I saw this woman on the street today and now she's immortalized on the web. As if she weren't already with her striking image. She's a vision of the 21st century. Blue shell (aka rainjacket), very professional looking pants and the curves that inspired this picture. In fact, the curves are all straight lines, no bezier used here. I call it a low polygon masterpiece. The two main things I saw was the presence of very separate objects (shell, pants, and person beneath) and the curve of her hips. I hate to sound perverted. Think of it as a sacrifice of social acceptability for the advancements of the arts. Her hips were wide (as they teach in manga books), but between the hips and knees, there was an funny angle. Her leg does not have a straight vertical line from side of pelvis to side of knee. It's a big angle. Anyone who missed this angle in their 3d model would end up with legs that did not look human. Check out this picture versus some of my others. I know for sure that my 3d models have straight lines from the hips to the knees. More on that in the next paragraph. So the lesson is: get those lines correct with human lines. If you want your comic to look good, feel yourself up in the least perverted way and figure out your own curves. For other people, you'll have to find pictures and people walking down the street.
Today's lesson is another look into the human body. I will detail my quest in the next paragraph, but here I will discuss my day's findings. The front and side of the face are often used as a foundation for a figure. In fact, it's been my foundation for almost every work I've done. However, it has not served me very well. So to deeper understand the situation, I took a top-view approach. The top view is often unhelpful, but using a contour model, it became much easier. Specifically, seeing the "slices" of the head apart from each other simplified the problem into a problem of structure related to size and angle. This is much easier than the side or front view where many facial features must be accounted for when generating a 3d model. For example, we can see in the the forehead slice versus the three nose slices the main facial feature takes precedence. The top of the nose can account for the eyes although it doesn't since I didn't want to add that feature. Often the angle between slices becomes hard to change, but the complexity is mainly with the subject rather than the system.
This evening's lesson is pretty simple. You know me, I like simple things. I'll explain more in the next paragraph, but for now, let's do some thinking. You're doing a futuristic comic and you want to make clear that no time passes between two events. You could either tell them in a little info box or you can display it in the word that you're doing. I suppose that telling the audience with an info box is the simplest answer, but I endeavor for better this time, I guess. I am going to put a clock into the scene and have it display 8:38 PM and 8:39 PM. How do I do it without making it stupid, though? Well, I'll just show Jav and the clock as he is doing something (event 1, I'll call it), then I'll show the clock in it's own window as he does event 2. It'll look a bit silly, but maybe it will confuse people into thinking that it's my artistic talent. Not like it hasn't been done before, but with little success. What did I put into this clock? Hmm, lemme see. I put a bit of thought into it and a bit of work, too. You might notice that the font is almost unreadable. It's because I invented it during Mathematical Methods of Physics (Physics 227) today. It involves two columns and three rows of boxes. The vertices are at the vertices of the boxes. between the vertices are straight lines. That allows for lines with slope 0, 1, 1/3 1/2, 2, 3 and infinity*. So I made the numerals 0-9 and put them into sequence for the clock. A waste of time? Possibly, yet I feel like it'll be nice to have my own font that I can use when I want. I know that I'll use it if only for the reason that I have it.
Before I teach you a bit about anime and JF, run, do not walk to http://www.indymedia.org/ and learn up about stuff happening that you should be interested in. Also, each regional site under IndyMedia has exclusive content, so go to http://seattle.indymedia.org/ or the indymedia where you live. So now we can go on to the obligatory lesson. Today's lesson is half-arsed-ness and lips. First off, lips in profile view are important and more ...importantly... hard. Ya, have you drawn perfect lips at profile before? I can say that this is my first time. Look close, even zoom into your subpixel microscope and you'll see: nothing. *sigh* I put so much work into those masterful lips and they aren't even one pixel wide. Well, if your lips look right, they shouldn't be more than a pixel wide. So I guess the short part of the lesson is that if you can't do something, you have two choices: steal or go with half of your heart. It may sound like a bad decision, but half-hearted-ness is often the best way to go into anything. If you do anything too much, it's likely to kill you. Water is an excellent example. Too much water will kill a person. I'm sure that you or I do not know from experience, but the scientists say so and I'm convinced. So, if you don't know how to draw lips at profile view, just don't do it at all and it'll take care of itself. If you really want to do them right, check out a good manga or a live model (but don't just leave it at that, interpret what an anime person would look like). There's a crack in the lips, guys have the bottom lip out usually, girls have a curvy upper lip, and rarely they are talking at profile, but if they are, their jaw and their upper lip move. A person who only uses their jaw to speak looks stupid, but you can find them in real life from time to time. Try it yourself in the mirror and you'll see.
