Adding some Sharpness

If the title of this post deceived you into expecting some clever remarks here, you will be utterly disappointed. This is simply a post in the Animators Anonymous category to prove that I have been working. I actually animated quite a bit, getting close to finalizing the possible opening scene for what is still tentatively called "Scattered Mind Matter". Here is a test for what may happen to the tree like structures once the animation progresses deeper into --dare I (ab/mis)use the term?-- the technicum: it gets hard.

 

 

[Geek alert!] It turns out the mesh generated from nParticles is not exactly clean and polygon reductions does not work without manually removing all manifold geometry. Polygon Cleanup can do that automatically but results in crappy topology, so the polygons identified by the cleanup procedure need to be manually fixed. And the mesh also has a number of holes in it. I guess that just shows how hard it is to fit a polygonal surface over an isosurface,and that the solution is pretty stable is quite a feat.

Technicum Artis Magistra

Since I have to return it to the our public library tomorrow I finally finished reading "What Technology Wants" by Kevin Kelly. A book that starts out as promising as this one, putting the door ajar to a novel outlook on the way things are, the end almost had to disappoint. It does not explain what technology wants. It is filled with a smorgasbord of interesting tidbits, and does contains a very interesting thesis that the whole of technology, for which he coins the term "the technicum", is simply the next logical step in the evolution of things that started with the big bang. A lot of brilliant minds were consulted and that shows, it is a very interesting read. And when you name Brian Eno in your acknowledgements, the man whose work first showed me that video can be Art, you cannot really go wrong, can you?

The show where I saw that greatly inspiring work by Mr. Eno was "The Luminous Image" in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. I saw it as a wee lad in 1984 (yeah, right). Here is a very low quality video of him talking about the piece I saw back then:

 

 

I still have the catalog.