Tonight we get much closer to that fabled Scene 5. This is floor 2 from an impossible view. I did it just because I wanted to lazily put two pictures into one picture and show context. It is unlikely that you'll see more than a sliver of one and the other at the same time. You see, this apartment has [major plot hidden -->] thin hallways, perfect for close quarters combat. So how do these two things happen? The stairs are more technically difficult. Notice how they're made of just two triangles. But they almost look like a dozen stairs. That's because I use a gradient in the texture. From darker to darkest, line, dark, to light, line, and repeat. Corel Draw did the gradients. Then I textured it from the top view and scaled it three half times in the y direction, 2 times in the x direction. That's pretty much it. I could've made it better by adding a triangle that drops down to give the stairs a bit of depth. But I decided that it wasn't worth it. The door was pretty easy. As you might remember, The door is inset with simple extrusion. I made that door texture and set it to the inset part. I like it a bunch. However, the front of the building's door wasn't as easy. I was stupid and didn't do a extrude. So I ended up splitting a bunch of the faces and messing it up. But it works anyway. You'll likely see that next week in scene 5, but it's the same door. You don't need to see the door twice. The thing is that the door works together with windows and a common brick texture with the windows. It's quite a marvel, really. I'm surprised that I pulled it off. Another thing is biting in my heels. The wall texture is awful. I just converted the Scene 4 apartment brick to greyscale for this and I cannot say that is half-decent. I think I'm just going to make something with less texture for it. You might notice how it doesn't line up everywhere. I'm not even going to try to texture it correctly in MS3D. LithUnWrap was made for that purpose.
This is a neat and easy lesson here. You see it is JF's unique attack engine. It's translucent and I think it looks very cool. What is it? It's something to show when something is happening. When Jav does a special attack, I put one of these up. Or when someone fires a weapon, you will likely see one of these or something like this. It also will be useful to show why shotty guy is going to miss a point blank shot at Jav. So, how'd I make it? In Corel Draw, I made the outline and textured it with a radial pattern with ten steps. I wanted to make the steps as noticeable as possible. I can't say why now, but you'll see. Anyway, I exported it to a 128x256 texture. That became the texture. Then I split the channels into HSB. I took the brightness and inverted it to get the alpha channel. Not bad, eh? It doesn't work every time, but almost every time. What happens is that the black borders are opaque while the cyan middle is translucent (like water, perhaps) and the white background is transparent, making a nice object out of two triangles. If I were ambitious and silly, I would put this into one triangle, but it wouldn't work with a wide back as I have without a more scaled texture. Anyway, that's how it's going to be and I hope you like it. It's just a small feature of a 3D comic. Transparencies make for excellent special effects, I must say.
Uh huh. I was too lazy to develop anything new. So I skinned Shotty Guy. I need to anyway, so here it is. But to the right is the actual skin used. What about this skin system that I have? Well, our lesson is simple: textures include important and unimportant information. The more important info you have, the more complex your model looks. The more unimportant info you have, the more realistic your model looks. First of all, check out each part. We have the front of the head, back of the head, shirt, and pants. It's very simple. Four important objects allows us a complexity of four, very low compared to sci-fi video games. Secondly, look for anything unimportant. Unimportant stuff includes edges, virtual bodyparts, gradients, folds in the clothing, and dirt. There's no dirt because there's no dirt in 2014. There are two edges if you look closely for the shirtcuffs. Simple, but very important for it. Secondly, there's the hair. You can barely say that it is unimportant. I could just set the entire hair area to be brown and that would be hair. That would be awful. This skin is simple and smooth. Notice that this is not a good thing. Smooth is in fact very bad. Smooth means that it looks like he's wearing a skin-tight shirt or something. But if you've looked at the latest Jav model, you'd see that folds are not my expertise. Ugh. Other details I could add are: hair in the middle of the head, gradients, noise, knee shading, and cheeks. Putting locks in the middle of the hair takes serious control of your textures. LithUnWrap is essential for such work. Gradients and noise are okay, but they don't do much in normal light and small pictures. Like I said in Shotty Guy's Making Of, these models don't get much exposure, 200x410x3 if they're lucky. Next, knee shading is cool. It makes the person think that there's actually a lot more polygons than there are. A realistic knee is very hard and takes at least 12 polygons, with shading, it takes nothing extra. Cheeks do the same as as knee, but might be better for more realistic works. JF is a comic and we want to keep it simple.
This picture is simply the shotty guy's face pasted onto body 2 with a skeleton. You might be able to see that the skeleton is not done. You certainly can see that the skin is not done. Is he wearing a jumpsuit? We can only gasp in horror and wonder. No, I have stuff to do tonight, so gimme a break. The same skeleton technique went into this as most of the others. I did however find an interesting idea. That is you can put the elbow joint right on the inside of the elbow since bending the elbow backwards will only happen when Jav is breaking someone's arm (Ouch!). The wrist joint can go right in the middle of the wrist area. The shoulder is another idea, though. It can go right in the armpit and then you have to assign the vertexes on the top of the shoulder to it. That way they rotate around and it looks right. That's my thought anyway. The same can be done with the legs. That's merely an idea, so go back to work, you dog.
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