Pipes Redux

What is brown, lies on the ground, and is sticky? Answer at the end. Don't peek.

Three weeks ago I showed you four shiny pipes, each one actually a join of several pipes together. But all the joins were at right angles. And based off a cube (a pipe coming out of two or more faces of the cube). Ever since I have wanted to revisit them, and do a much better job.

Remember back in school when you learnt the five platonic solids. Everything from the simple cube to the complex icosahedron. And you probably thought you would never need them again. And you probably never did. Just like most of the stuff you learn in school. Well, I took each of them, and created pipes coming out of each face. You can see them below, 4 pipes for the tetrahedron, 6 for the cube, 8 for the octahedron, 12 for the dodecahedron, and 20 for the icosahedron. I know, I'm such a dork.

I smoothed them all, and then added some textures, and color blending, and various things so they didn't look so flat. The red cube based one is nice, looks like its very hot in the center and cooler toward the edges. But my favorite is the orangey dodecahedron one, the pipes are round and fat, with just the perfect amount of unevenness to the surface so you know it would feel nice under your fingertips. And something about it just looks nicer that all the ones based on triangles.

Generally I think they all came out pretty well. The blue one looks like it has zillions of glass shards embedded in it. And the green one is sort of barky. Not that bark usually comes in green. And the cyan one's surface is like a whole tube of spearmint toothpaste was smeared all over it. So I guess you could say it is sticky.

Which reminds me of the sticky question I posed at the beginning. So what is it that is brown, lies on the ground, and is sticky? Did you think of the answer? Clever you. A stick of course. I hope you weren't thinking of something else.

Texture Maps

This is a perfectly flat square. In 2D. With a single flat color. It has a texture applied to modify the "normals", which means light falling on it will behave as if its not flat at all, but modified to the shape of the texture. A wonderful little trick that is used all the time to speed up rendering by keeping the number of vertices and faces low.

If you look carefully at the "stones" above any of the lights, you can see the highlights at the bottom of the stones, and shadows at the top. And if you look at the stones directly under the lights, you can see no shadows at all. Just as if the stones were actually protruding from the flat surface of the wall.

Blender also lets you apply the texture directly to make the vertices on the surface actually be displaced. Which you need if you are going to look at the texture side on, and see the actual silhouettes of the bumps, for example, a mountain range. But for this you need a lot of vertices. Thousands of them. Millions. And if you want to animate that you need a whole stack of computers, which is called a "render farm". All the CGI movies you see have large render farms working for months creating all the final frames. So there are definite limits to what you can do with just one computer. Once I push this computer to the limit it will be time to buy a newer, faster one. But that will not be for a while yet. At least I hope so, my wallet isn't very fat at the moment.

Jelly

Imagine if you held this strange rock in your hand. Or perhaps its not a rock, but a wobbling blue blob of jelly. Or maybe its a freeze frame of a large drop of colored mercury floating in free space. We get a lot of information from sight, but the sense of touch can make all the difference in identifying something.

I learnt two things to make this unidentified non-flying object. The first was meta-balls, an old technology in the graphics world, where you place balls in 3D space that "bleed" into each other when they come close. And then you sculpt them by smoothing, inflating, and shrinking their vertices. And end up with really strange looking shapes.

Secondly, I am finally starting to learn how to do textures in Blender. This object has a cloud texture affecting the colors, and a ''stucci'' texture affecting the normals, which means that it creates fake shadows and highlights over its surface. They may be fake, but they convincingly fool the eye into seeing indentations and folds where none actually exist.

So pick up this blob, and feel the lovely wobbly jelly all over your fingers. Then taste it - its blueberry. Yum.