Greetings fellow human beans. Today will be short and sweet with a little bit of fun at the end for good measure. This new body is based on muscles, the previously discovered joint system, and simplicity. I was hoping to make it so that it would look good at all angles during animation, especially the shoulder joint. I didn't get it perfect, but it seems to be a small step towards a better model. I now know what will not work. Perhaps there's a mathematical or qualitative reason why no matter the skeleton, my skin will crumple. That would suck, but it seems logical. So my plan was to just make curvy muscles and detatch each body part from each other so that they can move independently. I'm almost certain that is the way to go. It adds an extra 8 triangles or so, but it's worth it. Whenever Jav's arms are at his sides, they become thin as squished taffy. Not cool. So this model rectifies that so that the bicep, the forearm, etc never have less volume than any other time. The only squished triangles are the flesh around the joint. That's fine as long as it doesn't fold the faces like it's doing every so slightly in this model. There's one temp fix to that and that is to restrict joint movement. But then your characters can't have his/her arms at his/her sides... My temp fix and lesson for you is to move the verts, move the joints, test, retry. If it doesn't work, that just means that your geometry isn't correct, so correct your geometry until it works.
If you don't want to hear what I have to say about real life, but would rather learn about this model, skip to the last paragraph.
Tonight is a continuation of a vector bitmap thirteen days ago. You might remember that this character was inspired by FFX Titus. I have a poster of him in this pose on my window. I think that the symbol will have to go for use in Scene 5 Page 5. We don't want Square or people who like Square to think less of JF just for my simple jaunt into unoriginality. I'd like to mention that this skin is 256x256. Who does 256x256 textures anymore these days? I'll tell you who: me. That's who. You can't get simplicity and softness with higher resolution textures. I have to use lower resolution textures just to take out the jaggies. One would thing that using more memory would make something look better, but that's only in the case that you have something to show. I do not. A person is a person and little more. I could give people striped t-shirts, spikes on their clothing, or whatever, but I don't want to. JF has strict standards that something is not to become more complex than it really is. None of the characters here are supposed to be major fashion hounds or tv stars, so they should wear normal clothes and have flat color faces, simple lips, simple eyes, circles for irises. Even that gets far too complex when in a real comic. If I could take out some detail, I would. But the detail that is too much is usually the background. I want to show really important stuff in the background, but I just cannot without stretching JF into 10 pages per page. Of course, that would allow me to put more detail into animations, which currently lacks heavily. I'm thinking about it. How can I put more animation detail in without making it stupidly long? Today's lesson! I think that should be that simplicity is created by solid concrete ideas. You start with a box, you add lines, circles, boxes, curves. Then you color it in and there it is. But if you want simplicity, you have to remember that knowing what you want is more important than doing what you want. If you cannot control your hands, control your mind. It is, in fact, your mind that controls your hands. That's my main thing in all of my artistic work. I cannot seem to learn how to draw well and the drawing tools all confuse me, but my clarity of mind allows me to consistently create what I intend, by trial and error. Luck has little to do with it. My main friends: perseverence and statistics. My hard drive can tell you that a large number of monkey can produce JF given a long enough time span. But one weasel - me - can produce JF in a small time span given his intelligence and cunning.
Last time you saw DA9, I called him DA4 and he had his hands in his pockets. They were there for a good reason. He was warming them up for his special move: "Subdermial Flames". DA9 is a martial artist and thug for a very weathy gun syndicate. The same one that Jav is at war with in Scenes 1 and 5. DA9 is standing around talking to three of his friends on floor 1 of Sensei's Dojo Apartment. One of his friends is DA8, shown last night. They don't use any weapons, but you saw what use two shotguns, a pair of customized pistols, a grenade launcher, and an uzi were, right? Deadly weapons are deadly weapons. Bigger deadly weapons mean jack. Less-than-lethal is just a phrase tagged onto items that take more time to be lethal. Really anything and everything is lethal in our world. We cannot protect ourselves, nor can we hope to stop it by murdering the world. We can, however, work the odds so that the likelyhood of death is lower. Lower than what, I cannot say. What I am trying to say is that JF makes the point that a well-trained body and mind can master any obstacle, no matter how violent. Superman has nothing on Javantea. Javantea has the power of science, technology, and martial arts on his side.
