07.08.06 -- Ahra Pahts creation story

Postby Aloys » Sun Aug 06, 2006 9:30 pm

07.08.06 -- Ahra Pahts creation story, part 1: initial planning.

Disclaimer: this is going to be a long entry. So long in fact I had to cut it into several parts, today is only the first part. Now that you know this, read at your own risks. (Not all of my entries in this journal will be this long.)


In an odd coincidence of fate I noticed that I posted my first entry to this journal exactly six years day to day after I started my first Myst site. Which was about.. you guessed it: Custom Age creation. Well at the time, it wasn't exactly that, but it was as close as you could get. History repeats itself I guess. That, or my brain just runs in circles and is at its top during the night between august 5 and 6 of each year... Which is odd because that precise day is the birthday of someone very dear to me. Maybe there's a link here. I should just see an analyst.
Anyway, back on topic. Ahra Pahts' genesis. At least my side of it.

Yesterday I told you things about pizzas, Excel, swedish pop music bands.. Let's see how all that fits into the grander scheme of the Age. For that let's take a quick trip down my memory lane; the last six months to be precise.

So far making this Age has been no small task, it's been a big project, and in all big projects at some point you have to do a break, look back and do a quick summary of what went on so far. For me this started several weeks ago. I thought it'd be both interesting and useful to do a summary of my work and to get out of it some useful Blender tips to share. I started writing a document. It started getting long. It started getting very long. And confusing. (Much like this entry, hu?) Long story short, I dropped it and focused on my actual work. Now with this journal I hope to bring back some of the spirit and usefulness of this document. Of course because I'm lazy, most of the entry today (and probably some of the upcoming entries) will be taken straight out of this document.

* * *

As all projects this city started with sketches and passionate discussions. Long story short, the initial city layout that resulted from these debates (long disappeared in the depths of the internet unfortunately) was this one:

Image
The only big change we did to this plan was that we reduced it and turned it upside down. But that doesn't change anything to what I'll describe bellow.

This image was done by Dustin (who happens to have also since long disappeared in the depths of the internet), it is a fractal; a mathematical pattern that repeats itself ad infinitum. Perfectly suited for an ever-expanding city, right? No!! Well, yes it is, except that it's a triangle!! As any architect will tell you: working with right angles and square shapes is easy. This is not a square shape; and it has no right angles. And it still need to be very precisely built. This is a good 'worst case scenario' for a 3d artist. And yet somehow at the time I agreed it would make for a great city -- we all make mistakes. (in fact at some point I thought about reverting it back to a square shape; but it didn't happen -- It could make for an interesting entry some day though).
Anyway, there I was going with this triangular-shaped city and I had to find a way to actually build it... But to do that, I had to find what were the shells going to be like. And here comes our special guest of the day: the Pizza. The plan we had only showed the layout for streets, but not the actuall shape of the shells. So I had to cut the empty space between those streets and turn that into shells. Sculptors will tell you: "you don't create a statue; it is already there, hidden in the stone waiting for you to reveal it, by removing the unnecessary stone". It's how I felt right at this moment trying to find what those shells could be like. And then I looked at my pizza. (We all have a pizza on our desk right?) The way those streets were, the shells had to be arranged in circles and cut in equal parts. Like my pizza. Problem solved, yay for pizzas. (In fact they are more like hexagons rather than circles. But let's keep the pizza analogy anyway.)

Image Image

We did some adjustments like adding in the Rivers and a canal, making room for courtyards, but mostly we had the definitive plan of the city (which is the one I did above). And now that we knew what these empty shells looked like I had to actually build all 150 of them. Since they are all identical, the goal was of course to be able to create only one and duplicate it throughout the entire city. But the structure was complex (those triangles..) and the question became: how to do this efficiently since the shells aren’t arranged in an easy grid-like pattern? Well, in fact they are indeed arranged in a pattern, just a slightly more complex one than a simple square grid. If we look at the original plan we can see that it can be decomposed into a grid of triangles overlaid to a grid of hexagons (the pizzas); where each 1/6 of an hexagon is a shell and each triangle’s vertices is the center of an hexagon.

Image

The goal then became to have shells in group of six (the hexagons) and duplicate them along that triangle grid. Now it just so happens that Blender has this very useful tool called ‘Dupliverts’. It allows us to duplicate an object on all the vertexes of another object; which is exactly what we needed to do. We only had to create a grid of triangles, make it a ‘dupliverts’ object, assign the shells to it and 'voila'. We now had everything needed to efficiently duplicate one single shell into an entire city of 150 shells. (This could probably have be done without the Dupliverts tool, duplicating the shells one by one and moving them by hand; but since there was this tool, why waste huge amounts of time?)

Image

Off course this is the 'short version' of how this was done. I'll spare you the several variations and adjustments I did to this method before ending up with what we have now. From the top of my head I think I restarted the city from scratch 4 or 5 times, for many reasons, among which:
- I was testing various methods
- I discovered a bug with the plugin that made impratical to use mirrored objects because they end up inverted in Uru (their normals are somehow inverted, although they are fine in Blender)
- I discover late in the process that the dupliverts mesh I used wasn't precise enough geometrically and was causing the shells to be unproperly aligned; which caused holes and gaps between the streets and the shells. Small enough to go unnoticed at first, but very noticeable once in Uru.
- etc...
But in the end the method proved to be good and could be used for the whole Age. And that was the point of all this.

Now some of you may remember ABBA that I mentionned earlier? Well.. I don't like to listen to music when I work, it just disturbs me; I sing and dance on my chair and I don't work. So when I do listen to music I listen to stuff I can't sing or dance: instrumental music, classical music, operas, movies/games soundtracks. But a while ago I somehow discovered ABBA again. Now some people just give me weirds look when I say I listen to ABBA, but I'm not easily offended and I just love their music. And for some unknown reason, their music doesn't disturb me, rather it helps me stays focused and be productive. I don't understand why, maybe something about their tempo. Maybe indeed I should just see an analyst.

The fact is I built most of the Age while singing 'Dancing Queen'.
Bummer.


* * *

In the next entry, I'll write about some finer details of this duplication process. Because not only did it have to work for the shells, but also for the streets, the lamposts, and all of the objects in the scene that had to be duplicated. I'll also touch briefly about some other details of the Age exporting in Uru, and some numbers taken from my compulsive habit of statistics.
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Re: 07.08.06 -- Ahra Pahts creation story

Postby pappou » Sun Dec 30, 2007 4:26 pm

The Nature of Dis-Orientation
[tongue-in-cheek]

The struggle with fractal geometries is always fascinating, but especially so when they become taken up as the model for a plan [cf. Aloys' Development Journal; “07.08.06 -- Ahra Pahts creation story”]. Here, it immediately raises the question of How The Game Is Played.

Aloys and Dustin arrived at the 'fractal solution' as do so many designers in search of a paradigm. A pattern is needed upon which to base one's 'map', and fractals raise their many heads to offer a solution. An easy choice, it would seem; but everyone who follows that lead quickly learns a great deal about the difficulties of infinite (cheap) variations:
http://i121.photobucket.com/albums/o206/pappou/Planofahrapahts-1.jpg

In this case, it may seem to raise a question of 'How The Game is Played' – that is, for everyone who remembers Chinese Checkers:
http://i121.photobucket.com/albums/o206/pappou/ChineseCheckers-1.jpg

Now, the obvious relationship here obscures a more purposeful one, and I think it may be necessary to overcome the obvious in order to rescue the Ahra Pahts plan from being lost in the archives of Ted Turner's endless closet of games.

The too obvious relationship would raise an argument that Ahra Pahts is following the footsteps of that relatively old Yiddish game, Stern-Halma,invented in Germany sometime at the end of the 19thC. In America we learned of it as Chines Checkers, but in truth, the Chinese had nothing to do with it [at least, not until the Japanese began peddling it to them as “ファイルの概要” -- I have no idea what that means, but it seems appropriate to the case at hand].

The point here is that older blender addicts (if there are such folks) are likely to be confused by this too-obvious comparison of Ahra Pahts to Chinese Checkers. For instance, they may accept the comparison to mean that Ahra Pahts is play by play (marble by marble), and thus that it is a point-and-click game. Of course, this would deny it of any aspirations to move out of the Riven style of play into the Uru style of fluid movement.

Or, given greater distortions of thinking, it could even lead to more base insinuations of Messianic Planning and to the allure of Utopianism. For planners, these types of distorted comparison are not at all out of the question.

Given that the world is full of base insinuations, I propose to rescue Ahra Pahts from any future fall from grace in this regard, by offering what I see as the true purpose of these fractal plans. They are created and given to us as an earnest continuation of that time honored Myst Tradition: The Total Collapse of One's Orientation -- while playing the game.


PHENOMENAL ORIENTATION

The Games People of Cyan know full well that the human ability to establish orientation to one's surround is quite high when one is placed into an orthographic setting – say, the normal right-angled street corner intersection ('norma' in Latin refers to a carpenter's square). Human perception can tell the variation from a 90 degree intersection with astonishing acuity.

However, that defeats one of the primary values that Uru especially brings to bear: The LOSS of orientation. But this loss of orientation carries through all the Myst games, where the forest (and perhaps now the sandstorm desert) is the preferred setting. Even the paths in the forest intersect at obtuse angles, and unless one pays attention, the player is likely to turn South thinking that this last turn was Northerly.

And then there is the obscuring darkness, taken to such advantage in the caves of Eder Gira. I remember when i first entered the Cleft, my video card was so poor that i could see nothing in the bottom. It was entirely dark. No features stood out, except the outline of the sky above. Now, that is a really a difficult way to solve the Cleft.

And FRUSTRATING! Man it is the height of gamesmanship to bounce around in a totally dark world, being guided only by the reaction of the pointer (not to mention slogging around in the dark in knee deep water, with who knows how many alligators and water moccasins). In the end, however, it may require a more patient character than i posses -- i am now quite happy to have a new video card which opens up all but the blackest holes to me, and i am so thankful to be able to see the fantastic textures Cyan has given us.

But do not accuse the fractal plan of Ahra Pahts to be shedding too much light on one's orientation. The fanatical designers of this age are committed to the highest values of of dis-orientation which Cyan has honored all these years. I predict that Cyan will snap up Ahra Pahts as its own child, the moment that these things be allowed.
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Re: 07.08.06 -- Ahra Pahts creation story

Postby Trylon » Sun Dec 30, 2007 5:27 pm

Forgive me, but I'm totally missing the point of your post, pappou.
It feels like reading a review written for some high-level philosophers/psychologists society...
I can tell the you're either making a very well-based point, or making a very complex joke (I'm assuming the first), so maybe it would help if you put it in more simple terms...?

Disclaimer: It's 1.30 AM when I type this
One day I ran through the cleft for the fiftieth time, and found that uru held no peace for me anymore.
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Re: 07.08.06 -- Ahra Pahts creation story

Postby pappou » Mon Dec 31, 2007 2:38 pm

Thank you, Trylon, for taking the time to ask. And it is my fault for not being able to express it more directly. But the message is speaking of an irony; so it is that much a joke, but more importantly it expresses a truth. Unfortunately, the irony evaporates when i try to be direct, and without the irony, i think there is no way to get at the deeper truth here.

Still, if I were clever, i should be able to say it better. Sorry.

****************************************
However, i do see this:

One thing that caused me to dump on you guys this way -- dump a message that seems so non-program or non-texture or non-3Dmodeling or non-etc., is that it seems to me the difficulties of using modeling language are so great that you who can do these things (I cannot) get fixed upon the local setting and tend to loose site of the bigger ball of wax.

For instance, Aloys needs a ground floor paradigm to get his massive age-machine in gear. So, he takes the easy out of planting everything upon a fractal field. This is then his foundation. But intuition tells you that from the foundation, everything else springs. And in this case that means that the 'everything else' is going to be infected with these impossibly 'obtuse' angles (double entendre).

With this in mind, i interjected the the statements about Perception. The Perception of space is a human faculty that falls apart too easily when the spaces are not orthographic. And to me, 3D modeling is nothing if it fails to grasp its impact upon the human perception of space.

With that in mind, i suggested that if one goes down this road intentionally, then one is following the path of Cyan – for Cyan is one who enters into these confusions purposefully.

Is this good (to follow Cyan)? Perhaps, if one understand purposeful confusion as well as Cyan does.

But that means to really understand very well how a person perceives the 3D spaces that one has worked so hard to model. It may be well done and effective, or it may just be a backyard attempt to build a rocket ship out of bent nails and 2X4s. [Of course, i am speaking of the end result – the perception of the work – and i am suggesting that no matter now difficult it is to do 3Dmodeling, without the well done spaces to show for it, what's the point?]

But Trylon, being a good puzzle solver, could you not glean more than this from my ironic statements above? I don't think you are one to be put off by the language of philosophy – esp speaking the language of modeling as well as you do.
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Re: 07.08.06 -- Ahra Pahts creation story

Postby Trylon » Mon Dec 31, 2007 3:39 pm

pappou wrote:But Trylon, being a good puzzle solver, could you not glean more than this from my ironic statements above? I don't think you are one to be put off by the language of philosophy – esp speaking the language of modeling as well as you do.


Well, like I said in my disclaimer - it was 1.30 AM when I read it :)
One day I ran through the cleft for the fiftieth time, and found that uru held no peace for me anymore.
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Re: 07.08.06 -- Ahra Pahts creation story

Postby Jahmen » Mon Aug 03, 2009 5:46 am

Very interesting observation; Uh What? :? Without having seen or been in it, I can only say :roll: For myself, all my age puzzles and settings are set to multiple plains set in multi levels of play. So you better be thinking three dimensionally to solve. Oh and Cyan misdirection or use of "red herrings" as I have heard them called always gave me a DOH! :o reaction. :x

It was an interesting read and a great share and informative. Thanx

Your triangle reminds me of my own and looks likes the one in my own puzzles in my space ship. Though it moves to up & down and rotates with others wheels rotating within it. :ugeek:

P.S. I too listen to ABBA and Dancing Queen is a fav amongst the many. I always thought the girl in the music video was cute and danced very cool. Interest also that I listen to classical, instrumentals, guitar and oriental off beat stuff to work by to. But my best stuff is classic rock.
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