{"id":3943,"date":"2015-08-16T09:28:55","date_gmt":"2015-08-16T14:28:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/?p=3943"},"modified":"2015-08-16T09:28:55","modified_gmt":"2015-08-16T14:28:55","slug":"a-uchrony-of-retropolitans-also-stupid-morpher-tricks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/2015\/08\/16\/a-uchrony-of-retropolitans-also-stupid-morpher-tricks\/","title":{"rendered":"A Uchrony of Retropolitans; also, stupid morpher tricks"},"content":{"rendered":"\"New\n

Okay, after my post the other day you may think that I’m spending all my time considering feedback from the Bizarro World version of my editor. Not true!\n<\/p>\n

Over the past few weeks I’ve been spending much more<\/em> of my time on the sort of thing we see here. I’ve been adding to my collection of persons from Retropolis by modeling new characters; I’ve also worked out some tricks that extend the use of older characters. And I’ve done a bunch of them! I left out the imaginary editor you saw in my earlier post because you’ve seen him already, and all that exposure tends to make him more demanding; while another character that I like very, very much<\/em> doesn’t appear here because he constitutes a spoiler, sort of, and as a result I’m keeping him under wraps.<\/p>\n

The tricks I mentioned each have to do with the use of morph targets. I use those already for facial expressions, and for parts of expressions, but the first new thing I thought of was to use morphs to combine two existing character heads into a new character. I’ve mixed, say, 40% of Character A with 60% of Character B to get a new head that looks different from either of its parents.<\/p>\n

This is possible because all of my recent male heads share the same topology, while all of my recent female heads also share a common topology. (No… sadly, it’s not the same<\/em> topology as the male heads.)<\/p>\n

So I mix the same amounts of two characters, the same way, in every one of their facial variations, and hey presto, new character. I should have thought of this years ago. I’m sure other people have.<\/p>\n

This worked really well, sometimes… though not always. Some of these characters have so much personality that they just keep looking like themselves. Still: very neat!<\/p>\n

\"Morphing<\/div>\n

The second trick is even more useful. I do a lot of work on UV mapping on these heads, and although it’s always very similar it’s a thing that’s frustratingly incompatible between models. In addition I calculate vertex colors to accent the creases and hollows in the faces, and that takes about two hours every time I do it.<\/p>\n

But I don’t have to! I mean, this was the really clever idea that I ought to have thought of a long, long time back: because I can also morph an old head completely into a new head<\/em>. My UV mapping and vertex colors remain the same as they were in the earlier character.<\/p>\n

I can’t even imagine how much time I’ve wasted by doing those steps manually for every head. It’s a lot<\/em> of time.<\/p>\n

I decided many years ago that a truly lazy person should be willing to work very hard, one time<\/em>, in order to prevent hard work that has to be done over and over again. I have aspired to be that person. But I see I’m not quite there yet.<\/p>\n

Truly, the Way of Laziness is a long and difficult path to master.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been adding to my collection of persons from Retropolis by modeling new characters; I’ve also worked out some tricks that extend the use of older characters. And I’ve done a bunch of them!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-graphics","category-works-in-progress"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3943\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}