Forest Fence and Other Renderings

It's only been a few days since my last art post, but right now I'm in an art-creating binge. Also, I recently upgraded my computer to a quad-core, so I'm now able to get a lot more artwork done in the same amount of time (my time just waiting for the renders to complete is drastically reduced by this). Without further ado:

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Forest Fence

This image is a bit darker than I would have liked, but what can I say, this is the lighting in which it looks the most realistic (I tried several sunnier variants with no luck).

I'm definitely really happy with the overall look of this, though -- if you've been following my renderings for a while, you might remember that I've previously had a lot of trouble trying to get anything approaching a realistic forest scene. I feel that I've finally done it.

I'm also pleased with the quality of the fence, which is something that I modeled from scratch in SketchUp. I think it turned out exceedingly realistic. My wife and I went up to Virginia this past weekend, and I saw some fences like this and knew I wanted to render them.

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Loss 4

Thanks to an excellent comment by Stephen Parrish, I decided to take another stab at my Loss theme. This is the same image as Loss 3, except that I've completely redone the water (new waves, light flares, two layers of water, displacement mapping, and subsurface scattering). The result is a much more pleasing shadow for the tree (I think), softer waves, and a more vibrant solar reflection in the water.

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Rural Overhead

Another great suggestion by Stephen Parrish, who asked about orthogonal views in the rendering packages I use. While this rendering isn't strictly top-down, it's as close as I wanted to come (a little bit of side-perspective adds more depth).

The fence is the same one I used in Forest Fence, while the houses, tower, and chapel are all free models by the fine folks at Turbo Squid.

Rob!

This is hilarious. I'd never heard of Improv Everywhere until literary agent Kristin Nelson mentioned them, but this is just the sort of thing I love. It's sort of like Candid Camera, except much larger scale. Another favorite is the Slo-Mo Home Depot stunt -- the reactions of the employees are priceless.

12 Dreams of Steel and Coal

It's only been a few months since I got Carrara, so I'm surprised to find myself already moving on. Vue is an even better program that recently came into my price range (it's still on sale, if you want to give it a look). This is one of the few rendering packages I've used that has made appearances in commercial special effects (Pirates of the Caribbean 2, most notably).

I'm sure I'll continue to use Carrara some, as I may use Bryce on occasion, but Vue is now the prime tool in my art milieu. All of the pieces from my latest gallery (still in progress) were done in Vue. Here are some of them:

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Overcast Marsh

This is an instant favorite for me -- and it's also one of the most realistic renderings I've ever done. I hope to be able to realize this level of fidelity in many more renderings.

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City Cloudscape

My 300th rendering (not counting those in The Dregs or those that have never seen the light of day at all)! That seems fitting, because this was an instant favorite for me -- its a spiritual successor to one of my earlier works, Sky Castle, which was created nearly ten years before. 300 renderings in 10 years... that's not too shabby for something that is, after all, a hobby.

The building models are not by me, but rather came packaged with Vue 6.

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Loss 3

This is my second remake of perhaps my most popular image ever, Loss. The original version was done in Bryce 2.0, way back in 1998 when I was first learning how to do renderings. The second version was done in Bryce 6.1 in 2007.

When I was heavily into Carrara rendering, I tried to make a version of this image using that program. However, I found that the fantastical nature of the image just didn't turn out very well in such a realism-minded program. I was afraid the same thing would be true with Vue (which is equally realism-minded), but the flexibility of the atmospherics model in Vue is such that I was able to achieve my unrealistic sunset with a modicum of tweaking.

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Overland Sailboat

It's been a really long time (almost a decade, I think) since I last rendered a low-lying landscape from this height and perspective. I love this sort of view, but the challenge of realistically managing the horizon has always kept me sticking with more mountainous terrains (which I also love, of course). Finally, with Vue, I'm able to achieve the sort of effect I've been looking for all these years. This is one of my few renderings that someone has mistaken for a photograph at first glance.

The sailboat is a stock item from Carrara 6, imported into Vue.

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Distant Skyscrapers

These are the first building models I've created myself in a while. Vue is able to import directly from Google SketchUp, and is able to do so in a manner that makes it easy for me to apply complex textures (which Carrara and Bryce both had trouble doing with SketchUp objects), so I imagine I'll be doing more such modeling from now on.

The twiggy brush in the foreground is also of my creation, based on a different solidgrowth tree in Vue. In general, I was very pleased with how dismally industrial I was able to make this scene.

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Cliff Rays

"God rays" are a favorite subject of mine in landscapes, and this image marks my first foray into that territory in Vue. I was also particularly pleased with how the crags of the mountain came out, along with how the foreground grasses add realism and perspective.

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Subcon Palms

I love this one. In some ways it reminds me of the opening chapters of the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time game, but I designed it as a 3D re-imagining of Subcon, from Super Mario Bros 2 (one of my favorite games). I love the look of this one in any case, though, with its multi-layered ecosystems.

This is also the first night scene I've done in some time, because I was having a hard time making those look right in Carrara. It's actually more complicated to make night scenes in Vue (in Carrara and Bryce there is a simple toggle), but the end result can be much better. I imagine I'll be doing more of them.

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Desert Fire Fog

This was my second rendering in the full version of Vue. I wanted to see just how good the lighting and cloud effects could be -- the answer is "quite good," I think you'll agree.

One thing I really like here is how volumetric clouds are treated almost like meta blob objects (rather than simple bounding cubes). This allows for low-level clouds that look more organic, both by giving each component cloud a more realistic shape, but also by letting them "merge" together into larger clouds in a realistic manner. It's a little hard to explain if you aren't already familiar with this sort of thing, but let's just say that it lets artists model unusual natural phenomena more easily.

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Sunset Ruin 2

This is a re-envisioning of one of my favorite early renderings.

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Sky Canyon

This one was unusually tricky to get right, and took me several more iterations than normal to get right. I'm pleased with the end result, except for the horizon line.

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Blue Crags

This is another one that took me forever to get right. In the end, the composition is completely different from what I had originally imagined, but I'm happy with it.

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Autumn Mountains

My first rendering in the full version of Vue. I was immediately floored by how realistic the "ecosystems" component is. These sorts of grasses and trees wouldn't be possible in any other rendering package.

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Stormy Islet

One of my moodiest pieces ever. I was particularly pleased with how the ocean waves turned out.

Two Tone Range

Two Tone Range

Purely an experiment in lighting and atmosphere, the end result is something I really like. I enjoy the contrast of the ruddy darkness beneath the clouds with the grayish light above them. This sort of duality is the sort of thing that occurs all the time in nature, if you think about it, but it's the sort of thing we are rarely able to see from ground level.

Hairy Spaceship

Hairy Spaceship

One of my stranger renderings of late, it's also one of my favorites. I wasn't really sure what I was going to create when I started with a blank slate in Hexagon, but the underlying structure of this model was what emerged. I thought it would make a good base for a translucent crystal of some sort, but when I started working with it in Carrara I quickly decided to go with something darker, opaque, and reflective.

The hair was the stroke of inspiration that tied this all together for me -- the weather, the water, and the patchy mist clinging to the ship all serve to refine and emphasize this one aspect of the scene.

Frankly, I find the end effect pretty menacing. Always a good thing.

So Many Clocks!

I've never really thought about this before, but this world really is filling up with clocks. Doing a quick mental inventory of the clocks in my house, I come up with:

1 oven clock
1 microwave clock
2 wall clocks
3 alarm clocks
2 desk clocks
2 watches (at least -- probably more)
3 computer clocks
1 clock in answering machine
1 clock in VOIP phone
4 clocks in entertainment center equipment
3 clocks in miscellaneous other electronics
1 clock in wall thermostat
1 clock in bike odometer

That's 25 clocks right there, and I know I missed a good number of them. I also only counted those clocks that have some sort of visible display, whether on a monitor/screen readout or whatever. I'm sure various other electronics have some sort of internal clock of which I'm not even aware.

This is a pretty random thing to quantify, on the surface -- but on the other hand, it seems pretty descriptive of our society that we are perhaps more surrounded by timepieces than any other civilization on Earth has ever been.

Force Feedback In Managed DirectX

I recently wrote my first article for Code Project. It's on a pretty niche programming topic, specifically controlling the actuators in game controllers via C#. This is something that should be a pretty basic topic, but a longstanding bug in some Microsoft libraries prevent their examples from working with many game pads. My article outlines the basics of how to do that sort of code, and shows how to work around their bug.

Let go of my CD!

I recently discovered an online comic called xkcd, and I must say it is hilarious. A lot of the jokes are things that would only be funny to programmers, but I think anyone can appreciate this one. I enjoyed many others from that strip about turing tests, sysfaults, compiling, imaginary kilobyte denotations, and many other topics, but I doubt you'd be as interested in those if you're part of my normal readership (aka, other writers).

Island Chain

Island Chain

Another Carrara sunset, this time I was playing with light to see how dramatic I could make the effect. The result was quite pleasing, though I did have to massage the colors and contrast a bit in Photoshop to get the final effect.

The tower model was a freebie from Turbo Squid.

Unintended Influences

Whenever my family gets together, we generally play games. Xactica, Turn the Tide, Five Crowns, Phase 10, and Coloretto are long-time favorites of the Card variety (though we also enjoy others such as Descent, Settlers of Catan, Princes of Florence, among dozens of others). Anyway, the point being that we have a very wide variety of games we play.

Recently, we've added Three Dragon Ante to the mix. It's a fun, semi-strategic, card game under the Dungeons & Dragons license. I've never played D&D much, though I have played some of the computer spin offs such as Unlimited Adventures and Neverwinter Nights. I have a reasonably thorough understanding of most D&D mechanics, though I've never been wholly invested in the property.

Imagine my surprise, then, to discover the names of two particular cards in Three Dragon Ante: Bahamut and Tiamat, the two dragon gods. These were names I had given to two of my seven Elder Dragons in THE GUARDIAN (which are also the only dragons in my series -- and there are no elves, dwarves or fairies/faeries, I swear).

I hadn't realized that these two names were used together in D&D, or I never would have chosen them to use in my own work (I picked them for their mythological significance). Fortunately it was something I caught on my own, well before the work was even sold -- how much more embarrassing would it have been to stand accused of plagiarism years later? At that stage of the game, it would have been very hard to convince anyone that the choice of name was unintentional. I hear the same sort of thing happened to Katherine Paterson with Bridge to Terebithia. I've been sympathetic to her on that issue since I first heard of it, but now I can really relate.

From now on I'll be googling every name I use if it seems at all familiar. A lot of the names I use have their roots in various world mythologies or classic works, but using names from modern writers/works isn't the same thing. I've renamed Bahamut and Tiamat to Deinderak and Tiarak, which are definitely unique. The characters were already quite unlike their (unintentional) counterparts in the D&D universe, so at least their monikers were all I had to change.

Writing a novel is an interesting endeavor in that you are simultaneously inspired by others' works and setting out to do something wholly original. The more original the better, of course, but there's no way to be original unless you know what else is out there (and, come on, good writers enjoy reading for pleasure, anyway). Sometimes a little too much of some other writer's influence sneaks into our works, and we have to guard against that. Even without the issue of plagiarism, reusing characters, names, ideas, or phrases from other works isn't going to make your own writing stand out. Where would we be if writers weren't out there inventing words like "hobbit" and "muggle" and "jedi?"

Doctrine of Insufficient Adulation

Via Slashdot, I found an interesting article called Why Apple fans hate tech reporters. The basic premise is that when people are really rabid about an idea -- the merits of a certain product, religion, or political stance -- they perceive even-handedness as an insult. In other words, if I think you're completely wrong/evil/whatever, and someone else comes along and doesn't immediately leap to my side, I'll feel like they're siding with you.

Interesting. Disturbing. This is apparently just part of human nature, because I've certainly seen it before in life, though I'd never thought much about it until WSJ columnist Walt Mossberg pointed it out. It's particularly troubling for me, because I tend to avoid political conflict by remaining neutral. Go ahead, ask me what I think about abortion or Israel or Global Warming -- I'm not going to debate those things with anybody, at least not at present.

There are many conflicts in the world, a great many of which affect me, but I am not enough of an expert on them to feel like I can take a meaningful stance. On those issues with which I do have first-hand experience (the need for helmets on bicyclists, issues with violence in schools) I'll definitely speak out. I know it's more popular for people to have ardent opinions on anything and everything, but that's never sat well with me. I've always been a moderate, only taking one side or the other when I feel particularly informed or knowledgeable about the issue.

And now I discover that even moderation is likely to drag me into ideological scuffles I want no part of. How the heck does Switzerland do it? Oh, well, life wouldn't be interesting without conflict.

Oddest Book Titles

Reuters recently had an interesting short article on this year's finalists for the oddest book title. I can't decide whether I think "Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues" or "Cheese Problems Solved" is funnier. Of course, "I was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen" is pretty good, too.

As the article points out, it's really nice to see that the publishing industry isn't homogenizing too much. There are still plenty of quirky oddities making it into print.

Why I Write

Literary agent Nathan Bransford posed this questions to his readers: why do you write? Here's my answer:

My own personal character has been heavily influenced by the works I read as a child and a young man. Books have a way of reflecting and crystallizing real life, and our favorite characters are often foils to ourselves. I write not so much to change the world (though that would be nice), but to hopefully help others shape themselves into the people they want to be -- as my favorite authors helped shape me into who I wanted to be.

On the other hand, one of the main reasons I write is simply to provoke a response. If I can make people laugh, or cry, or look at something in a new way, I've been successful. Novels are entertainment, education, and sometimes even catharsis. For the author as well as the reader. But mostly, I write because it's part of who I am.


PS - In other news, I am quite busy on a writing project, which is why I haven't been blogging much. I hope to be back soon!

Writing Status

Well. I am sick. Yesterday was the worst, with my temperature getting up to 101.8, among other unpleasantries (which I will spare you). Not sure if this is the flu or not, which is going around NC in a major way, but it's certainly cutting its way through the school where my wife works. At least the really bad phase seems to last only a day or two for most people.

Today I'm still home from work, and as you can tell I'm catching up on my blog posts a bit (to distract myself from how my body feels, mostly). But I'm way too out of it to get any actual writing done, and have been for a couple of days now. I did get maybe a page written on Wednesday, before things got too bad, and I've also been making prewriting notes so that I can hit the ground running once I'm better. Amazingly, I finally sat down and wrote the first half-page of my synopsis -- I think that's going pretty well, so far.

And... that's pretty much all the news.

Roads, versus their destinations

Yesterday, Dwight made an interesting post called What's a little sacrifice between friends. He brings up some very interesting points about happy endings, and predictable endings, and why he prefers works that are not formulaic in their resolutions. One interesting quote from Dwight's post, this one specifically referencing movies:

As a kid, I was the biggest James Bond nut. Somewhere in my teens (circa A View to a Kill with that awful Duran Duran soundtrack) I finally had the “He’s never going to die. What’s the point of all this? Why am I wasting my time here?” epiphany. I was done with Bond.

Here's the original response I posted in the comments of his blog:

Very good post, Dwight. I have a lot of the same feelings. The intersting thing about tragedy is that it often goes well until the end, when everything falls to shit. I don't like to write tragedies any more than I like to write comedy, or happy endings, or whatever.

As you say, write the story honestly. For me, this means bits of dark comedy throughout; moments of success for the hero and moments of abject failure (somewhere between page 1 and "the end"); and endings that are never all bad nor all good. Bittersweet? You could call it that.

But, more to the point, things are never wrapped up with a bow on top -- for good or for ill. Just like life.

I still stand by what I wrote there. However, as yesterday progressed I found myself wondering how I could think that, and still love Bond movies (or the latest Batman incarnation, which has much the same problem -- there's no way Batman will die, any more than Superman "died" in the mid-90's during that whole "Death and Return of Superman" publicity stunt). How is it that I can pride myself on writing the unexpected, often bittersweet endings, and then not be as judgmental with other works? What's the appeal of those other stories, if the ending is a relatively foregone conclusion?

Well, I think it boils down to the fact that I don't read books or watch movies for their endings. I want to find myself captivated the whole way along, and if the ending is predictable -- so what? If I come away feeling good and happy about myself, what's the harm in that?

Granted, my own writing tends to be much darker, but that doesn't mean mean I can't enjoy the lighter side of things in others' works. In the case of the Pierce Brosnan Bond movies, it was all about the cleverness of the action and situations, and the interesting bad guys and their plots. Sure, it was lightweight fare, but it was pretty entertaining nonetheless. Those aren't among my favorite movies, to be sure, since they lack the depth to make me really connect with them, but every movie I enjoy can't be my favorite.

With the most recent Bond movie, Casino Royale, the writing is much more poignant and deeper, and Daniel Craig portrays a much more interesting Bond. Did I think there was a possibility that he might die in the end? Of course not. But there are a lot of things nearly as bad as death, in such movies. What about the heroine? She's fair game to die, and I didn't want her to. What about the other secondary characters that I was coming to care about -- would Bond be able to protect all of them? And, of course, there are other interesting subplots, such as his relations with M (who doesn't seem to like him very much), his growing finesse as a spy, and the ever present danger of betrayal. So, clearly, there was a lot to keep it suspenseful.

I think the same can be said of Batman Begins, which is another of my favorite movies. I was less interested in Batman before that movie, but I really connected with every aspect of that rendition. Harry Potter was the same way -- of course there was no possibility that Harry was going to die until the last book in the series, and even that seemed pretty unlikely. Yet those books drew me along like few others, as there was a whole world there that I cared about and didn't want to see ruined. There were plenty of characters that I cared about just as much as Harry, and was distraught when they did die (though I was artistically pleased with all of her choices as to who to kill).

I could give plenty of other examples of books I think fall under this category (The Dresden Files, which I just finished the first of and loved, for instance), but I think you get the point. The endings of books and movies should definitely not be telegraphed in advance -- that's bad writing -- but the central question of whether the protagonist(s) live or die is not always the most important one. Sometimes it's all about seeing what they do along the way (all unexpected events, hopefully), and sometimes it's about any collateral damage that might occur.

Clearly, statistics aren't everything

This post at SF Signal shows which books supposedly are for the "dumb" kids, and which ones are for the smarties, as evidenced by the correlation between favorite books and SAT scores.

I highly recommend you read the original article, but here's the graph they include, for quick reference:



Hmm, interesting. I'm quite surprised to see that the average score (on the older 1600-point scale, rather than the new 2400-point one) does not go any higher than 1250. At any rate, I know loads of people who scored way higher than this entire range, and who loved many of the books on the lower end of the scale.

My favorite book is Ender's Game, but I'm also quite partial to Harry Potter and the Chronicles of Narnia (just to pick examples from this list). My score was about 1425 (790 in English, thank you very much). My wife is not nearly as partial to Ender's Game, but liked Eragon and loved Wicked and Harry Potter (though her favorite books, most by Connie Willis, aren't even on this list). She scored a 1590. I knew plenty of people who scored in the 1400-1600 range who loved Lord of the Rings above all else.

Of course, this might be skewed by the high school I went to -- Enloe was the top magnet high school in the country when my wife and I were there. I was actually a bit embarrassed by my 1425, and with a ~4.4 weighted GPA, I was only something like 125th in my class of about 500. My wife had a much, much higher weighted GPA, and a much better class rank in her year, but I think she'd rather I not publish those on the Internet.

The point is that I don't think that the books we read (within reason) are necessarily indicative of intelligence or SAT scores, and certainly that kids shouldn't be discouraged from reading certain books because it will "make them dumb." Obviously there are benefits to reading thought-provoking works with an advanced vocabulary, but reading works of value that inspire you is also important. Great books are about people, relationships, and ethics (Harry Potter and Ender's Game) as often as they are about deep ideas in an academic sense. Read higher-class literature if that's what moves you, but don't expect that to be a primary determinant of your academic success.

Progress is Progress

Wild Zontars had to drag the information out of me*, but I managed to write three and a half pages today. For whatever reason, the juices just weren't flowing -- but I persevered. I'd write more here, but it's late and I'm tired. I'll try to make a more interesting post very soon.

The stats as of today:
-52,625 estimated words.
-62,186 actual words.
-210.5 pages.
-Song(s) listened to while writing: Lacrymosa, by Evanescence; The Man Who Sold The World, by Nirvana; Monstrous Turtles!, by zircon

* Ten thousand points (**) if you catch the incredibly obscure reference I made above without googling it.
** One point if you can catch the much less obscure reference I made in the first footnote.

Blog Birthday

That's right, this blog turns one year old today. No fanfare, just business as usual. I've made some progress on my writing (actually, I've given in to the urge to do a bit of editing -- to good result, at least), but I don't have enough that's new to warrant a full progress report. I hope to complete an entire new scene tomorrow, but we'll see what else comes up in the meantime. I find myself with a lot of different things going these days...

Manuscript Analyzer Online

The Windows version of Manuscript Analyzer has been getting some pretty good comments and use around the Internet, but one undercurrent that I've been encountering is that there are more writers who are Mac users than I had anticipated. To provide a solution for those users who can't use the Windows version, I've created Manuscript Analyzer Online.

This program is written entirely in JavaScript, and so works with Internet Explorer, Safari, Netscape, and FireFox without the need to install any software at all. The online edition contains all the features of the Windows edition, and is only very slightly slower to run.

The big concern that everyone is likely to have with this program, however, is its online nature. Is it stealing their manuscript, or transmitting it across the Internet where passing hackers might take advantage of it? The answer, of course, is no. Otherwise I wouldn't have put it up.

The program itself is about 24kb, and gets downloaded as a web page via your browser (like any other web page). Once it is downloaded, that's all that is transmitted: using JavaScript, the program analyzes the manuscript on your own computer, without any more interaction with my web server. This means that it also will work just as fast for dialup users as it does for users on cable or T1 (after that initial download), and that you don't have to keep an Internet connection open to use it.

Hopefully that alleviates any concerns that anyone has, but if there are other questions please do let me know and I'll be more than happy to address them. Also, I'm still quite interested in ideas for improvements/extensions to the program, so feel free to email me with those.

Exciting News

Well, this is certainly the most exciting news I've been able to post in a while. Remember how I've been admonishing you to read DON'T MURDER YOUR MYSTERY, the nonfiction book on writing by mystery editor Chris Roerden? Well, I promise you that my recommendations have not been skewed by the following news, which is a very recent development:

It turns out that the first line from my current WIP will be included in the next edition, DON'T SABOTAGE YOUR SUBMISSIONS. DSYS will be the expanded, cross-genre edition of the 2005 original, which won a 2007 Agatha award among many other honors. DSYS will be released later this year (I'll post a reminder as the time approaches).

This is very exciting for me not just because it's a great publication credit (hooray, query letters), but because I so wholeheartedly support this book. Amongst all the various writing books I own, this one has far and away been the most helpful on a practical, nuts-and-bolts level. It's really an honor to have my writing included with the many other examples of good writing that Roerden uses.