So, what's this mess? This mess is a lesson waiting to happen. You've seen this background before, but you won't recognize it unless you decompress it, delete the first 54 characters, and rename the output BMP to PNG. I'm going to teach people here a little bit about data compression theory. Using my AltSci Any2Img program, I turned a png file into a bitmap. Then I recompressed it. Why isn't it a lot smaller than the original? I did compress it twice instead of once. Well, that's because of the definition of compression. If you could compress something n number of times and get a smaller each time, the limit as you take n to infinity, the compressed file becomes zero size. Then you have a program that can create information out of nothing. But that's nothing new. The damascus blade came out of "nothing". A program that inputs three numbers and outputs a picture. I could make a program out of that program that inputs nothing and outputs the damascus blade. Of course, it'd output the damascus blade every time unless I hooked it up to some random or some factor driven function (which would be data, I might add). So, where was I? Ah, yes, the compressed file. The double compressed picture looks pretty random, right? Well, a good compression outputs a very random compressed file. In fact, a perfect compression program would output perfectly random information. That is perfect as defined that it would compress to the smallest size possible. But perfectly random is hard to define. What is perfect randomness? Random is something that not only cannot be defined by a person with a ruler, but is theoretically impossible to be defined. Pretty strong words. What is an example? Well, the exact position of an atom is pretty random. With Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle, it is impossible to know the position exactly because it would take an infinite amount of energy. Without going further into Quantum Mechanics than we need to, I'll just tell you that we can only know the position of an atom to a certain degree and that degree is based on the energy that your laser fires at it. But there are better ways to get random numbers than pushing around atoms with a laser.
Moving down from the torso, we find: the grossly misfigured legs? No, never should you go from a beautiful torso to ugly legs. Hopefully you agree with me that this is a wonderful set of legs. I have to admit a little secret though. These legs are actually arms! Ack! What was I thinking? I was thinking that the arms look so good, I don't even need to mess with them much to get legs. Does this prove that people evolved from cats or primates? No, that takes a lot more evidence of which not even evolutionary biologists have let alone a physicist artist. It simply says that people's legs can be made from arms if the arms are correctly modelled. I don't suggest it, but I do suggest that you take any break you can get. When you haven't gotten a page of your comic done for weeks and before that months, you're in trouble. So what do you do? You make legs like you've never made before. It's pretty simple to create legs from arms if you just remember what the legs look like. Really, you can create legs from a pair of tobacco pipes as long as you remember that legs are legs. So what I did was: rip the arms off and attach them to the bottom of the shirt. Then I cut out the torso except for the bottom of the shirt. I called that the pelvis region and here you have a pair of legs. Well, not that easy. First off, a lot of things were no good. The pelvis was just a trapezoidal cube, really. I split the sides of the shirt pelvis to make it fit the shoulder. Then I joined the crotch region, but beware: do not join it all together. It should have a front and back part. If they're joined together the butt looks wrong and you'll never get a good looking zipper. I know from experience (see Jav almost every version 1-33, Rave Kiddies, Sensei, etc). So the solution is to make the crotch join in two places. Here's something interesting: Loomis as well as LearnToDrawManga.com says that you should definitely leave a space in there because the legs don't join exactly together. It'd be awkward trying to walk like that. HOWEVER: Do not listen to them on this point. Check your own pants before you try it. There is a little space, right? Of course, but how wide is it? Is it one inch wide? I hope you aren't working on any nude close-up crotch shots, because that the only time you see it. any other time, it's less than one pixel and will never show up. You on the other hand modelling and following their advice will put more than one pixel space in there and it'll look awful. It's interesting, but that's the human body for ya. Next, we got the knees. You can once again check your own knees, but here it takes a bit of practice. What I've found is that the knee is like the elbow in that it comes to a sharp edge in the front (Note: the elbow's sharp edge is on the outside). The back side, however, has a little slack. This is because the quadriceps and the calf are both ovals. They come together and you get what you find in the back. The front has a bone, though, the tibia is it? Anyway, it's what you hit when you knee someone in the stomach (if you knee someone in the groin, you usually use the front of quadriceps). Anyways, last but not least is feet. If your character has shoes, you probably just want to model the shoes and stick them on 5-sided cylinders. But if they're fighting in a dojo, they're probably barefoot. That means that you have to model the foot. I suggest that you look at your own foot. My idea is that it's wider in the front than the back and taller in the back than the front. Don't forget the heel; it goes back from the leg. If you miss that, people might wonder. But who puts bare feet into their comic, right?
You might have seen something like this before, but this one is slightly different and pretty important. I copied the body from a previous girl and made the head from a guy that I'm working on. It's tough thing to get it right, but every once in a while you get a quality piece of artfully drawn character. This girl is Sensei's Cousin's Grand-daughter. Remember her? More on her later. This picture simply ages her and gives her a normal female body. She's pretty tall for being Asian, but I've seen my share of tall beautiful Asian girls at UW. So, what did I do? I started with the facial structure as usual. Then I added eyes. The position of the eyes is important. You don't want it too high or she'll have no forehead and if you put it too low, she'll have an ugly nose. Ugliness is intolerable, so we're left with one choice: calculating the correct position of the eyes. That's right, get your graphing calculators out for today's lesson. First you got a circle denoted by (x+x0)^2+(y+y0)^2=r^2. x0,y0 is the center, r is the radius of course. That circle goes from the top of the head and is the skull. The line of y=y0 is the top of the eyes and bottom of the eyebrows. At the bottom line of the circle, you have the top of the nose. The bottom of the nose is located at (1.14*2*r)-r+y0. The lips are located at (1.23*2*r)-r+y0. The chin is located at (1.41*2*r)-r+y0. Got that? At x0+r and x0-r, you have the left (from her view if your coordinate axis is on her right) and right bounds of the face respectively. What else? Her lip liner is stretched 50% wide. I just tried it to see how it'd look and it wasn't half bad. What I was shooting for was to double the size of her lower lip, but no go. If I wanted to, I could've just copied the lips into two versions: the outline and the fill and then split the line into upper hand lower halves and make the lower half thicker. But I decided that it wasn't worth it for a Making Of. The last part of the face: the hair. The front of the hair was a quick click click job. The back of the hair wasn't as easy. I copied the front and put it on the back. Then I squished the bottom half to the bottom. But it cried out for spreading out. I was thinking about Furi-Kuri and decided that's how it should be. Her hair should be well done, but not Princess Leia or anything. Next: the decurvization of the breasts. I decided that it'd be better to make the breasts uncurvy. More on that in the next paragraph.
Tonight I tried really hard to get something worthy of my viewers. I didn't get what I wanted, but perhaps you'll like this.. This is a continuation of the previous Making Of. I did a bunch of fixing with the shirt and I added legs. My idea was to completely accentuate the features. It worked pretty well. I'm particularly happy about the chest. I have been consistently disappointed with my previous chests. This one looks textured, possibly because I'm wasting a bunch of triangles. With some work, this might become a decent nude model. Not that there's going to be any nude models in JF, but partial nudes (sleeveless shirts, shorts, and torn clothing). The actual wireframe of this model looks like heck. I'm slightly embarrassed, but I made it while I was in limited capacity. If the skeleton doesn't make it look like Freddy Krugar, I'm going to be amazed. What can you learn about this? Well, one method that worked particularly well was was to work on one quarter of the body at a time. First, I did the left arm and left side of the torso. Then I duped and flipped to the other side. Then I connected the vertices and there was the top half. Then I did the left leg, duped, flipped and there was the model. Of course, then came the long task of making it look right. Often a perfect model will just not look right no matter what you do with it. Logically, if you put the vertices and triangles in the exact same positions as the Quake grunt, you'll have a Quake grunt, but don't think that your 1/100,000,000 is coming up in the next few days. Until then, copy. But if you do not want to copy, play Quake and your brain will copy and you'll say that you didn't copy and you won't break copyright law, but you will have.
