This picture is a partial cast shot. Two male Rave Kiddies, the girl from the previous Making Of feature, Gabe, Tycho, and Javantea. They're all dancing if you didn't notice. These type of fun cast pictures are good if you don't have anything smart to say, just that the comic is coming soon. So what about the characters positions? Well, that's what AltSci3d Manga Director does. You click on a person's name and then you move them where you want them to be. Then when everyone is where they ought to be you click on the cam button and move the camera to where it ought to be. Then you take a pic and then you can see the cast. Oh, I added some lights, but they didn't work very well. I didn't want to make everyone fully lit, so I just attenuated it to 1% or so. The faces are hard to see, but the bodies are good looking. You can see that Gabe has orange on the front of his pants, not intended. Oh well. Lesson 5: Cast shots are good for the end of the issue. Make the lighting just right and you'll have something to put in a poster. I myself have anime posters all over my walls. We got Love Hina x 2, Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop x 4, Final Fantasy 9, and Nadesico. I'd say that it'd be cool to have JF posters on my walls also. It'll take a while to get it going at this rate, but with cast shots like these, no problem.
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This is sensei. A wonderful shot, I must admit. It's not quite perfect, but it's a roundhouse kick. Roundhouse kicks must be the hardest thing for a keyframe modeler. Sheesh. It only took me twenty minutes, but compared to a normal kick, it's heck. 551 triangles make up sensei and he's stealing the Rave Kiddie body model. I guess that's acceptable. What else is noticeable? Well, nice shading. Since this was done in MilkShape 3D, I can't really say much about how I did it. MilkShape 3D lights in the direction of the camera, for better or for worse, the shading is consistent.
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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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