Today's lesson will be brief (relatively) because I am not to happy with spending time on JF right now. The rant is another story. It is immensely long. Que sera sera. The lesson today is to make those bad models better. You know the Beatles song, "Hey Jude" right? It goes, "Hey Jude, don't make it bad, take a sad song and make it better..." Well, that's what I think of when I look back at some of my earlier works. I think "Shoot, this certainly is too good to give up on. I'm going to subdivide and delete, turn edge, scale, scale, move." So that's what I did. Part of making a bad model better is correcting the number of triangles. If you have too many, try deleting them. Usually my older models either have too few triangles or are no good. So it is with this model. You might remember this being the face of Jav from Scene 3 to Scene 5. It's been eighty some days. It's nice because it can animate the mouth and it looks decent. It's semi anime and semi realistic, which is right where I want to be. What did I exactly do? I messed with the jaw a bunch. I messed with the forehead. I really couldn't seem to get it to look like a head. But bald anime people don't look human. Just check out Dragonball Z! Hehehe. I need to add hair tonight. What can I say about my lesson of making it better? Well, after my first five hours on a model, I'm pretty much dead for ideas. I need to give it a rest for at least five more hours to get a new approach. If you don't have the will, just start a new model, your will ought to come back with a lightning flash. If all else fails, draw in your notepad. You can either copy your notepad idea directly or your brain will do it automatically. Remember: minute differences in length, angle, and curvature make a huge difference in the look of a character. Be sure to push and pull those vertices in real time.
Ah, what do you get when you cross a physicist, an anarchist, an artist, and a capitalist? 3d impossible sculpture t-shirts. Errm, well not yet, but I'm working on it. A while back I had this idea that selling long sleeve t-shirts at JF would be a really important part of JF. Now it's more getting content up, but you'll see... What does a 3d impossible t-shirt have to do with JF? Well, very little. But it's the type of shirt that Jav would wear, so... You get the picture. What we have here is Body number 40 with a little artsy thing pasted over it. The artsy thing is supposed to be part of the shirt. I know, I know, I messed it all up, but forgive me. I'm actually planning on making the impossible sculpture be partially transparent (to give depth) and lit from the right side to provide more 3d perspective and a more complex gradient. Also, it'll have a texture on it. What is it and why is it impossible? Well, a few things. First off, a torus is 3d object that was tough to understand without an actual 3d model (a doughnut, for example). It signifies the superiority of 3d modelling over real world and thinking minds. The inner part is just a cylinder that has no endcaps and has been squished in the middle. It's impossible because it has the odd property of only being one pixel thick no matter how close you are to it. Take a sheet of paper and look really close to it. It grows in size as you draw closer to it. The 3d model has thickness of one pixel but at the same time can be said to have zero thickness. Thus, the superiority of 3d is once again seen. Higher-order thinking is enabled by computers. Where-as it used to be that the best model of the universe could be explained as spheres colliding, attracting, and repelling one another, the present is able to - and the future will - see such systems as surfaces with zero thickness, yet a finite surface area, and even perhaps a volume. Here at AltSci, I say: "While the world remains impossible, we will forever strive to make it possible." The lesson today, if you haven't figured it out is that the word impossible means that the tools are not yet in place. Wait until they are or build your own tools.
If you keep checking for the latest JF, Scene 5, Page 3, You'll be unsurprised when you do go there and find something. Actually, if you check as often as you should, there's a bug in the UW Unix server that won't show it to you. The best way to check for JF is to type into your address bar: http://students.washington.edu/jvoss/javantea/latest.htm?random where random is a collection of numbers and characters that you haven't typed in before. I know, I know, nobody will ever do that, but that's what you get when you rely on others, right. Is that a question? Should I put a question mark at the end? But it's a rhetorical question. Ah, who cares... Wait, I've done it again! When will the madness stop. ^_^ Last one, I promise.
Today in Physics 227 - out of the blue - I came up with a brilliant idea to make a body that is made of seperate bodyparts that are connected by flabby skin. When the skeleton moves, the flabby skin stretches while the body part stays solid. That is how these arms are working. They aren't great, but they show the system. The system is not working very well. You can see that the armpits are flipped inside out. It's slightly better than the Jav model, but comparable to the Dojo Ambush perp model which uses a different system. I think this system will work pretty well once I figure out the correct placement of joints and vertexes. As for the vertex and triangle waste, it's pretty compact for all the detail that it gives. It's also pretty close to my vision of the human anatomy. That's a good thing. We all like being truthful to reality at some points in the process. Body dynamics is my area.
