Sucky Sucky Ramparts
Jun. 22nd, 2002 03:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
strange_aeonsIt's not a Picasso. On the other hand, I'd like to see him produce something like this within a couple of days of first working with a program. Especially a program with a manual so opaque.
Since it occurs to me that it's rude to randomly clobber the poor well-meaning bastards reading![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lilairen's and lstone's friends pages with bigass image files, you can see my spectacularly uninteresting first foray into the exciting world of subpatch modeling below, but not on the main page.
On an unrelated note — did Impostor do really poorly in theaters? Did something else happen to make PKD's name more of a dirty word than it, technically, already is (you can't say it on Elfwood, that bastion of hysterical Puritanism)? I didn't know Minority Report was based on a Dick story until Tycho mentioned it. Tycho, for the love of god. I didn't even know he could read.
Since it occurs to me that it's rude to randomly clobber the poor well-meaning bastards reading
lilairen's and lstone's friends pages with bigass image files, you can see my spectacularly uninteresting first foray into the exciting world of subpatch modeling below, but not on the main page. 
On an unrelated note — did Impostor do really poorly in theaters? Did something else happen to make PKD's name more of a dirty word than it, technically, already is (you can't say it on Elfwood, that bastion of hysterical Puritanism)? I didn't know Minority Report was based on a Dick story until Tycho mentioned it. Tycho, for the love of god. I didn't even know he could read.
And what about the people reading _my_ friends page, hmm?
Date: 2002-06-22 12:45 am (UTC)It doesn't look exactly uninteresting, either, anyhow. Not remarkable as art, perhaps, but a nice example of two-dimensional splinish things rotated to make a round object. Which one can appreciate on a level of it being appropriate that a shape of that nature only takes five points to define -- which means that one can use the points to define the shape, mostly, rather than needing to put in a lot of extra just to make it look like curves of its sort ought to properly look.
(One can particularly appreciate this, having in one's childhood done programs to fit curves to surface-contours of turbine blades, and finding that a 2-D cross section took a couple of hundred points. But one digresses, as one tends to do after midnight....)
Er, anyhow, as for your video card -- I challenge your claim that yours is mind-searingly bad; you have not seen the mind-searingly bad ones that I've recently put up with. Like, say, the bottom-of-the-line one that I bought a year ago to upgrade my computer with. Aside from any other issues, it could not update a plain 2-D screen fast enough to produce a reasonable scroll rate of plain text in a textbox! That is mind-searingly bad.
Mind-searingly worse, though, is the one that won't do more than 60Hz, except interlaced. Yeesh! Luckily I have little plans of ever using it....
Anyhow, the screen capture doesn't look all that off in my opinion; the hue-wonkiness in the light grays might arguably be of vague annoyance, but I wouldn't complain of it.
- Brooks, also noting that opaque manuals, oddly enough, tend to be more readable than ones that don't block light
Re: And what about the people reading _my_ friends page, hmm?
Date: 2002-06-22 02:12 am (UTC)You clearly don't exist, so the people reading your friends page have problems enough without me going around compounding them.
It doesn't look exactly uninteresting, either, anyhow.
It would probably look even more inexactly uninteresting if I'd made it the jug I had initially intended, except I have yet to figure out what the hell is wrong with the extrude tool, and the thought of smooth-shifting an entire handle made me want to cry.
Not remarkable as art, perhaps, but a nice example of two-dimensional splinish things rotated to make a round object.
You sound like you're trying way too hard to make me feel better. Not that I don't appreciate it. Not that I appreciate it just because it's funny.
There was actually no lathing (the term for what you're talking about) involved. Though now that I think about it, that would have taken a lot less time. Hmm. Well, it was two in the morning.
I'll make sure to do some lathing when I get around to modeling the inevitable wineglass (it's like a rite of passage), though.
Which one can appreciate on a level of it being appropriate that a shape of that nature only takes five points to define -- which means that one can use the points to define the shape, mostly, rather than needing to put in a lot of extra just to make it look like curves of its sort ought to properly look.
It took me a long time to decipher this sentence, but I think that's because it's now past five in the morning. (And I'm intermittently distracted by watching Final Fantasy, which is a worse movie every time I see it.)
You've hit on exactly why I fell immediately and desperately in love with subdivision surfaces. Plus they aren't as scary or inefficient as NURBS (http://www.computerarts.co.uk/tutorials/type/tutorial.asp?id=20550).
When I rebuild my pants-wearing alien thingy head, I plan to use subpatches. Actually, I would have already started if it weren't for that pesky learning curve.
(Technically, there are eight points, but I forgive you for not knowing that, because three of them you can't, uh, see -- there's that indentation in the bottom that machine-produced ceramic things tend to have, which is one, and there are two inside the neck. There would be more, but I was getting some weird distortion and was too tired to figure out why.)
<snip Scrappy Doo levels of badness>
Mind-searingly worse, though, is the one that won't do more than 60Hz, except interlaced.
I whimper, I crawl under the desk, and I never come out.
Actually, my video card wouldn't be so bad if I had a smaller monitor, which is not a thing I ever imagined I would say. It refuses to do do true color at more than 1024x768, but everything looks big and clunky on this monitor at less than 1280x1024 -- like I'm using Fisher Price's My First Computer, as I am overly fond of saying. So I cope with it until I can get a better one (something that will, unfortunately, also involve buying a new motherboard).
- Brooks, also noting that opaque manuals, oddly enough, tend to be more readable than ones that don't block light
Until I implement my diabolical plan to own an overhead projector, anyway. Can't be a proper ex-homeschooled-kid without having a few overhead projector anecdotes.
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Date: 2002-06-22 01:12 pm (UTC)Well, for what it's worth, (NOMAAAAAAAAAAH!) (that parenthetical brought to you by local surreality effects), hand-constructed pottery also generally has 'that indentation in the bottom'. Slab stuff doesn't always, but often has a coil laid on it, or at least on the corners. Coil generally does, another coil. With wheel-thrown stuff, the bottom of the pot when taken off the wheel is generally massive, and one sits down with a tool whose name I disremember but which is descibable as a loop of wire on a stick once the thing is leather-hard and puts it on the wheel upside-wrong and trims off all the excess crap, leaving a rim on the bottom with, well, an indentation inside it.
Of course, there are exceptions like my scrybowl and the coil pot I made that looks like a dragon, but both of those have feet instead.
So now you know.
no subject
Date: 2002-06-22 01:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-06-22 02:25 pm (UTC)Oh, and it turns out that the distortion is just a function of the smooth shift tool. It extends things along their normals (very similar to actual normals of the kind one gets in, uh, physics), which I was not aware of because I don't have an overhead projector.
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Date: 2002-06-24 01:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-06-24 01:22 am (UTC)I don't know my sources, though.
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Date: 2002-06-24 01:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-06-24 01:39 am (UTC)