I've just finished chapter 4 on my novel. I'd gotten a bit bogged down in research on drug culture, since I want my character to have just exactly the right kind of OD experience, but I've sorted that out now. (If anyone knows how much any street drugs cost in Kansas City circa 1985, please speak up!)
With chapter 4 done, I'm pausing the novel long enough to dig through my obscene backlog of unpolished fiction. It's damn well time to get stuff out there. I've got
Once that's done I'm strongly considering a piece for Haunted Legends. To which I'd also just like to say a huge thanks to both
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ellen_datlow and nihilistic_kid for having an open submission period.- Music:Nick Cave & Warren Ellis - What Happens Next
( Clicky to see big peeeektur. )
- Music:Shriekback - True Passage
Because my John Henry needs to be standing in front of something...
(The writing is Cherokee for "eat your grandmother, Q'iche". Or I think it is. Or maybe, I want it to be. I should find someone to help out...)
- Music:Nick Cave & Warren Ellis - Moving On
- Music:Miranda Sex Garden - Bring Down the Sky
Some stats on what I've done so far:
I've generated 2.6 gigs of files, not including exported bitmaps.
The model is currently 17 million polygons, it will probably be 20 before I'm finished.
I've probably put about 20 hours of work into the model, though at this point a considerable chunk of time has been spent on things like scanning decorative elements, file management and troubleshooting some glitchy model stuff.
Things were a bit uncertain yesterday, but I've solved all my major problems and I'm looking to finish this model either tomorrow or Monday. So far I'm very, very pleased with how this is coming out.
( Click here to see a screenshot. )
- Music:Set Fire To Flames - Buzz Of Barn Flies Like Faulty Electronics
- Music:Snakefarm - John Henry
I need two photographs. A simple portrait and a street scene. They'll be emulating grungy silver nitrate photos, so I won't need to go overboard with detail and materials quality. The challenge is that I'm going to need to design Maya/Cherokee/Industrial fashion and architecture.
Fortunately I'm an expert in both architecture and fashion history.
That was a joke. I know squat about both.
Have I mentioned that I am a research junkie? I'm pretty sure my encyclopedias have track marks now.
I'm also going to need to build steel and leather mammoths, dire wolves and terror birds. The streets are populated, you know.
One of these days I'm going to do something simple and then the world will cease to exist.
- Music:Jean-Michel Jarre - Industrial Revolution:Part 1
It's an alternate history version of John Henry. One where the Maya ruled the Americas until the early 1800's, when the various north American tribes banded together, hired African mercenaries and won a peace treaty with the Mexica and by extension the Maya. This story is set largely in Kituhwa, somewhere in what's now (in real history) North Carolina. The Cherokee are fantastic inventors and have cities with neon signs by 1860. They build mechanical recreations of extinct animals using steel, leather and magic. John Henry is a miner with a knack for finding good stuff, and he gets even better with a steam drill, until it's sabotaged. Then things get interesting.
The story is written as a newspaper article in an English-language immigrant newspaper around 1943, when the former African mercenaries are trying to convince the Allied States that they should get involved in the war that's brewing across the Atlantic.
I originally thought the story was going to be completely free of both sex and violence, but I got to the sabotage part and it just begged to be told in an actual narrative voice instead of bland newspaper-speak, so it's got a bit more pith.
I'm having enormous amounts of fun with this. I'd really like to be finished with first draft by tomorrow, but I think that might not be happening.
When I'm finished writing it, I need to do a couple of illustrations. 'Cause I can.
- Music:Lisa Gerrard & Jeff Rona - A Healer's Life
I did this picture a couple of weeks ago because I was bored of my current desktop. It's the result of some experimenting with various 3d programs, stock 3d figures and textures. Just about the only thing I can actually take credit for is the posing and framing of the image. Still, I like it.
- Music:Devendra Banhart - Rejoicing In The Hands
Heading back down to Black Sheep was a truly great idea. Despite having more or less figured out a process for making good ties, I decided to go back down there and chat with the owner -- who I had been told works with silks. Indeed she does, but she's never painted silk, only dyed it. I'd taken my prototype tie to show her and see if she had any tips. She felt I'd more or less gotten it and offered me two of the silk ties she had there and a bottle of green fabric paint if I would give her one of the ties with the squid. This was a deal I could not refuse, and so I currently have 4 squid ties, one of which I'll be giving away.
The tie I got to be the 'final' turned out not to be silk, but some stain-resistant polyester. I'm not sure how well the paint will stay on, but it should be good enough for my purposes. In the future, it's silk all the way.
I'm exhausted from all the painting -- my method still involves a good deal of meticulous brushwork -- so I don't have any pictures, but each subsequent tie has been an improvement on the previous.
With the new ties, I decided to use splatters of green instead of more red. It's a very nice effect but the first time I tried it I got into the action-painting thing a little too much and it looks more messy than organic.
It is good to have lots of materials to work with.
A huge, huge thanks to Karen at Black Sheep.
Now I'm seriously thinking about what other stuff I can do with this basic set of techniques. The answer at first blush appears to be 'really a whole lot'.
- Music:William Orbit - Painted Rock
You can't buy them as near as I can tell.
Well, you can now. Because I made one.
- Music:Mastodon - Seabeast
Egyptian Funerary Portrait from the Roman Period
For a variety of reasons I've decided that I'm just not taking art as seriously as I'm taking writing. A pretty silly state of affairs for a person who considers himself an artist first and a writer second. In short, I realized that I've let myself become hidebound with art in ways that I haven't with writing. When I write, I obsessively research. When I do art, I only do visual research as a last resort because my brain is still convinced that it's cheating if I can't make it up out of thin air.
Seeing as how I've decided to illustrate all of the stories I recently wrote, I've set myself the task of collecting a giant pile of visual research for each project. Then I'm going to copy as many of the images as I can. On paper. Once I've managed that, then I'll start working on original pieces. Good and all.
This lead me to researching Roman portraiture, which lead me to this page. Go look at it, it's where the picture above comes from.
What strikes me first about these paintings is how many of them could be touched up for age damage and put into any collection of modern illustration and no one would ever know that some of the pictures were two thousand years old and painted with heated beeswax. After I look past the technique of it I'm struck by how much these people -- dead for a sizable chunk of human history -- look like people I see every day. I had that same sense of "I know this person" while looking through Roman statuary, but it seems somehow more remarkable out of these paintings. Perhaps simply because they cover so much wider a group of people.
I shouldn't be surprised when history doesn't look so different, but there's always an angle of things I hadn't considered
- Location:A coffee house in Encinitas
- Music:Shriekback - (Feels Like A) Planet
Also there's this 8-bit cyberpunk story. It started out as another brain-flexy thing from the great Steering the Craft. I worked on the theory for a couple of days that it was just going to be a really fun little short story, but now it's perilously close to being not only a novel, but a novel that I'm going to start writing as soon as I clear away a little time for writing. I hadn't planned on that, but I know
mrissa is often getting jumped by stray novels while walking around the wrong mental neighborhoods. My thought process was wearing a pretty provocative outfit, but I just cannot quite make the leap to 'was asking for it'.And yes, I'm perfectly aware that I just implied that my brain uncomfortably violated itself. These things happen, you know.
- Music:Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds - Blue Bird
Human skin is an extrordinary and complex material. Its appearance varies enormously with lighting conditions, and varies still more by how it's being viewed.
The viewer is a fine place to start. It's useful to have a basic understanding of how each of the methods we use to observe actually work. There are three primary filters between skin and what we percieve and it's important to make a distinction between the idea of perception and the idea of sight. The first filter is the most obvious -- our eyes. The second is film, and the third is the profusion of optical sensor technology of video and digital cameras.
Our eyes aren't as uniform in their ability to see as you might think. Even beyond common issues like color blindness, cataracts or glaucoma there are a huge number of variables that determine what any given person sees. At the common end, there are variations between types of color-blindness (which can rarely manifest as complete achromatopia -- no color perception at all). At the obscure end are neurological issues that impair or destroy the byzantine mental machinery required for making sense of vision. Plus, there are cultural differences in color perception. Our brains always try to color-correct what we see. Stay in a room lit purely by purple light, and white surfaces will look green. The internal color wheel got spun so we could tell what color was what despite everything being altered. Our memory of skin is biased to a slightly warmer hue than what we actually percieve. It's one of the reasons for 'magic hour' in photography.
The human eye sees light in fairly narrow band. The longest wavelength we can see is above ultraviolet [note to self: research actual numbers -- brain thinks UV is 680nm, but brain may well be on crack]. The shortest wavelength is a hair under infrared. There is a lot of visual information that we cannot see.
Film, however, can. At least depending on its chemistry. Unfortunately, the dynamic range of light that can be recorded on film is much narrower than our eyes. This is partly because our eyes can very rapidly adjust and partly because our eyes are just better. Except that film can be made to capture infrared or ultraviolet. The sensors in video cameras and other digital recorders typically have higher infrared sensitivity. Most cameras have filters built into them to prevent infrared 'haze'. Some sensors have more dynamic range than film, others less. The actual mechanisms by which film and sensors capture images is slightly outside the scope of this little essay.
Infrared brings me back around to skin. Skin is not an opaque surface. It's mostly made of water, and as such light penetrates into it. The amount of penetration is hugely variable depending on the presence of melanin, underlying structures and things like keloiding or hair density. Different wavelengths of light penetrate skin to different depths.
Skin is layered. The epidermis is the outermost layer. It is the least vascular and therefore the most 'skin-colored'. Typical caucasian skin is slate gray. The epidermis layer also contains melanin, and this is responsible for the bulk of variations in apparent skin color between people. This outermost layer is typically 1-3mm thick. Below it is the dermis. The dermis contains some fat, some lymph and a smaller number of tiny blood vessels. It is a yellowish color and is 5-8mm thick. Below the dermis the skin becomes much more vascular and blood-colored. Common lighting penetrates roughly 18mm into our skin. What we percieve as 'skin color' is actually a mixture of those three layers.
Contrary to popular belief, deoxyginated blood is not blue. Veins appear blue because there is less blood and fat between them and light. The color is primarily from the epidermis. It looks blue because our brain interprets color by context. Take a picture of a blue vein, open it in an image editing program and use the color dropper to sample what appears to be 'blue'. Fill the screen with it. It is a very slightly blue biased gray. [note to self: do this experiment to verify]
Infrared photography takes very strange pictures of people because infrared light penetrates deeper into our skin, so people can look extremely vascular.
Finally, the shininess of skin is caused by two different things. Oil and smoothness, and in some places both simultaneously the tips of noses, our ears. All surfaces are intrinsically shiny (exluding exotic materials). Irregularity is what breaks up reflection. Thus, smooth things tend to be shiny, and some of our skin is smoother than other parts.
And that's that.
- Music:Tom McRae - Human Remains
The glorious thing is, since I'm using Messiah, I was able to animate it and then go back and change musculature without needing to re-animate anything. Lovely. It's just a fun program to work with. So much so that doing some animation with it today was really very entertaining.
- Music:Synaesthesia - Natural Forces
I'm close now to getting back to the writing thing. There was a long stretch there where I was pretty much completely devoting my brain to artstuff. Sometimes I can write and do arty things at the same time. This wasn't one of those times. In fact, it was getting to the point where I was barely able to grunt much less form complex sentences of descriptive prose.
Saturday night kirizal and I attended a Prose Potluck with a bunch of the San Diego area horror writers. We made cookies, spicy carrot salad and read stories. It was very fun and satisfying and got me back on the path to writing. It was a pretty natural cap on the art time since I was able to show the animation I'd been working on to the guy I was making it for, and it was well liked. The stories we took went over well too.
In kind of getting back into writer head, I've been toying with Google Documents. I'm not sure I'd write anything using it yet, but it's certainly interesting. In the process of toying with it, I uploaded a couple of stories to see what kind of manipulation I could do with them. It's pretty nice and straight-forward without much in the way of ridiculous bells and whistles -- like auto-superscript bolded semiphore lists of coliform bacteria or suchlike. Still, there are some formatting pecadillos that make me frown a bit.
In the process of this, I read through the first third of my Ogdensburg story and was largely pleased with it. I liked the character stuff I was doing, and the effort I'd put into giving my artist character a voice that was not my own. It's also got lots of fun teratology. However, the prose is sloppy in places. I could do do lots better now. Also, having actually gone to Ogdensburg since I wrote it, I didn't get the town as right as I wanted to (when I wrote the story, I had only driven through the town a single time many years previously -- since writing the story, I spent a couple days there exploring and taking pictures). Still, I'm not sure that anyone who hadn't spent time in the town would notice the extent to which I didn't get it right.
I'm not sure if I want to rewrite the short story -- short in this case is over 16,000 words -- or if I want to expand it into a novel. It'd be a strange beast expanded out. It's about being an artist, the games industry in the mid '90s, small town life, extremely strange monsters and BDSM. Plus it's 16,000 words long.
The flip side is that Forrest Aguirre liked the story, just not enough to buy it for Leviathan 4. Whatcha think, readers? Rewrite or rewrite and expand?
- Music:Tom McRae - The Girl Who Falls Downstairs
I'm pretty happy right now. I've finally figured out how to use some powerful tools that are making tentacle animation easier. Specifically, I've learned how to set up a tentacle with a multi-goal IK rig and then drive that rig using a spline that has knots controlled by spring dynamics.
Jiggly!
- Music:Reverend Horton Heat - I Could Get Used to It
I mean, I love making horrible monster things and having a real excuse to animate one makes me very happy indeed. So I spent some time in ZBrush and Lightwave today. I'm most of the way to having the main design done, then I get to go back to my very favorite part.
Rigging†.
I'm being completely facetious. I despise rigging models, and rigging and animating lots and lots of tentacles is not my most dearest idea of a good time, but I'm pretty sure I can do it and get a really, really good result.
† For those of you who don't know computer graphics, rigging is the part of making CG things that can be posed and animated. Until a model is rigged, it's static and can only be moved, scaled or rotated. Once it's rigged, it can be posed in as much detail as the rigging allows.
- Music:HP Lovecraft Historical Society - Tentacles
Way back in the mists of time I had a Commodore 64 computer. This was late 1984. The thing that finally convinced me was the Koala Pad. It was a touch-sensitive tablet and an associated art program that allowed primative computer painting. Compared to the tools I have now, it was a joke. I have vastly more powerful art tools on my Tungsten.
In 1984, it was the bees knees.
After about a year, the Amiga came out. I didn't have one, but my friend Steve did. The first thing I did was learn how to code a script for DKB Trace -- one of the earliest ray-tracing programs for personal computers. As a harbinger of things to come, it was too slow to ever see a result.
This has been the story of my life. No matter how much computing power is available to me, I always find the outer boundary of what it can accomplish. Maxwell render is quite the collaborator on that project. Back in 1984 I would have had a very hard time believing I could do the stuff I do now. I think mostly I would have fell over when told the amount of ram I'd be using. The scene that I have rendering now is eating 1.8 gigs of ram.
If I could, I'd be using more. However, there are limitations. Windows XP will only allow 2 gigs of ram to be allocated to any given application. There's a method for hacking it to use 3 gigs (which is how much ram I have), but the last time I tried that it worked spectacularly poorly. Sometime next year, Next Limit will release a Linux64 version of Maxwell. I'll probably move to Linux for rendering then, so I can make use of all of my ram. I may upgrade to the full 4 gigs that my motherboard will accept. There are almost no limits to the amount of ram I can make use of. More ram? More polygons. More textures. Higher resolution. With my current workflow, a single human figure eats about 800 megs. A lot of that is eaten by textures. The rest goes to geometry.
The moral to this rambling story? I am never satisfied with the state of what I can render.
- Music:Angelo Badalamenti - Moving Through Time
It feels good to be getting my art out there again.
(That link is NSFW)
- Music:Dead Can Dance - Nierika
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