This picture is the product of a new system I'm working on. It's the Relative Face Manipulation System (RFMS). For every awesome 3d manga, you need at least a thousand systems. RFMS is just one more. It's currently in Corel Draw, but will be ported to Visual Basic soon. It's a pretty intense system. You put in points for the boundary of the face and join them together. Then the system allows you to move the points very carefully and scientifically. I have a whole page of explanation for it. From low-poly models to super-hi-poly models, this system will be great. It'll use an n-patch system, which is popular to use these days. The n-patch system allows a modeler to model on the cheap and then tell the program to beef up the polygon usage by a factor of two, ten, or a thousand. This method was seen in a picture of Jav just a few days ago. I'm thinking that this guy is just going to be a bystander in one of the scenes. With RFMS, he was done in five clicks. Now, he needs to be modelled in 3d, given a body, and animated, but that's all really just busy work. This guy is done for all intensive purposes.
***PageBreak1***
So, what is this? This is a continuation of yesterday's picture. As you remember, I had a decent looking Corel Draw vector graphics picture and I wanted to use it. Well, this is the first step of using it. Since I have limited time, I only modelled the front half of his head, but the rest will show up eventually. You can see how 3d easily conforms to anime standards because anime is based on 3d. If anime were to deviate from 3d, it wouldn't look good at all. That doesn't say that gag characters (you know when the artist draws their character as a little runt-sized wild Tazmanian Devil-looking thing?) don't mess everything up, but oh well. But that's beside the point. The point is that a person doesn't need to know much about anime to turn a decent front faced model into a decent 3d model. Next picture I'm going to make the sides of the head and attach a generic body. Who's body? Well, the Rave Kiddie body is the newest, so that's what it'll be. I might try to change it a bit so that I can get some random variation in characters, but not much. In case you didn't read the previous caption, this guy is going to be an extra character for Scene 5, a VERY important scene. Why is it important? If you've read and remembered every news article, I say that JF loses the politics in Scene 5. Big somethings are happening behind the scenes at JF.
***PageBreak1***
About this picture: It's not the continuation of the one I did the last two times because I thought this might be more interesting. This picture shows two shots of a new Jav. The first shot is with the mouth closed, the second is the mouth open. See? You'll probably appreciate it if you wonder why Jav doesn't move his lips when he talks in Scene 1-3. This uses a half-dozen bones, just 66 triangles and some good work. With some hair and a new body would be the new talking Javantea. You tell me that I'm lazy? I put a lot of work into that pretty mouth!
***PageBreak1***
Continuity is the name of the game. At least the past three days and tonight. Tonight we "finish" this model. As you may remember, the past three days we made: the head, the torso and arms, and the legs and feet. Today we merge the head with the body and add a skeleton. The head doesn't fit exactly onto the body. First off, it has a neck and shoulders. So I just deleted those. Then I scaled the head to fit. It was far too large for the body. It looked silly, kinda like the mascot of How to Draw Manga books, Mr. Manga. But that's not what I want. I don't need a big-headed mascot, I need a serious looking character. So after resizing, the job isn't even close to done. Skinning was my next priority. The head was already skinned and I decided that I needed to add a bit of shirt and pant texture. So, to make a long story short, I added a rectangle for the shirt and a rectangle for the pants. Then I drew the centerline for the shirt. Of course, I left out buttons because I was rushing a bit. I'll assume that he uses velcro. ^-^ Next, I added the skeleton. The skeleton is no easy job. You can see it there at the right, but it's much more complex. If you get something wrong by a pixel or even a sub-pixel, it'll ruin everything. Milkshape is slightly quirky on that. So what I did was use the side view to put every joint in correctly there. But the side view puts everything at x=0. That's great for perfection like me. I just use the exact move tool and move each vertex 15, -15, 2, and -2 correctly and there we have a correct skeleton. But it isn't that simple. Getting each joint in their correct position is tough. This model is about 80% at getting the joints correctly. When you turn the shoulder forward, the back messes up. But that's also a problem of low-poly modelling and the vertex bone assignment. I'll work on it, but it just goes to show that 3d modelling is tough. But look at how wonderful a job it is?
