Who is Jav looking at? You perhaps? No, just the monster behind you. Don't look now, but you might want to take care of that... soon. What's this all about? You've seen this model fifteen times at least, right? If you haven't, shame on you, take a look. But this pose is from Scene 5 Page 2 or 3. I haven't decided which. It's definitely going to be on Floor 2 of Sensei's Dojo. [Plot hidden -->] He looks this way because he sees three well armed guys (with grenade launcher, uzi, and dual customized pistols). I think there are two things that you should know about this pic. First off, it's a pretty decent pose. You can almost see emotion from his face. You can almost know what he's looking at without having to see it for yourself. The only three things that are different from a normal pose in this pose are: jaw moved down, upper lip rotated up, and the angle. I'd like to comment on the more interesting of the three, though -- the angle. Why does changing the angle change Jav's expression? Well, I like to call it the midget effect. Hehe, since I'm so tall, I know all about it. When you are taller than most people, you have to look down at them to look them in the eye. They look like Smurfs, really. When people are shorter than you, you see more of their forehead, tip of the nose, bottom of the eyes, upper lip, and very little chin. When you are shorter than someone, you see more of the chin, lower lip, underside of the nose, eyebrows, and very little forehead. I'm exaggerating, but small differences make huge emotions. In this shot we see Jav from a small person's perspective (~5' tall). Just seeing his head tilted back gives him emotion that the otherwise would not have. So we see that an artist can manipulate an audiences senses just by using different angles. However, most comics are pretty rigid on angles to use. If you try to mess with the angle too much, you'll cut off a lot of your subjects. Then people get angry telling you that you suck at angles.
If you haven't looked, Scene 5, Page 1 and low res version are up! Look at that before you look at what is below. Comments on Scene 5 are in paragraph four.
You like movies, don't you? Then why are you cringing? Don't worry, it's only 56 kB. It's far less than the picture above.
You were expecting maybe Santa Clause? Certainly not. This is the famed Scene 5 and it's almost all it is cracked up to be. The first page is pretty decent if I do say so myself. A little bit of a lesson for this. Even though this is not actually the Making Of section, I slept through last night's Making Of, so I hope you won't mind having Scene 5 and a lesson to that. I'm really only 5 hours behind. It's not like you'd have read it by now anyway. Anyway, I really had some big stuff going on. As you may remember, AS3DMD version 2 is not cooperating in the slightest. So I'm working with version 1 and it is nice yet primative and buggy. Not that version 2 is any better. The main bug that I fixed tonight is the alpha blending bug. You see, whenever I do Alpha blending, certain important objects (Jav, Shotty Guy, and Co) are hidden by it. The funny thing is that I can see the thing behind it. So it acts like a window to the soul of Jav. Hehehe. Not what I want. I looked at all the code and tried one thing after another. Finally I try messing with the order of rendering. I can't seem to figure it out when finally I make the connection, there are two frame objects. One is being rendered before the other. Guess which is being rendered first? The one with the transparent stuff. Do you understand the logic? If you render transparent stuff and then render stuff on top of it, the stuff on top won't show up at all. There's the z buffer and the alpha and no blending unless the blended is rendered after the unblended. Get it? Well, it's important. Just look at those beautiful shots! Jav's Shot Scattering Song blasts those shotgun pellets into the walls. I'm going to redo a few of those shots when I can get AS3DMD1 working again. It hasn't worked in over an hour. Thank goodness I got enough shots for Page 1 before its brain flew the coop. None of the skinned meshes are being loaded. The next few paragraphs are kinda tough to understand, but you'd do good to read it.
If you haven't looked, Scene 5, Page 1 and low res version are up! Look at that before you look at what is below. Comments on Scene 5 are in paragraph four.
