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volume 1, issue 31

Today in loonygames:

New!! The Archives have been cleaned up, fead links fixed, and printable versions restored! Also, don't miss the new comments on the front page!

Livin' With The Sims: theAntiELVIS explores the wild and wacky world that is Will Wright's The Sims, asking the inevitable quesiton, "is The Sims the first step toward a virtual life where everyone is Swedish?"

Pixel Obscura: Josh Vasquez on Omikron: The Nomad Soul.

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Thinking Outside the Box:
The Many Faces of Kelly Monaco

(Part 1)

By Paul "Villam" Steed

 

Here’s another, er…shot.

Looks nice and smooth, right…

…ACK! There’s all kinds of goofiness going on there that is almost impossible to pickup in a smooth- shaded mode. In wireframe you could probably pick it up if you rotated and zoomed and dicked around for 2 or 3 minutes, but HEY! We got things to do and hot chicks to build so I don’t want to waste a whole freakin’ 180 seconds trying to see if Kelly’s butt is smooth! (gasping…panting…wheezing like Animal, the drummer from the Muppet Show…)

Here’s the quick fix by turning the edges…

A quick fix I might add that would have easily been seen had I strictly been in what mode? Riiiiggght. The ‘Faceted’ mode.

I won’t illustrate it since this faceted equine is getting a right proper beating, but along with those edges, manipulating vertices with ‘Faceted’ on in a single Perspective viewport with your ‘View’ or ‘Screen’ coordinate system is fast, fun and effective as hell. Do it, do it, do it.

Now let’s do Kelly. Well, let’s build her polygonal representation at least.

We’ll start with her legs using the ‘choke the chicken’ method I discovered while doing the flight icon for Q3:A. We need to set up our reference so let’s talk about that first…

The main thing to remember here is we’re going to map our reference onto a box in Max and it has to be of maximum resolution and clearly visible. Provided you’re using your GL drivers instead of the Heidi ones in your Max preferences the importance of your reference images being a power of two is academic. The image I’m using for reference was first sized to a height of 512 pixels. The width was slightly less than 256 pixels so I just expanded the canvas to 256 to make it even. This is very important, this ‘power of two’ thing and with the berserko proliferation of 3d hardware vendors and cards, it will only become more important as time goes on.

So we go into Max, make a material called ‘legref’ and create a box that’s twice as high as it is wide (512 x 256 texture) in the front viewport. Map the material onto the box (don’t worry about applying a ‘UVW Map’ modifier; the material will show up on the box correctly…).

Now go to the ‘Create-Shapes’ command panel and click on ‘Line’…

(Continued on next page)

Credits: Thinking Outside the Box logo illustrated and is © 1999 Dan Zalkus. Thinking Outside the Box is © 1999 Paul Steed. All other content is © 1999 loonyboi productions. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited, so don't even try it. We've got really big guns, and we're ripped, baby.