Well, Rimworld did end up consuming four days of my time over new year. There’s no high like a micromanagement space simulator.
I moved posting these back to Wednesday. It worked well for me before and I’m not sure why I decided Monday would be better. Monday mornings are always really busy and as I’m increasingly doing my renders over the weekend, they’re often not ready for Monday. Wednesday works.
I had a couple of goes at photogrammetry a few years ago when it was first on the phone with 123D Catch. You’d never guess that it wasn’t that great in 2014. So I got Trnio the other day with a view to expanding my pre-made assets and cutting down on hard surface modelling time. I was out on a ride the other day and statue hunting where I found this one of William Tyndale – an early Bible translator in Victoria Gardens. I took a scan in AR Kit and the normal object mode and the AR Kit version was unsurprisingly better. AR Kit feels like an unusual concession to exploratory creativity on Apple’s part and it’s a definite advantage to newer iPhones.
I managed to learn a bunch of stuff doing this: Trnio can’t really catch objects of this scale in much detail. It works really well at the scale of household objects but the statue is very distorted close up. Trying to capture in neutral light conditions will make setting up scenes much easier – the texture is baked on and in this case was catching the specularity of a low winter sun so I had to get lights in place that didn’t obviously contradict it. There’s not a huge amount you can do with the mesh beyond basic clean up; there’s no logic to the structure and it just comes out as a mess of triangles. This would be good for organic objects like people but for hard surfaces like the plinth it just limits options to tweak and tidy. And obviously the scale limits rendering possibilities, the top areas of the statue where I couldn’t scan were best-guesses on Trnio’s part – not bad but they wouldn’t stand up to much scrutiny.
Anyway, lessons for next time, which I guess will have to be household objects now. For this week I also decided to produce a ‘making of’ IG reel. Might keep these up if it seems like people are enjoying them.
I spent this morning revisiting an old piece of writing on CGI and imagination I needed to redraft and have been feeling very guilty about avoiding. It was from the Before Times which dates it to around late 2019 and it’s amazing how much you can learn in a year. A bit of me wanted to do a wholesale rewrite with all the stuff I’ve figured out since then but there’s only so much time in the world and too many things to do. I managed to slip in a few references to support some of what at the time time were just vague notions and send it back off. The thing’s been a weight on my conscience the last six months so I’m glad I got hassled back in to kicking it into gear.
As I write, Warnock has secured his victory in Georgia so this is shaping up to be a good day so far. I’ve been avoiding the US news podcasts in the last week because I resent the kind of frenzied speculation that accelerates closer and closer to these events and inevitably turns out to be meaningless. They’re amusing to listen to after the fact though. Particularly if Ossoff also wins.
There’s no short stuff today because I’ve been playing video games and riding bikes for a week, leave me alone.
Love you more than ever. Speak next week.