This picture is to prove to the disbelievers that I really made a 3d website. I agree that it could be duped, but not perfectly without a lot of math. Thankfully, the mathematical calculations for the lighting was done for me by MilkShape 3d. It even did the rendering for me. How nice of it. But how exactly did I do it? Well, first I modelled it. I came up with a good idea and I built the thing in 2d. Then I pulled a few vertices out of the 2d plane. Those vertices look like they are bulging because they are bulging. So then in the 2d front view, I took a printscreen of it. That gave me a very nice looking object to work with. I then made some text with CorelDraw and put it onto the side and top. Then I cut it into four pieces so that it'd fit into a table nicely. Then I added the page list on the left. I really like how that works. It's an actual morphing 3d website. The morphing page list is a simple javascript code that turns on the display CSS. I like it a lot. Hopefully the poor Netscape users can see it. If not, get IE6. It's not as bad as you say...
First off, this is fan art for Exploitation Now. I didn't get permission or ask them to post it yet, but I hope it's alright with them. I'm going to ask them later. They say it's easier to get forgiveness than permission. Anyway, I'd just like to point out EN as one of my favorite web comics and I'd like to applaud them on their excellent comic which is as consistent as JF's Making Of Section. Their news isn't as consistent, but no one reads this column anyway. I've already got a bit more Fan Art on the way for EN, so I really hope they like it.
This picture isn't very special. A screenshot of my desktop with a renamed link made this a slightly funny picture. Jav turned out fairly well considering the time I put into it. I put maybe thirty minutes on it. I stole the eyes, mouth, eyebrows, face, and half of the hair from the vector graphic that the 3D Jav skin came from. I stretched and turned them to face his right. Then I added a body, arms, hands, legs, and feet. The hair uses a silly little radial gradient, not very impressive, right? What's the lesson? Well, it is facing at 45 degrees. That's a big departure from my normal stuff. So the lesson is: 45 degrees is much better than head on. The forward arm has to be moved and rotated to be in front. The legs have to be shaped so that the forward one is bigger, also. Kinda weird, right? Well, that's 3d for ya. I'd just as well say make a 3d model and test it out for yourself. 3d doesn't lie if the modeler is good enough.
This pic isn't spectacular, but the animation hasn't been seen before by anyone but me. You may or may not notice that my fight scenes are a bit cold. The animations are stiff and ugly. The characters are low-polygon, so what am I supposed to do? Well, I'm supposed to make up for it, not make an excuse for it. So I spend a few hours adding secondary, reactionary, and tertiary motions to the animation to bring up the realism. If I want this to be a full-motion anime in six months, I better get going. As you can see, this punch is a little more fluid. I like it especially. If I could show you the video of it, you'd be amazed, I bet. Except for the legs. I only put a bit of rotation in the hips and knees. I need to put more flexing of the ankle and toes. So the lesson for tonight is: people never move stiffly. They always have to use their lower body to move their upper body and their upper body to move their lower body. They move their left arm back to move their right arm forward and visa-versa. Why do they do this? Not only is it more efficient, it's physically easier. Using Newton's Laws of Physics, we know that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Thus when a person moves their right arm forward, they must counteract the movement at the same time. The only thing that keeps us accelerating and decelerating in this world is friction. We push off the ground, we push off the air, and we push the water around us in the opposite direction of where we want to go. Thus we get a relative motion, but the entire system must conserve energy and momentum.
