I’ve been really struggling to not read stuff about Web3/Crypto; it’s like rubber-necking a car crash. I can’t tell if it’s just that there’s a lot of it about or if the algorithms are pushing it my way. I’m going to try and tone it down and share less on it because I sometimes worry that there’s some perverse incentive at play. The more brilliant, thoughtful, critical and analytical pieces being written and shared about how it’s an extractive pyramid scheme to enrich a super elite the more attention is driven to it.
I’m also going to apologise because there’s not any ‘content’ this week. Just a lengthy breakdown of the sketch and then short stuff. To be briefly hypocritical and write about it, I’m not the only one worried about this notion. As the latest Real Life Mag newsletter attests:
Whenever I write anything about “Web3,” I am beset with the self-defeating feeling that the concept is impervious to criticism. Not because it is any way defensible — its success will make the world immeasurably worse in every conceivable way, more divided, more unequal, more paranoid, and more unsustainable — but because the concept seems likely to profit from any attention it’s given.
The Treasure That Never Rusts – Real Life Mag
DS061
This was a nightmare – please skip past this bit if you’re not particularly interested in me moaning about my own hubris. I started this week’s sketch with the thing I’ve started doing more often – building a set and then figuring what should go in it. I had the notion of having a neoclassical room that would be lit like the interior scenes in Dune. Turns out that’s pretty tricky but we can skip over the details to the animation.
I was giving a talk about worldbuilding this week so that was running through my head while doing this sketch. I thought about a machine that would endlessly build sandcastles only for them to collapse. The set-up for this simple animated machine is extremely complex: The rocking arm is keyframed, copying the movements of a Shishi-Odoshi video I found. Getting the pouring sand looking right was the next issue. At first I tried particles, then liquid before using a smoke simulation with gravity flipped and multiplied so it went straight down. If you’ve ever played with fluid simulations of any sort you will know that they are an utter pain and getting a very specific look – that of pouring sand, even trickier. Then I wanted (for some reason) to have multiple sandcastle machines so I needed to re-calculate fluid simulations for another two ‘stations’ resulting in about 2 GB of simulation data and maybe 48 hours of computer time?
Then I needed the collapsing castles to line up with the arm. I ran through a bunch of methods here for hours; particle dissolving, fracturing, fancy plugins that turned it into molecules etc. etc. All of them ran the computer into the ground when totted up with the fluid simulation. In the end I decided to be pragmatic after realising that on-screen the castle is relatively small. So it’s simply a deformed mesh that it flips between ‘fully formed’ and ‘flattened.’ Then the castle mesh jumps back into the bucket and falls down again with it. I will say this: every frame of that castle moving with the bucket is hand animated.
So that was about three or four days work, but then came the real problem; rendering. I built it for Cycles knowing I would need Cycles for the flowing sand – Eevee can’t really do volumes or translucency well, both things that are central to this sketch – but Cycles was taking approximately 45 minutes per frame to render because of the sheer amount of stuff going on – so about 5 days in total to render. No good. So I had to switch out everything for Eevee which meant redoing a bunch of shaders, lighting etc. only to find that the amount of data being crunched resulted it in dropping caches or randomly crashing. So I baked everything and rendered it in 50 frame chunks by hand over the weekend.
Lessons learned? Don’t fly too close to the sun. This was too ambitious to do for what’s meant to be a sketch and if I’m honest I don’t even like the way it looks that much. The aim of these sketches was to do something that maybe takes an hour or two a week and this one took damn near every free hour I had.
Recents
I was up at the Architecture Association last week to talk with some of the students about worldbuilding. The talk focussed on the ways in which worlds are conceptualised through the tools use to measure them and then how they are reproduced, with a particular focus on (and you’ll never guess) AI and Computer Graphics. The slides are up here if you want to see.
Short Stuff
- Brad Troemel’s NFT Report is online for free. A forty-minute breakdown of what happened in art, tech and finance to create the Ponzi scheme of NFTs. It’s pretty good and concise and in Troemel style has some nice gags.
- NFT Makers are trying to build their own Disney in the latest escalation of value manufacturing.
- Car advertisements in France now have to encourage people to consider alternatives to car travel.
- Justin McGuirck, writing in Aeon, argues that waste dissolves the distinction between nature and culture.
- Cassie Robinson has written to introduce a really optimistic project examining the role of imagination as a public service.
- Friends Honor Harger and Changeist have been involved in this project on the Future of Arts and Culture which has now been published. I went to the launch, it was good.
- The Expanse ended last week. Easily my favourite TV show of the last few years, and likely yours as well. Everyone knew the ending was going to be rushed due to the practical constraints of TV production but the vibe generally seemed to be that it was ended tastefully. Post-mortem writing is beginning to appear which is great. Here’s a piece from Noah Smith making a case for it as an optimistic (or journey to an optimistic) future.
Mrs Revell said to me that she likes it when I used to finish on personal notes and I don’t do that so much anymore. So what has been going on? Well, we had a daughter in early December and I’m currently on a sort of three month-ish sabbatical with her and Mrs Revell, doing deep ethnography on poop, hiccups and flailing arms. Both ladies are very healthy and we’ve been incredibly lucky with how well everything has gone and how chill Mrs Revell Jr. is. So yes, I’ve been generally being domestic, reading and writing in the morning when I take the feeding shifts while Mrs Revell sleeps, watching a lot of Queer Eye and riding bikes. It’s great because I haven’t really had a proper break in ten years.
At the end of February I’m starting with Arup Foresight and I’ll start getting warmed up for that at the beginning of the month.
Ok, love you very much, but you know that of course. I still like telling you, I think it’s nice to hear even if you already know it in your heart. Speak to you next week.