Today, I will tell you a story of a grenade launcher that spit fire. I was in the trenches of WWII 1944. My platoon had been wiped out by weakly armored, heavily gunned panzer tanks weeks earlier and I hadn't seen a single person friend or foe since. I could hardly say that I had before either. But that is neither here nor there. I was walking in mud a foot deep in a wet trench four feet deep. I didn't know at the time, but there was a river feeding my current situation two hundred yards to my left. To find anything was my only goal. I could not see a single thing besides myself and the trench I was stuck in. I wasn't literally stuck, but I wasn't going anywhere. Certainly I would walk upon an enemy troop at some point and be happy as I was shot by the only people I could call my friends. Upon finding any enemy no matter how crude, I will announce to him in his language as best I can that he is my best friend. I am no traitor or coward, but here I am. I am in a trench built to protect soldiers from an ever-coming onslaught of evil troops. The troops that were supposed to be protected by these trenches were long killed. The evil that had killed them are hundreds of miles behind me. Why should I have to follow them to be killed? Surely I'll never catch them at my pace. The best way to find someone would be to head right into where I am sure that evil lurks. I dropped my rifle during the mess. Perhaps that is why the tank didn't strive to fire an expensive round at me. Or perhaps it's because I was headed bravely in the exact opposite direction of the entire world. Indeed I had drifted far into the place where it is impossible for people to go. I knew that for a fact. How did I know that? Because I stopped hating. There's no better sign. Well, well, I've found a muddy ramp out of the trench. I'm not going to make a quip about getting out of a rut in a bad place. I can only think of myself and I don't know why. Isn't there someone else out here? Can't I mail-order a Popular Science magazine? This is my dilemma. Being alone makes me more afraid than staring down a tank or a rifle. I believe that it's probably only because I'm not staring down a tank or rifle. I was afraid then. Would I be afraid when I saw the next row? It doesn't matter. Throw myself on the ground. I'll be missed if I don't make myself big enough a target, I'll sit up. As my arm pushes off the ground, I feel something metallic and laminated pressing against my hand. Not a rifle. This is thick. I look down and to my horror, a terrible machine of war is in my hand. A grenade launcher has been ditched by a fleeing enemy troop. Empty of course, but it's quite a piece of work. Really a portable horizontal mortar. It had no real practical use. It made an impressive bang and put a hole in the ground. People always run away before it explodes, but it certainly makes people run. Perhaps the grenade is the weapon of the enemy coward. Firing a weapon that will ensure your target will retreat. But of course the enemy could advance, but who would want to? Picking up this hefty piece fo metal, I can understand what the soldier who carried this felt. He was young and ready to die. It's a perfect combination for those with money on their mind. I look down the barrel expecting to see some gory detail. There is none. I could tell you that the barrel has been violated by the ammunition that has fired from it, but I don't think that counts. Innuendos hardly mean anything on the battlefield. When your CO tells you, "Come here," you hardly care about adolescent puns. Indeed that was my fireteam leader's famous last words, but he said it with less conviction in his voice. Certainly he found his words as fitting as I did. On the horizon, the sun is rising. Orange and green mix in a waving diffraction pattern. A physicist such as myself can make comments on the irony of the fact that this is my first and last time to see such a sight. I squint to get a better view and my pupils dilate to the size of the bullet headed my way. My eyeballs detach from my head, and I get a perfect view of my beloved grenade launcher behind the sun. My vision was blurred, but that is to no matter; my best friend stands above my corpse checking my pulse. He stops a built-in reflex to seal the wound; he must have been a nurse. But he thinks it is a good idea to pretend to his friends that he got a kill as I bleed to death. Don't worry, I'll thank you on the flip side, bud.
My apology for yesterday's blatant disregard for humanity is two paragraphs down. But for now, let's learn about scenes. This is an interesting scene. You've seen it before, but not quite like this. This angle is the angle I want to use for JF Scene 5, Page 3. But the new thing is the tiled carpeting and the slight retexturing of the walls. I wanted stuff to look better and less DooM style. Remember DooM? I still have it. It was a good game for it's time, but I gotta say that the Nirvana "Heart Shaped Box" MIDI outdid the graphics by a mile. ^_^ In fact, I destroyed that midi a while ago and downloaded right after I typed that sentence. Now I'm listening to a different version and it isn't hard enough. Gotta find a harder version of it, you can't kill murderous aliens with a shotgun if your MIDI is too weak. Talking about midi, it will find it's way into almost every scene of JF Final. I doubt that it will materialize by rough draft Scene 5, but I oh so wish I could. Tool "Intermission" from their Aenima album is what I'm interested in for JF midi. But I have to produce all MIDIs myself. That's not too hard, since I've been doing MIDIs since 7th grade. Now I'm a physicist and I understand waves, I can r0X0r some MIDIs. But back to the lesson. What's the lesson? Get those walls to look right somehow. One way to get all the bricks the same size is to do that in LithUnWrap. It's a wonderful program, but I wasn't quite smart enough to make it work. What worked for me really well is the fact that I used boxes to create my scene. Milkshape textures boxes but beware extrusion. Of course, in that case you can just remap. It's no big deal, but it's a tough process. Lining up brick textures vertically is close to impossible. My advice is to get someone else to do it. Computers do those calculations so easily, it's a wonder why a programmer like Mete Ciragan, Brad Bolthouse or myself has not though of an easy autotexturer or UV typer that works alongside their program. Of course whenever you give the control to a computer, you lose mobility and safety. Perhaps spending an hour on stretching those darn faces is the correct thing to do.
Today's JF is brought to you by strong will. Read the next few paragraphs for a description of strong will. But read of if you want to learn a thing or two about 3d. The lesson for you tonight is that model ownership is not always a parent-child relationship, but sometimes a peer-peer relationship. What does this mean? Well, look at this model. The shotgun is laying in this guy's hands. How nice. But don't think that it was point and click. Actually it was, but it took more work than it should have. The reason is that MilkShape3d only allows a parent-child relationship and no inverse kinematics (IK). I hear that IK is very cool. What is IK? It allows a peer-peer relationship in bones. Of course for 3d modelling, half parent-child and half peer-peer is useful. Being able to push off the ground and pull your foot off the ground at the same time is an example of this. IK makes for really cool realistic fluid motion. How would it help here? Well, I have this shotgun model that I want to be able to use for multiple models. Instead of forcing the owner to be the same, I rather force the shotgun model to be in the same place. I just put it into the second person's hands and it's ready. That's helpful for 3d modelling. So how did I do this? Well, I put the arm in place and then tacked on the shotgun and the shotgun bone. I put the shotgun under the right arm and the shotgun bone at the trigger of the shotgun connected to the right hand. So I have the shotgun rotated all funky out of place and the hand in the right place, so I rotate the shotgun, and again and again and again. Then I see that the hand is off, so I rotate the hand and the shotgun moves. Ugh! So I rotate the shotgun back and again and again. Ugly, huh? IK would be nice because then I could rotate the shotgun as a peer at first and then when it's in his hands, I can make it act like his hand's child. So when his hand moves, the shotgun moves. So then I put the other arm in place and mess with the legs, we're ready! Idatakimasu!
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Shotty guy gets a new skin? Well, kinda but not exactly. Indeed this is shotty guy with a new skin and a thinner shotgun and a thinner face. However, it is not shotty guy. It is his friend, pacifist murderer guy. I'll explain that oxymoron in the next paragraph. For now, we learn how easy it is to copy and paste. This model is almost exactly shottyguy. I feel kinda dirty using the same model for two people who will stand next to each other, but perhaps I can differentiate them by colors, faces, and actions. To make the faces different, I decided to change the eyes, hair, and mouth. I kept the pupils of the eyes, but brought them closer in. I copied the pupil on the right and scaled it about five times. Then I deleted the eyelids and made completely new ones. The eyes seem to be better simply because I put them closer together. I also made the face thinner to compliment this. I changed his hairdo very slightly and changed the color to off black. I made the lips wider to give them a different appearance. I messed with the shirt. I should've given him a collar, but I wasn't thinking about it. I changed the color of the pants also, but the rest is the same. I changed the gun for realism. I keep switching between realism and expressionism. I want to show how stupid weapons are, but I don't want people to wonder if the guns are supposed to be something other than guns. Perhaps they're tasers. No, this is a shotgun that fires lethal shot. In fact, it does better than today's shotguns. I show that and I hope that it is understood.
