Here's the first scene. It's missing some things, but I'm happy enough to put it up here officially as the first page of the first scene. Hooray!
So what's my rant going to be about? My laziness? Naw, I'll wait a few pages for that. I'm going to rant about my wonderful system. Yes, My wonderful system allows me to forgo all artistic ability and simply program an entire manga from the triangle level. Indeed, everything seen (and more) was touched by me at the triangle or pixel level. I had to build the characters vertex by vertex, face by face. The textures I drew at the square, triangle, and pixel level. The layout maker I built from scratch and I handled everything there at the pixel level. But all this extra work required allows me to not work at all on the comic. I simply do a bit of drag and drop and there's the next page. ^-^. In the next few paragraphs, I'll explain the system.
I built a program called "AltSci3d Manga Layout" that does the layout and saves in bitmap, PNG, and JPG format. My first page used to have Cascading Style Sheets for dialog and info boxes. It'd be cool if I could do everything in CSS, client-side XML, even AltSci3D, or whatever, but not yet. Some people (those who use NS 2.0 or so) wouldn't be able to read it because of CSS, so instead I built a caption utility into "AltSci3d Manga Layout". Sweetness. The page is 640x873 and fits nicely on an 8.5x11 at 87dpi, finally! The high-bandwidth PNG version is 251 kB, the low-bandwidth JPG version is 42 kB. I hope that suits everyone's needs in that field. For a decent comic, you gotta wait a few secs.

The second part of the system is that I have most of the "Javantea's Fate" written out. For the first few scenes, I have the script, word-for-word, camera angle to camera angle finished. But "Javantea's Fate" was originally a machinima anime* rather than a 3d-Manga, so the camera angles don't fit as well. But aside from shortening it a bunch, the manga is still the same story. However, I find it a bit disturbing that Scene 1, one of the coolest scenes is only three pages long. I guess it isn't the coolest and I'm just getting used to the controls, so bear with me.

The third part is Milkshape 3d. It's a wonderful program that I owe so much to. It's the poor person's 3D Max and it just r0x0rs (for $20 shareware, anyone can buy it). Talk about ease of use! Ground-up or hi-level geometry construction, animation, export to DirectX, and an interface to die for. Every model except for terrain came from MS3D. But I am not an artist, like I said. So MS3D even turns this physicist/computer programmer into an artist! It's wonderful.

I said the terrain is not made by MS3D, so what is it made by? I'm glad you asked, AltSci3D Terrain Works, a program I built does it.orks. It'd be terrible to try to tell people, "Just imagine a sky and ground..." Lol.

As if that wasn't enough, the entire website is ASP/XML based. But wait a minute, this is a Unix server! Check it out: ASP is not just for Windows 98/NT/W2k/XP machines. =) What I do is have my development machine churn out the HTMs from ASP code. It's completely automated. All I have to do is type in my rant into an ASP form, click a button and then FTP it. When I get a DSL without firewall (MSN suxx0rs), I'll put my W2k Pro webserver online and it'll show some ASP/XML power at www.AltSci.com and www.Javantea.com. I own them both, so I oughta use them. Pretty sweet, right? You gotta admit that I am the uber domain name chooser. Until then, I find it perfect to have static pages and a dynamic back-end.

So what do I do here at "Javantea's Fate"? I keep everything moving. I'm going to work on better models all the time, and of course from time to time, I'll build a new scene with MilkShape, one of the funnest tools to ever grace my computer. And don't forget that I write rants. I'm going to write a lot of rants. Be sure to come back for another rant on Wednesday. It progresses at a slacker speed, but just remember all the late nights I spent at ye olde console working to bring this to you. The AltSci3d has taken six months of a lot of work. And by the way, I'm a busy guy beyond "Javantea's Fate", so if I'm not doing JF, I'm doing physics homework. Truly if I wasn't a physicist, I could put out 10 pages per day with the AltSci3d system. That's faster than an entire team of manga drawers, I believe. Of course, when I hit writer's block, I'd be done for. However, it poses the question, "Could AltSci3d revolutionize manga and anime forever?" In a few weeks or months, we may see.