Today's lesson is an interesting solution to the problem I had last night. As you may remember, I disliked Corel Draw's Palette system. The truth is that I didn't understand it fully. I am still a little ways away from getting it completely, but I think I understand most of it. First of all, they put the professional palettes in a hard to find directory. Secondly, they have a roll-up specifically for the generation of funky colors. The professional palettes include: TRUMATCH, TOYO, FOCALTONE, PANTONE, SpectraMaster, DIC, RGB standard, and Uniform. Uniform is what you start out with. It has jack, but jack is easy to find ^-^. So I switched my palette to TOYO (no specific reason other than I liked how it looked) and drew myself a good looking person. The skin tone is TOYO 569. The hair is 100% PANTONE 542 CV. The shirt is TOYO 332 and 333 for the shading. The pants are TRUMATCH 10-E1 and 10-E2 for the shading. The shoes are TOYO 931 and 930 for the shading. The eyes are a simple radial gradient from some light green to some dark green (it doesn't say which they are in the gradient roll-up). Pretty simple, right? Well, the shading was pretty simple. I decided to do a bit of shading just to see the properties of shading with these very precise colors. I find it very nice. All of the professional palettes have shading colors right next to good colors. It's easy to use and very powerful. I also tried a different technique for shading. I manually moved the copied vertices to their position inside the original. That allowed me to make it look like the light is coming from the viewer's left.
Perhaps today I'll talk about how I suck at female bodies in 3d. Or perhaps it'll be about what a texture can do to a model and how. Since I have a bad female model with two different textures, I'll do both. First off, we got a bad model. You can tell because it doesn't look right in either picture. The arms are too bulky for a female, the breasts are odd-shaped, and vertex are placed incorrectly. Then you got the two textures. Which is less painful to look at? You tell me. I'd say that the bikini is worse simply because it accentuates the odd-shapen breasts. If this texture were on a better model, I'd say that the bikini would be much better than the green shirt. The green shirt is just green. There's nothing else in there. A blue shirt might have been better fit to a loser model like this. *sigh* More on that in the next paragraph. So we ask ourselves: what can a texture do for us? Well, it can put clothes in where no clothes used to be. That's a plus. It can give detail that a solid fill of course cannot (ID badge, dotted line down the side of the arm, etc). It can give detail to replace shading and modelling (curves and permanent shading). Lightmapping is similar to this method but requires each vertex to store color data. It also doesn't allow dynamic lighting, so you must use static lighting. That's no fun, right? Well, actually it's commonly used in old-school 3rd person 3d games that were really fun, but we'll let that go. So a texture can do that and allow you to continue to use dynamic lighting. Then there's the the folds in the clothing. If you've looked really close at the newest Jav model, you see my failed attempt at texturized folds. It looks like sweat marks (on the elbows and knees!). Might I suggest that Corel Draw 6 allows the easy access to use of far too few colors? You see, they made it completely dynamic so that I have to either: use their sucky palette or spend 2 hours making my own. I've so far decided to use theirs with one or two exceptions. That has proven disastrous for JF so far, but I'm going to keep letting it slide. If I wise up and buy PSP, that won't solve it because I need a vector graphics program. I also hate drawing in anything other than vector graphics. The Object-Oriented design has pampered me far too well.
Today's lesson is about a virtual brick wall with virtual paint on it. First off, we have a brick building. It's simply a box with texture stretched on it, not very impressive, right? The only cool part about the building is the brick and I didn't make that texture. Thanks to whoever I got it from. I'm going to have to make my own, but for now it's nice to have. Well, it has a window into Jav's room. That's cool, right? But AS3d isn't handling the transparency correctly, so it's not cool. But then there's the mural. Yes, the saving point to the picture is the nice mural. It's a larger-than-life size mural which is my favorite. In fact, it could even be made of duct tape, an art form that I invented immediately before the WTO protests. Larger-than-life duct tape murals, who would've thought? However, it's not made of duct tape. In the pre-nano world of 2014, Jav invented AltSci Bits, a light show type device that uses lasers and micro-scale floating mirrors to project a huge image onto any surface using solar power. Instead of paint and spotlights, many businesses use AltSci Bits in gigantic morphing video displays. AltSci Bits are so flexible that even interactive displays are common in department stores. [SEE Theremin] So, how did I do it? It wasn't too hard, just a bit of guess and check. First I took the mural in vector graphic form. I exported to a bitmap and I selected the person and sun, etc. I copied that onto the brick background. But the problem was that it didn't fit and didn't look right. So I tiled the brick and cut the brick and mural out. Then I made it 512x512 so that it'd be a texture. Then I put it on a square in my picture. Then comes the hard part: lining it up so that it works. So first I lined up the top. Then I slowly stretched the bottom vertices so that they matched up with the bricks at the bottom. Then I expanded it until it was square (hint: a square made of two triangles has a perfect 45 degree angle line between the two triangles).
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This isn't just a lesson, it's a bunch of them. I guess I'll give you a bit of each. The first is the computer. My vision of the future is not too bright in JF, you see. Computers still have boxes for the processor, HD, video card, sound card, etc. Most visionaries (including myself) believe that computers in the future will be light as a feather, smaller than a quarter, and faster than a Cray. Well, perhaps with nanotech, but in the pre-nanotech world of JF, we're going try to keep our feet on the ground. Of course, that box is a 1 TerraHertz 256-bit processor, 5 GB of RAM, with a 20 TerraByte HD. It runs on AltSci Thin Client OS, Business Edition. It's running AltSci Network Status viewer. It's a simplified map of the world and their internet connections. But anyway, it's of little importance. In Scene 4, Jav will just look at it and look away. The Wall, floor, door, window, and ceiling is a perlin texture made by Corel Draw. The window is pretty cool. It's transparent. The third picture is from the outside looking into the room. The perlin texture makes the other side look textured. A nice effect. The posters on the wall are actually pictures taken by my webcam of my walls. I have eleven posters in my actual room. I didn't want the other six because they aren't as dear to me as those five. Notice the glare on the Cowboy Bebop poster and the Neon Genesis Evangelion poster. It actually looks good rather than bad. However, in motion, it doesn't look as good. Not only that, but selling pictures of those pictures is illegal I gather, so I'm going to have to replace those before I do the anime, but details.. Next is my bed and pile of clothes. You see, a room without a pile of clothes and without a closet implies that a person doesn't change clothes. Jav does change clothes and thus he has a pile of clothes. It's kind hard to do that in low poly, but I just took a 3 level box, rotated each level, and moved each vertex a bit. It looks decent enough, I think. If I was a perfectionist, I'd model actual shirts and pants in 3d and wrinkle them up in a pile, but I'm not. Next, the bed is pretty simple. Another extruded box as you may have guessed. Extrude, squish, extrude, squish is what I always say. A bit of luck made it look like there's actually a top layer in picture 2.
