I know: there hasn't been a lot of news lately. And, now that there is, it's kinda more of the same.

I've been playing with LightWave a bit lately, as mentioned in the last entry. Though, this time, there's not really a lot to show for it right now. I never for example got back to rebuilding the whole F22 LWS and finishing the flyby; although, if I ever do that, I'll remember to save the damned thing.

Mostly I've been playing with a couple newish options in LightWave. I think I'm using V9.6 now, though the stuff I'm playing with showed up around V8 or so. Which is good, since it lets me do some stuff I was doing in the nineties outside LightWave, in C4D, which wasn't as good for moulding cubes into things leaving me to draw out points in topographical rings and fill in the voids between them with polygons. Newish versions of LightWave have an edge function, in addition to points and polygons, letting me kinda do the same thing, if faster and more reliably.

Supposing that made no sense, it's like this. Draw a 2D cube, if that makes any sense, so all you've got is a square with one side [looking at the other side, it's invisible], then grab an edge and clone it, pulling it to the side, making two connected polygons; then repeat. So you go from [] to [][] to [][][][][][][][][] and beyond. If you still don't get it, then you're probably happier anyway; but what counts is that I can kinda pixeldraw 3D objects one polygon at a time, preventing me from overlooking something instead of subdividing cubes and trying to move the corners around until something looks right...even if it's actually not.

In a related story, and something of a confession about how long I've been doing this stuff, I got a couple things scanned in from my copy of Greg Paul's book, which has been out of print since the Reagan Administration, to pull into LightWave and set as backgrounds to give me a map for adding polygons. Strictly speaking, I shouldn't do this; but a mutual friend hit up Greg asking if there was any way, this century, to get a copy of his book; there really isn't, but he apparently mentioned that, if she could find someone who did have a copy, he—meaning I—could just scan the thing for her and hand it over. So here's a fraction of a percent of the thing, in case these do anyone else any good:

Click on those to open each in a new tab/window, or just rightclick to save them.

For those who have seen Greg's book: yeah; I cheated. While I disagree that Deinonychus antirrhopus is veloish enough to count as Velociraptor antirrhopus, being on the other side of the planet from the Aptian through the Albian, I will grant that elements are close enough that I was able to clone its tail in Photoshop and paste it in place over the velo's missing tail in the top view, even without changing its scale. Which is good anyway: the missing tail's been bugging me since 1988.

I actually already built a velo once. But it had muscle and skin and stuff, mostly as a result of eyeballing a few featherless renditions. Since I know a little about this, I figure it'd be more accurate to build the skeleton, IK the bones to move correctly, then maybe add muscle and skin over that, possibly calculating collisions to make everything work correctly. Also, I've got a decent rex around here, since everyone who's ever used anything from 3DS to LightWave has built one; but I've never seen a decent skeletal model [the thing in Night at the Museum was close to decent] and I've never seen a skeleton even loosely resembling that of a rex available to download online, free or otherwise. And something I wrote in the nineties—Teatime of the Living Dead—was supposed to have a reanimated rex in it [amusingly, the idea was to reanimate the polyurethane thing in the lobby of the DMNH, which is a cast of a skeleton compiled from three different animals and two different genders]; I was kinda thinking about cannibalising that for Deadache, so I might have a use for a skeletal rex after all.

Of course, having just downloaded them from a supersecret site and cropped them to upload to gremlin.net, I haven't even got these images pulled into LightWave to start mapping yet. So, again, there's nothing of any real interest to show off here yet. But I'll do that once I've posted this, and see how bothersome it really turns out to be to try extrapolating the trinary views into a single 3D bone, polygon by polygon. Probably, it'll be as annoying as building an aeroplane, plus the weirdness of trading out logical aeronautics for IdioticDesign. Nature does in fact irk me: it's messy and asymmetrical and stupid. Whatever deities thought it up, if any, were morons.

More later....

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