Ugh, I am tired. I'm waiting for my computer to finish a task before I go to sleep. ... My mind is kinda fried, so I'm going to go to sleep and wake up tomorrow hoping to be doing better. I have a tough thing to do tomorrow. Wish me luck. T-6:00 and counting. This rant will be short. I wanted to give people a few hints on my status. Gundam Wing is actually very intellectual even if it is 'just a cartoon'. Like many anime, the depth is quite amazing. I'm on dvd#3. I watched 28 days later last night. It was pretty decent. I read pretty deep into it. While I am not afraid of a deadly virus wiping out Britian, the reality of that movie is quite thrilling. Yup. I liked the taxi scene quite a bit even though it was a deleted scene. Also, the music video is quite good and actually covers almost all of the movie in chronological order, so go for it.
Greets, I wish I could tell you about all the stuff I'm doing, but I'm kinda torn between talking about good stuff and doing good stuff. You see, Robat taught me lessons, but I'm repeating those mistakes already even though I tell people that I will not. You see, instead of building an ornithopter, like I had originally set out to do, I spent time defending the theory that a flapping robot using muscle wires could fly. Ornithopter builders, electronics experts, programmers, and every person off the street said that Robat was impossible. None gave a concrete reason. Most of their reasoning was simply: muscle wires cannot provide enough strength. Back before I understood levers, I did the numbers: the wing was ~32g, the muscle wire could lift 1kg. Simple, huh? Well, the muscle wire would only contract ~0.1% which means that a long piece of wire would contract only a few mm. So to get the wing to move the required 0.2m, I would need to use a lever. I created it and it worked fine. But the lever would require ~20kg to lift it. No problem, just hook up 20 muscle wires in parallel. There wasn't really a problem with electricity with 20 long wires. So, the problem is solved. The next problem was stability. Using Robat as a glider showed the inherit instability of my design. It would nose dive for two reasons: The center of mass was in front of the center of lift and the wings had unstable drag during forward non-flapping movement. The center of mass could be brought back easily by changing the weight configuration. The wings having unstable drag could be solved by changing the shape of the wings. Those problems were solved. The thing that sunk the design of Robat was the flapping downwards instead of using normal aeroplane physics. You see, planes use a propellor to gain speed and the wings to generate lift. Birds use their wings to gain speed and to generate lift. Robat, on the other hand, was designed to use the wings to generate lift, but not gain speed. You see, I forgot to design speed into Robat. Forgive my stupidity, I was young and I learned my lesson. The idea was to have a hummingbird type system where it could hover just because it was flapping enough to cancel gravity (very hard). You see, it was fairly heavy. Not compared to planes which have very heavy engines. In total it was ~100g. Flapping wings at 3 Hz will not sustain that. However, it is my opinion that Robat could be redesigned to support forward motion and gain lift from wing shape instead of flapping. The flapping would advance forward motion and the forward motion would promote lift. This is a much more traditional model for ornithopters. Also, a much lighter, smaller, energy-efficient model could be made to achieve flapping flight with muscle wire. For example, the wings could be made shorter to decrease the energy needed to propulse them. The wing materials could be more light. The body could be made of thinner plastic. The electronics could be made very simple. A very efficient energy/weight battery could be used. One day I will open up XFig and design it, then I'll buy $100 of materials and build it. The day after, I will fly it and it will fly away. But here I am doing what caused the previous failure: telling you how it will work instead of making it work.
Greetings. Hopefully tonight's Making of JF will be short. I'm kinda backing up against a deadline. Hopefully I'll be able to get something done by Oct 1 to show you. My new job is picking up, so HM will lose a bit of steam, but as you can see here, I'm not giving up. No sir. No mam. This is a girl that I drew a while back at the same time as this one and . While you probably don't care, I dated the day that I scanned it as 2003-08-16. It's a good thing to keep dates on things so that I or you can know what is going on when. A year down the road no one will remember anything, so one ends up with messy memories. But my second favorite philosopher, Juliette Lewis (Strange Days, Natural Born Killers) said: "Memories fade for a reason." and also "There's one way that movies are better than playback -- when it's over, the credits roll up and you know it's over. IT'S OVER!" Anyway, I hope that one day my pack-rat-ism will benefit me or someone else. It's a burden to keep memories, data, and random info on hand or in storage, but I feel that it's quite necessary.
Tonight, I did another one just like tonight's MoJF. Cool, huh? I vectorized this the same day as I vectorized another that I drew in pencil on the same day as I drew it on pencil. Are you confused? I am. Well, like I said on tonight's second MoJF, this is the third MoJF tonight. I think it's a good thing. Being able to trace something so quickly is a good trait for a cg artist. This image is funny because the original was slightly tilted. That happens often in pencil. Of course, cg is never tilted unless you want it. It's kinda odd because the cg looks younger than the pencil. Why? Well, a few things. I used her right eye which looks younger than the right eye. That's a small difference. The second reason is that the pencil is grey while the cg is in colors that are bright. Another is that the mouth is larger. Why? Because XFig has several modes of positioning: any, 0.1 in, 0.2 in, etc. So I wasn't able to make the lips any smaller than 0.2 in without going into any position mode which is harder to control. I mean, the lips look decent, but they don't look as old as the original. Also, I mirrored the legs and made them thinner which made them a little sexier. Also, I had a problem with the waist so I had to pull the waist in such a way to make it look like her breasts are quite disproprotionate to her waist. While that isn't a big problem with manga and anime since women are naturally plentifully endowed with gazonga melons implanted into their chest.
