It occurs to me that maybe I shouldn't be trying to do the whole of West Alcove at once, but should begin with a few buildings and work up from there ... But here's the gardens, albeit without much flowering stuff. The flowering stuff will come when I work out how to do it without megapolygons. I did throw in two flowering cherry trees. And Lynda, what colour do you envision West Alcove as being?


posted by Anonymous at 17:54   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Now you see it, now you don't. What is it with July 27, 2003, the entry that seems to annihilate everything that follows it ... I am posting this in hopes of making the last 6 months reappear, because we do not have a 6 month embargo on new posts, vent it!
posted by Anonymous at 21:37   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Monitum in autumn. The foreground was rendered in Vue, the background created in Terragen, assembled in Photoshop. When Lynda suggested Monitum, I thought the scene should be autumnal, in keeping with that house's decline and mood. (Ditatt would agree with the latter, but he'd be after me with a horsewhip for the former). The infamous blue (the native vegetation that gives Monatese Turquoise its colour and toxicity) is not as evident as it might be because the grass in the foreground is dark green, and there's a blue haze in the background. I might put more yellow into the grass, but it could start to look rather artificial; will think about this. Vue was giving me a red flag on the number of polygons: over 3 million, because of those trees.



Silver Hearth. Rendered in draft, and it still took overnight - though the computer seems to have snoozed off in the middle. It's not so much the time that concerns me, it's the CPU heat generated that concerns me; a G4 runs hot! Before I add Luthan, in all her regalia, which I surely will, I will have to find a shorthand that conveys "chandelier" without putting a 26-light-source object in the middle of the scene. I wonder what the clever people at Pixar use, aside from restraint?



Of course, there is the additional small detail that to get the lustre I wanted for the walls, particularly the midsection, the patterns are colour mapped onto a white translucent material, adding another major computational load.

posted by Anonymous at 06:05   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Another problem. e-mail passwords need renewing. Please e-mail me with a password. I'll put it in. Once you can log onto squirrelmail you can change it.
posted by David at 18:12   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Our hosting server moved the site to a new server and had a few problems. Everything is back as it should be EXCEPT that various passwords got changed. The FTP access password among others.
So if anyone has problems please e-mail me (david@okalrel.org).

posted by David at 16:56   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
testing, testing
posted by Anonymous at 07:58   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Some planet somewhere! But I still think it's pretty. This started out with the idea of the pool and the arches overhead. The tile is a bit plain, but any more intricate tile is overwhelming. I think I must explore bump maps and get away from the flatness.



posted by Anonymous at 13:58   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Email from Brian yesterday contained the following:

ForeWord Magazine's BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD FINALISTS ANNOUNCED



The best ideas have always come from independent thinkers, and we at

ForeWord Magazine believe this maxim holds true for written ideas as well.

Six years ago, ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Awards was established

to bring increased attention to the literary achievements of independent

presses and their authors. The editors of ForeWord are pleased to present

the following titles as finalists, and congratulate the authors and

publishers of these exceptional books.



For those of you planning a trip to BookExpo America this year, plan to take

a break and join us as we announce and celebrate the 2003 Gold, Silver and

Bronze winners as well as the Editor's Choice Prizes for Fiction and

Nonfiction. Notable guest speakers will discuss the merits of working with

small publishers.



-Mardi Link, editor at large. ForeWord Magazine



Finalists in the Fiction SciFi Category



Arcalian Apocalypse

By Michael Anthony Cariola

1stBooks



The Hand in the Mirror

By M. Bradley Davis

1stBooks



Younger

By Judith Sulzberger

Apple Trees Productions



The Light of Eidon

By Karen Hancock

Bethany House Pub



Throne Prince [sic!]

By Linda Williams & Alison Sinclair

Edge Science Fiction & Fantasy Publications



Dreams of the Sea

By Elisabeth Vonarburs

Tesseract Books



Ring

By Koji Suzuki

Vertical Inc

Hmm, does that mean we're not actually nominated, and this "Throne Prince" book is?
posted by Anonymous at 08:48   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
I've taken the liberty of adding a person to the Flashing Floor. If I can get this right...


(click for larger pic)


Virginia
posted by Anonymous at 13:05   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 



Even if it's only "Save yer work, ya twit!" (The little text across the menu bar says "Untitled"). Vue has so far been well-behaved, and does not offer false hope with that invitation to save. However, today it decided to withdraw that hope.

As I said, the Gods are trying to tell me something. Maybe, "No scene needs 8 flowering cherry trees."

Although the great thing about OS X is that the program that crashes, crashes alone, instead of taking the whole system down with it. (Not so fond memories of Netscape 3 and Mac OS 7.5).
posted by Anonymous at 20:55   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 

posted by Anonymous at 08:20   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Going from a symmetrical fractal diagram to something asymmetric - using Photoshop to go from polar to rectangular coordinates.


posted by Anonymous at 00:02   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
I said (on the phone) I wasn't going to do this but ... How about Twiki?. I believe it does HTML. One I've heard is straightforward is UseModWiki.

Article at Information Today: Quickiwiki, Swiki, Twiki, Zwiki and the Plone Wars Wiki as a PIM and Collaborative Content Tool.
Article at First Monday: Collaborative development of open content.

My eyes are puffing shut. Time to go to bed!

posted by Anonymous at 23:44   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Still tinkering with the Fountain Court picture. Replaced the terrains that had been standing for the fountain with ovoids of 'foamy water' - preset with a bit of extra density. Mixed the grainy beige of the walls with one of the Marlin Studios free downloads from their SF series, an image of a hull, but at that scale and in the mix, it gives a suggestion of grid, which helps shows the angles of the walls. Mixed in the grainy beige of the walls with the floor tile. Enlarged the texture on the Black Hearth doors and the Green Hearth doors, though the Green Hearth door still doesn't show the wood grain.


posted by Anonymous at 19:06   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Don't know where, yet. Looks Demish. The impetus - to construct a curved room with windows on the inner wall - came from a sketch by George Gilbert Scott of the coffee room of the hotel at London St. Pancras, page 46 in Masterpieces of Architectural Drawing (Helen Powell and David Leatherbarrow, eds). Two views, one using a daylight atmosphere (with rather too much blue haze in the default) [deleted], and one using a sunset atmosphere.



7:01 pm - edited this post to add a better daylight picture, minus the blue haze.
posted by Anonymous at 17:01   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Just the interior - I have to build the rooms around it yet. Might need to adjust perspective - those doors seem rather large, so I may well fill them in with latticework. Wonder what it means when the polygon count appears in red?? Maybe I've merely not noticed them before, or maybe I'm overdrawn on the polygon bank! The first picture has a link to a larger version; the second is a detail of the walls without a larger version.


posted by Anonymous at 12:08   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Inspired by a Discover article (again) to add a commentary article to the ORU web site. Article featured evidence of "hardwiring" in our emotional reactions to moral issues that is detectable using MRI techniques. The article I wrote discusses Reetion psych profiling in light of this inspiration, but a second resonance for me was the "yep, we're doomed" feeling of discovering that, indeed, people do not tend to have those moral, emotional reactions when the stimulus of immediate fellow human beings is removed. That is, we might be able to use our evolved fail safes to damp down a face to face fight, but it's all academic when it's a red button and the gore is not "in our face". I'd count that a vote in favor of Sword Law, as a survivable solution to human conflicts, too. If we take the people factor out of decisions, we are apt to treat existance like a video game. And we KNOW how careful we are about not blowing up the universe in THOSE.
posted by Lynda at 10:38   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Fountain Court, with doors to Red Hearth, Black Hearth, and Green Hearth. Note reflection on the Red Hearth red metal door! I like the sandstone texture I have for the walls and ceiling now; doesn't look so flat, though now I look at it again those tiles are too bright and even for 1000 years of feet; I might mix them with the sandstone. Took about a half hour to render in final mode, and as it rendered I stared at it and thought 'that fountain spray is the wrong shape'. Would make rendering easier if I did them with primitives rather than terrains. My computer would thank me: 30 minutes running with the fan going the whole time. Click for a larger picture.


And this (from a screenshot) was what it was coping with.

posted by Anonymous at 21:44   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
I can quit any time I want ... In the meantime, inspired by a photo in one of the architecture books I have borrowed from the library (James Steele, Architecture Today, p 234), I have tackled Ilse's house (Ilse, for other readers, is a Blue Demish midlord who gets caught up in Erien and Ditatt's efforts to transform Gelion, judicially and technologically). She lives down on the Apron District, below the Citadel (we need a map!). The blue sky is very un-Gelion, but I need the preset atmospheres for the sunlight until I tackle the building of an atmosphere from scratch.
Click on the image to see a large version: 640x480. Not too bad to render, compared to the fountain. I did a certain amount of manipulation to try and lift the white walls - adding a spot behind one of the front pillars and actually putting the white in the mix to luminous. Still haven't got the whiteness it has in the photograph. I think the key is reflective surfaces offstage, spilling light onto the scene.



The tiles come courtesy from the collection of free GIFs provided by the Architectural Engineering Graduate Students Association at Penn State U. The woods come from LEMOG Maya 3D Graphics.
posted by Anonymous at 18:33   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 

posted by Anonymous at 09:47   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Looks rather nice (if I say so myself) ... renders like a hog. Fountain Court, the next installment. It's the transparency that's doing me in; I don't like to think what it'll do to my Mac when I get it right and render a copy for printing at 300 dpi! The walls look bland now I've taken the tiles off. I have to work on texture and light to get the depth, once all the elements are in and behaving themselves.

Here's a detail of the fountain itself, showing rather better what I intend for the tile. I've used a 4x4 tile pattern coloured according to the allocation of hearths at the time the floor was laid. I don't quite have the contrast between brown and golden that I need at that scale, but I'll work on it.

Now I'm working on the doors ... per the occupancy of the hearths in Throne Price, so red on the left, black in the middle, and green on the right, if I've read my layout correctly. I've got a door for Black Hearth that looks as though they could hold off the universe - I may need to mitigate it somewhat - but my present problem is that when I put it into the image, I get a whole lot of spurious noise in the middle of the fountain ... Like my monolith.

posted by Anonymous at 23:18   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Here's what Angie whipped up for me in Sims. :-) We had to put in windows on the walls to light up the scene enough to make the walls look white, and one cannot put doors in diagonal walls of a Sim house. :-( As I mentioned to Alison on the phone, the horse in the fountain is also a no-go. And I believe we've described the central fountain as circular and the bench(s) around it as backless marble jobs. But all impressions help approximate the desired result. Enjoying yours, Alison!



posted by Lynda at 09:09   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
First shot at the fountain. Need more turbulence in the water, and I spotted a boo-boo in the final rendering - the fringes of the terrain I used to create the spray shows. Got that fixed, but got to go to work. So here, warts, etc ...

posted by Anonymous at 08:28   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
First doodle of fountain Court, though it wants for doors, an interior decorator, probably a sense of scale, and, well, a fountain. I am tolerably pleased with the vaulted ceiling, and there is water in the pool.
posted by Anonymous at 21:38   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Some random spark of a cluster of synapses a couple of days ago coughed up a memory of The Trigan Empire, which was a long-running comic series originally in the British magazine Ranger and then in Look and Learn (which is where I learned, among other things, that Victor Hugo mauled his proof copies with revisions ... but I digress). When I encountered it, it was in its established middle phase, and I remember it as Romans in Space, complete with gladii, red mantles, a noble emperor, the wise old general scientific practitioner, the emperor's hotshot pilot nephew, various nefarious bad guys, assorted nasty aliens - all good stuff. As I said, this random neuron sparked, and I did what I do when random neurons spark - I went surfing. And found a site from a Dutch affictionado who is putting up the story, panel by panel, starting with the Trigans' emergence from a tribe of nomadic barbarians under the impetus of having an advanced civilization out to enslave them or wipe them out.
posted by Anonymous at 22:01   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
In search of wall decoration for the ORU - the trouble is that most of the repeating patterns that please the human eye make the Vrellish twitch - I started looking for fractal patterns, and then for fractal generators for the Mac. Observe the results -




... does the phrase "creating a monster" perhaps spring to mind?
The fractals were generated with Fractal Explorer, which was found through Fractovia. I could export them as PICT files and then convert them to JPEGs, though the option of making larger than default patterns doesn't seem to be working - but I am not complaining - I have a whole bunch of gorgeous patterns to play with for free. Fractovia also linked to the Chaos Hypertextbook, which has an appendix of software resources.
posted by Anonymous at 20:31   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
... and just play with 3-D graphics. I always said I that I only wrote because I couldn't draw. Instead of getting exercise, writing, hoovering, or going to the grocery store, I have been doodling around with Vue d'esprit, the alternative to Bryce now Corel has been churlish enough to stop development for Mac. I'm just at the very beginning of what is likely to be a long learning process, but I now know how to import pictures and wrap them around objects - witness the results of playing with a couple of free samples from Marlin Studios and a pretty jpeg I found on the www.

posted by Anonymous at 12:53   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Heard from the SF-Canada list about the blog Guy G. Kay is keeping while on tour.
posted by Lynda at 11:41   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Here I go again ... one with the requested alpine meadows


And a bit more dramatic rendering of the rays, after isolating the extra-dark bits and adjusting the contrast on the remainder of the picture.


posted by Anonymous at 23:02   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments