Yes, this is my ticket for the Incubus concert tonight. No real art lesson today, but read on if you will. The concert r0x0red my ass. Yes, it was the kick in my booty. Incubus played so many awesome songs for two hours straight. It was amazing. The entire Key Arena was packed to the brim with kids. The floor was one big mosh pit and above the mosh pit was rows and rows of people in seats. Where was I? Front and center? Crowdsurfing? No. The last row in a seat that didn't exist. I had to steal someone else's seat. Why was I not front and center, where I should have been? Because I didn't get General Admission tickets. The reason for that is that I only learned about the concert on Tuesday. Nickelback is coming to town on May 15 or so, so remember: General Admission == mosh pit fun! What else? Incubus lacked the energy of their opener, but of course, they had to pace themselves for four times as much singing. Yes, two hours of rocking music really did me in. I'll give you a few details. First, I didn't eat dinner before, so I was running on no energy. Secondly, I didn't sleep much last night. Thirdly, someone was blowing pot smoke into my face. Contact high? No. Should I have? Most definately. Let me tell you that I do not get high unless I will it. I do not will unnatural highs, so I am immune to, yet hypersensitive to drugs which is why I do not do them. Instead, I breathe air deeply and convince myself that I am invincible. It works better than any drug. So these people are smoking pot somewhere in front of me. I can't see who, but I know that they're smoking a lot of it. They must have gone through $60 worth of pot judging from all the smoke the blew up at me.
Uh, another one of those angles. Yes, this is the only angle that this model looks good from. No, this is not a perverted angle. I thought that it was a good angle because it does well to show the light. Light does good things when used right. Of course, MS3D only has one light that eminates from the camera. It's not very interesting and it makes for bad shots often. But what can a person do? It's just a model editor. We cannot expect too much from it. In fact, adding lights would be a hassle. But anyway, we can see that this angle gives a feeling of muscle and skeleton structure. It isn't perfect, but it's good for my purposes. I guess the lesson should be: look at your models from every angle. Some angles give away details that top, front, and side leave out.
As promised, I deliver a decent Making Of JF page also. If you haven't seen Scene 5, Page 4, I encourage you to. Coming to Making Of JF and not the actual JF is like watching a promo to an anime again and again never watching the series on Cartoon Network. Hehehe, of course dubbed vs subbed is a big deal, but would you suffer through an anime with bad dubbing? Sure. Anyway, you need a lesson, I betcha. Well, this picture is part of Scene 6 and might be a part of the last page of Scene 5. I have no idea what page that will be, but it's not Page 5. Scene 5 will be at least 6 pages long. Anyway, the lesson is that streets do not look like this. First off, there's usually more than one building per block. Secondly, if a building takes up an entire block, it has about eight windows across. My block has about ten houses. It's special, but suburbs have eight or so houses per block, but only two houses wide and an alley between the two rows. But urban life is very compact. There are tall brick hotels that are eight windows by six windows, offices have five by four or so. some blocks have 4 joined buildings with different levels for each. How does a person do this? Focus... Extrude, Copy, Add randomness, save every five minutes, save to a different model every once in a while, build procedurally, simplify, modify colors at the building level, and use different textures. Then reel at the fact that you can't run it at 20 frames per second at 640x480x32. Why not? The number one reason is triangles: you can only render so many triangles per video card. The second reason is that if you vary textures a lot (twenty 256x256 textures for 500 buildings), you'll run out of memory if you don't specifically guard against it. Also rendering many textures on a slow video card will slow the frames per second down. The solution? Ah, I thought you'd never ask: Continuous level of detail and mipmapping. Mipmapping is ready for Direct3D 8.0 and up. Go ahead and use that if you know the distance computation (not very hard). Then, you have to do two continuous level of detail tricks. The first, culling backfaces, is already in Direct3D 8.0 and up. That'll save half of your building faces. The second is quadtree. That is what I'd like to do. I can barely understand it now, but I want to implement it in AS3D Terrain Works 2.0 since it'll be vital to UAV:RR. What it does is: draw very detailed terrain that is close to you and draw undetailed terrain farther away from you. Adding portals would be cool, also. That means that when you enter a building, the terrain isn't rendered anymore. Then when you exit, the interior of the building isn't rendered.
My eyes are swollen shut as I write this, so bear with any mistakes I make. I've slept twenty hours in the past four days and I'm genuinely tired. This picture was made somehow with minimal use of my eyes. Have you ever tried something different like that? My lesson for today is to try something new. In English Comp 101 at SFCC, my professor, Barbara Williamson had us write a journal every day. It became the template for Making Of JF rants if you didn't guess. One of those journals I will reproduce here now. I didn't date it, but I dated the second journal as 09/18/97. Add 43 days and you get November 17, 1997 or so. If you want to read more, I digitized a few of the topical ones in the index of my old personal website. Beware that all the info is very out of date. If you want recent personal info, JF is the only place to go.
