Yesterday, I posted something and then forgot to actually explain the image. I feel bad. Go back to see the full explanation of that sweet picture. But when you finish reading it, come back here because I got a treat for you. This is a 3D drum. There are a few things about this drum, so I want to explain a few things about them before I go on about how I mastered this artwork. Two years ago, I built a drum in my dorm room. I bought a 2'x2'x1" piece of super-ply. I bought nylon cord, brass tubing, a coping saw, and a 16" goatskin drumhead over the internet. With the coping saw, I cut the plywood board into four pieces. I put two pieces away and they are still sitting in my toolbox. The other two would become the drum body. How does a person turn two 1'x1'x1" super-plywood boards into a drum body? Simple, you cut concentric rings out of each of the boards. But the concentric rings are more tightly packed on one of the boards than the other. Then you take the widest ring from the wider-spaced rings board and put it at the top. Then you take the widest ring from the thinner-spaced rings board and put it under. They fit together with an airtight seal. You glue them together. Then you cut more and more concentric rings until you have a drum with the correct height. It's harder than it sounds. A coping saw is the wrong tool for the job. Later, I learned that a band saw could not only do that in five minutes, but it could cut it at an angle so that the drum body would be smooth inside and out. Instead, my drum is layered. That's fine with me. It may create a high noise to sound ratio, but it sure does put out a lot of volume. It can make more noise than a person shouting at the top of their lungs and it projects off buildings and over hills. I know because people have told me so when I drum. I made the goatskin head wrong. You're supposed to soak it for many hours and I soaked it for half an hour. It was nice and rubbery when I took it out, so I thought it would be good. But it wasn't. It's as stiff as a board. It won't make a proper sound. I even analyzed it with my AltSci3D Direct Acqusition for a Physics 207 (Physics of Music) term paper. You can read that paper here.
As promised, this is the precursor to yesterday's wonderful 3D cell phone. I've been thinking, you know, maybe I should become a manga-ka. Yeah, a real professional. Looking at this, you're probably sighing audibly. Real manga-ka's can pump out something 100x better than this in five seconds. It's done all wrong. The method, the look, the perspective, and the tones are all wrong. Any professional would say, "When you're old enough to go to the university, take art classes." Of course, then I'd tell them that I've almost finished my degree in physics and they'd sigh audibly. A physicist trying to be an artist. It's a shameful thing. But I'm not very good at physics either. Last year I got D's in *counts on his fingers* six of my physics classes (EM 1, EM 2, Quantum 1, 227, 228, and a Seminar). I'll be retaking them this year. My grades in lower-level physics were not much better. Why do I want a Bachelor's Degree in Physics? I like physics so thoroughly that I take great pleasure in getting poor grades. The poorer the grades, the more I'm learning. Boy I sure am learning a lot. I did very well in math. I understood it too well. I got a 4.0 in humanities 200 last spring. I got a 3.5 in American History. I got a 3.8 average for a full year of German. Even though I've taken my time here at the UW, I'll be graduating on time. Actually most of the people who will graduate with me will be a year or more older than me. I'll be a young physicist and I will become it easily. I will not stress about getting 6 D's because I am getting something more valuable than gold. Really, the past three years have been the best I've had. It isn't saying a whole lot either way, but I want to be this happy and this crazy for the rest of my life. But when I graduate, I can't just take a job or just keep taking physics classes. It will immediately become un-crazy and I will hate it thoroughly. So my plan is to pay off my debts and do something completely crazy like travelling the world. In my travels I plan to find: an achievable solution to America's problem, a lifestyle that is sustainable, convenient, and happy, and a tasty noodle shop.
As I promised, a perfect Making Of JF. Actually, a bit less than perfect, but better than yesterday's disgrace. It's a side project that I dreamed up the other day. It'll be a dating sim game possibly in 3D and possibly involving a cellular phone. Actually, it'll definately involve a cellular phone, possibly much like this one. This is a seriously high-poly phone. Well, professionals would call this a low-poly phone since it would run in realtime by itself on a 4 MB video card (Riva TNT or Voodoo 1). That's another story*. What I want to say is that this phone has more polygons and texture size than a full human model. Isn't that sad? Well, perhaps I will take a 128x512 picture of the phone and make it a gui item. That is one of the few times that number of polygons and size of texture doesn't matter. But still I want to be frugal because frugal makes good models, no matter the usage. That is the lesson for today. Tomorrow you'll see another good picture which is a continuation of this picture.
Hello. I skipped two days in a row and I apologize. Tonight's picture is hardly artistic. I've finished tomorrow's artistic picture, but of course, I have to wait until tomorrow to post it. A lesson is hidden in this picture. That lesson is that compression is not compression at all. It is merely mathematical reduction of gross misappropriation. But wtf does that mean? It means that PNG is based on zlib. Zlib is a mathematical formula that creates an index of all the repeated strings in a picture. It assigns a number to them and puts that number in place of the repeated strings. That compresses it. The problem lies with the gross misappropriation that the mathematical reduction works from. Many artists use Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. Some use Vector Graphics. I use 3D with textures made in vector graphics and Paint Shop Pro. All of these programs take input from the mouse. Lines are drawn. Rectangles, triangles, etc are made by digital clicks and analog mouse movement. They record this mouse movement and then throw it at a HUGE chunk of memory. That chunk of memory is exactly what is thrown at the monitor. Instead of recording the mouse movement, it records the brush stroke on a canvas. Vector graphics programs save the actual mouse movements as curves. That is very small bit of information. But if you turn that curve into a bitmap, it becomes huge. Even compressing it to a PNG is about 7 times as large as the vector graphics file. Do you see what I'm griping about? This resume is 2,457 Bytes uncompressed in HTML. Compressed, it would be less than 1 kB. But it is 14,117 Bytes as a PNG compressed. In jpeg format, it's lossy and it's 35kB! What do you get by saving it in PNG rather than HTML or a vector graphic in PNG rather than vector graphic format? Cross-platform and processor time. You see, vector graphics take a bit of time to render. Text does not and HTML takes very little also. But complex vector graphics can take a few seconds to load. Bitmaps always take the same amount of time and it's incredibly fast. Even mathematically compressed images are very fast. DivX is deemed slow, but it is very well-compressed video that runs at 30 fps on a 300 MHz. So what am I advocating? A cross-platform 3D medium that does from the ground up. It would be able to do 2D vector graphics with software rendering, 3D movies, interactivity, compression, and such. Shockwave is trying, but it's not cross-platform, just Windows and Mac. It is also very limited even though they try very hard to make it good for programmers.
