bad, right? The mouth looks awful, but oh well. 58 vertices and 100 faces. Pretty decent for such a complex face. The back of the head is much better than usual. It's completely ready for realistic looking hairdo.
Aha, another one right when you didn't expect it. This isn't Scene 5 material because I'm in a bad mood. Scene 6 it is and it's all you'll get from me tonight. So, what is it about? Well, you might remember me saying that vertex-by-vertex is the way to go for good models. Well, this is a contradiction. To make this model, I extruded a 1 stack, 6 slick cylinder from the hand to wrist, to elbow, to mid bicep, to shoulder, and to neck. Then I messed around a bunch with the faces and added another row for the chest. Then I duplicated, mirrored, regrouped, and welded each vertex. Not too bad, eh? Well, then I just started pulling vertices each which way. For curvier breasts I did a few "Split 3" operations. That's a nifty function along with the "Flip Edge" operation. It can get annoying from time to time and hard to fix when I mess up, but it works 95% of the time. I messed around with the specular and emissive color on the model. You might notice if you use it yourself. Most people don't use it because it's uses insane amount of processing to do it dynamically. But I say that's a bunch of baloney. You see, if we use fewer polygons and fewer vertices, the lighting calculations are quicker. Thus, specular calculations makes up for a lack of polygons and has a cool effect all it's own.
Ah, a little change for the better. Really, it's not much how it currently stands, but it will stay as other improvements are made. What exactly is improved? The skin is slightly better. You may have remembered the ugly model that this is based on in Scenes 3 and 4. The first major improvement I wanted to make was the folds. You might remember that the folds looked all wrong. The elbows had folds that were wide and colored badly. The front of the knees had two folds that were supposed to look like something. So for the elbows, I just made the fold thinner. It makes a small difference and makes the arms look a bit more round at certain angles. For the knee, I deleted the upper fold and made the lower fold more curvy to look like the knee is pressing into the cloth and making a dent. This is often seen in spandex or tight jeans. That's kinda what Jav is wearing, but his are made of a super-cloth that doesn't get dirty or wrinkle and is very light and tough and has a lot of torsion (ie. silk). Anyway, I tried to make it look right. So then I added the shoes texture. It's pretty important to have shoes. I added shoelaces even though I think they'll be obsolete by 2014. These are advanced shoelaces that don't need tying. Pulling one lace makes a perfect solid form around the foot. Then there's the hair. I tried to do a gradient on it, but it just looks like a solid fill. Duh, the lighting system makes a gradient, so a double gradient looks like a single gradient-- thus it looks like it's lit slightly differently. But that's okay. I learned a bit about my fifth favorite program, LithUnWrap. The cylindrical UV map works well on the kind of hair that I do.
Hmmm, Odd picture isn't it? Jav with mouth open and green curves spewing forth from his mouth. Drink too much Heiniken? No, Jav does not drink alcohol. Those green curves are my visualization of attacking waveforms. I can't say much about them that won't spoil the comic. We know that Jav is a bard and that his powers are not in martial arts alone. More on that in the next paragraph. We better give you a lesson before you throw a fit. Well, that's what I did. I was drawing a character in Corel Draw and it got worse and worse until it was a girl and then it was a guy, but it was an ugly guy and then it was a very ugly girl. I kept going until I got to the arms. I thought: fsck no, not another number fifty-seven! So I threw the bezier curve away and it was a decent curve. I thought, hey, let's try that curve. So I continue to abuse my mouse and suddenly I have a wave. It wasn't what it is now, though. So I filled it with a color. That made it worse. So I copied and pasted it to make it flat 3d. Sure, why not? So I changed the color. Not too good. Let's make the top layer transparent. We all know how to make stuff transparent ever since Jav beat up that riot cop, right? If you don't remember, take the part that is supposed to be transparent and make it a lighter shade of the sky color, push it to the back of the scene, intersect it with each background piece (ie. the cop), and make the color of the intersected thing a mix of the original color of the background object and the transparent object. Cool, huh? So what is this supposed to be again? Well, it's just a profile view of a wave that is going to kick a few arses.
