DS007: Progress on indirect lighting, largely because I didn’t spend hours on procedural textures. There must be an easier way to do cables than curve modifiers but I have yet to find it.
What would the Arctic be like if the Earth’s spin was perpendicular to its orbit? Instead of a half-year day and a half-year night it would just be perpetual dusk and dawn. Even the creep of a day stretched out over a year indicates time, imagine if it was perpetually out of time, between day and night?
I said I’d make time to read three things a day, but time’s already run out by the time I get to last week’s tabs. I wanted to bring the better behaviours of lockdown and the summer back to work but responsibility gnaws at the edges of the day, like a needy puppy. I’ve also caught myself being angry this week at nothing in particular, just frustration at professional inconveniences. That’s often a sign of losing perspective, a useful way to check myself and appreciate how good things are.
I’m happy with the digital sketch this week. Those screens were meant to have articulated arms like the wall sections in the Portal games but I forgot how to rig them up and then have them repeat along the mesh without doing it manually. So I cheated and made a pneumatic pump instead.
My PhD work is increasingly circling around realism and expectation. This is somewhat disappointing but feels good to have a better sense of it: ‘Realistic Expectations’ The aesthetics of realism in visualising the future. Maybe? I don’t know. It’s slow going, every paragraph keeps being rewritten and mostly I just look at a blinking cursor and feel incredibly stupid. In a way it’s a simple task: What’s required is quite straightforward but the way this is meant to be achieved seems to be completely incongruous depending on who you ask; everything can be picked apart, you patch a hole only to create another hole. And so a small subsection that I had cut back to 800 words two weeks ago is ballooning to 3000 just trying to plug all the damn holes and in the end, it’s not that important and needs to be cut again resulting in more holes. It’s a Sisyphean task that appears to have no intellectual or creative value and serves appease pedantry. Don’t do a PhD, the sole reward is smug self-satisfaction and self-hatred. Maybe I should have just written a book on realism instead, like a readable one.
You know me well enough to know that I don’t get into divisive rhetoric or demonising people or things. People have different motives and I generally try to empathise or at least understand them, even if I don’t agree with them. I’ve found this to be a more effective way of pinpointing and critiquing these motives in order to inculcate change. Folks are most often responding to the world around them and celebrated social and political values like self-preservation, wealth accumulation and individual success rather than malicious intent: The ultra-rich seek primarily to preserve their fortune, not deny others of their own – this is just a side-effect. It doesn’t make the side-effects any less that hurtful and traumatic but I think it’s a mistake to assume maliciousness in other’s actions because they hurt (not to say there aren’t also malicious actions.) Usually hurtful actions are the result of an iniquitous economy and institutions that reward and celebrate individuality, ego and self-worth above community, care or even classical notions of progress. This is why so much of the necessary changes we need to make are put on the individual including social and ecological change, because that’s what are our institutions (including the creative and academic ones) are centred on; individual change and personal growth. All this is to get to the point that I fucking hate Peter Thiel.
The government has decided to put Palantir in charge of our borders because apparently G4S weren’t toxic enough and it just flung that memory dust in my eyes. Some people are beyond redemption.
I idly watched this episode of VFX Artists Reactwhere they talk about how the cartoon matte was achieved in Mary Poppins in 1964, long before green screen. It used a process called sodium vapour. Sodium vapour lights emit yellow at a specific, very limited wavelength that falls exactly between the red and green film strips that were used separately (along with blue) in the Technicolor process meaning it was super easy to isolate and matte anything at that particular wavelength while still having yellow generally as a result of the red and green overlay. Problem is, there was only one camera ever made that could do this which Disney jealously guarded for forty years and now it’s lost so the history of special effects went a different way with the slightly more janky, less detailed mattes developed on blue screen years later for Star Wars. Innovation is stupid.
Lemino is a cool YouTube channel. (I’ve removed the channel recommendations section of this blog because it gave me too much of an excuse to watch YouTube.) He goes over interesting mysteries in quite a good amount of detail, maintaining an air of mystery while offering cynicism to hysterical and conspiratorial interpretations of historical mysteries and events. It’s almost forensic; good 1am stuff.
Here’s friend and colleague David White offering a provocation for this year’s Digitally Engaged Learning conference; the desituated studio. He nods to the conversation we had on teenage drama simulation website twitter dot com about it and some of the work Eva Verhoeven and I have done in this area.
It’s weird how protocols sometimes appear in innocuous interactions. Like BBC stuff will not play over SONOS. Neither BBC, Spotify or SONOS will tell you that, you just figure it out after spending ages updating, scrolling, turning things on and off and then Googling it.
I’ve used all the short stuff I had so I will need a new Content Strategy for next week. Blogging is hard, but thank you to the roughly 140 people who check in here on the reg. I love you particularly. I’ll write you again next week.
DS006: Playing with irradiance volumes and global illumination to try and crack the nut on rendering interiors – not happy with it. Spent too long on the procedural concrete floor.
The sky was briefly beautiful this afternoon. I looked up from the screen to our east-facing balcony, holding my neck at an unfamiliar angle and couldn’t really think about anything except how rich the clouds were and how the gradient of blue to dirty gold at the horizon looked like the backdrop of a massive set I’d accidentally wondered into.
Normally this blog and the digital sketch are mostly done by the weekend, I chuck in things here and there over the beginning of the week, give it a quick glance over in the morning and then post. This time I’m cutting it pretty close to the wire, staying up late the night before. This may be because I kept fiddling with the sketch; I’m not happy with it. It feels too cliched, there’s no focus, the lighting is a bit janky. Interiors are hard. So I chucked some volumetrics in and so infinitely multiplied the rendering time which means it was only finished about 15 minutes ago. I also didn’t get to really play with the new global illumination addon because I realised I didn’t know enough about Blender‘s existing global illumination setup, hence the new learning curve, hence the fiddling, hence the lateness.
We can Simulate it For You Wholesale
I’ve been chewing over a thought that popped up in some writing a few weeks back: It feels like realism is entering a really contested space. There are so many different versions: cinematic, animatic, climatic, natural, mathematical. All of these have their own versions of ‘realism.’ Even then, within each of these larger version of realism are contests based on the limits of the technical frame through which most folks experience these realisms. I want to try and unpick this with examples of two at the boundaries of video game-esque simulation: Microsoft’s new Flight Simulator (which I haven’t and won’t ever use) and the interactive cycling ‘simulator’ Zwift (which I do use).
Both of these software, though based on video game engines and technology are edge-case video games. They aim to simulate certain effects of a real-world experience, of flight and cycling to a degree of realism. It’s important to note that the briefs are different: Flight Simulator does fall into the fantasies of video games in the sense that it aims to connect (most) of its ‘players’ with an experience they can never have – flying a plane. While Zwift doesn’t and can’t seek to simulate cycling, only to give a passably entertaining experience of cycling on the spot in your flat. And, unlike Flight Simulator everyone who uses Zwift is necessarily also a cyclist – because you need a bike.
What do I mean by a contested space? Should you ask rhetorical questions when writing? Well, most desktop computers are now very good at rendering good quality graphics relatively easy, both thanks to advances in the software and the hardware and standardisation of certain technical processes that make them more interoperable. However, there has to be some concessions, there’s only so much that can be simulated and so the world has to be built in response to imagined use-cases. So what decisions are made when someone, creating a world, defines the boundaries of realism? How do you predict the actions of an actor or individual in your simulation such that all the affordances of the world appear as realistic, and not as simulation? Let’s briefly explore a corollary from Blender:
Given a limited technical frame, limited either by money, memory, power or speed, decisions have to be made about what is primarily constitutive of reality in constructing the simulation and what is secondary.
For instance, Blender‘s ocean modifier tool is remarkably good at really quickly simulating what appears to be the surface of a body of water. This might otherwise take hours of messing around with procedural displacement, but in a few clicks a relatively new can make an ocean, pond or lake surface and animate it, even simulate foam and spray. (I know this because I do it in day one of my Blender 101 class.) The good folks at Blender (which, remember, is produced for free by a foundation) decided that this was a tool users would need to improve their workflow, but crucially they also decided that this tool would mostly be used at a scale 10 – 100 meters. If you attempt to render a scene any closer than 10 meters-ish to the result then the geometry and lack of surface detail becomes obvious. You can fix it up with some extra stuff but that’s not part of the drag-and-drop modifier that Blender have designed. Any further out than about 100 meters and you’re forced to tile it, resulting in an obvious repetitive pattern. Again, this is fixable but requires an extra bit of know-how and experience.
Tiling – the repetitive patterning of a texture – is an obvious sign of a render. Blender’s ocean modifier tool struggles to create realistic water surfaces at scale without trickery. (Source is Pinterest and I don’t want to expose you to that parasitic labyrinthine nightmare.)
Blender had to make a judgement call, given a limited technical frame of the average user’s computing power, technical skill and preferential aesthetic to deploy use these particular algorithms to make this particular modifier that works in these particular cases. Given a limiteless amount of computing power, this would not be a problem, but realism has been zoned to 10-100 meters. Blender have circumscribed a technology based on certain expectations about its use. To draw on my favourite paraphrased definition of technology from Alfred Gell, it is a tool (the computer, Blender), the knowledge on how to use the tool (which has been made as simple as possible by a drag-and-drop modifier) and the social necessity of its use which is limited to 10-100 meters.
(Don’t even ask about horizons. There’s a reason you don’t do horizons.)
So, back to Flight Simulator and Zwift. Nearly universaly hysterically positively reviews of the new Flight Simulator have pointed to its astounding accuracy both of the experience and attention to detail. This has been achieved, as previously noted, by Microsoft plugging together various bits of its ecosystem like mapping, weather, 3D scans and advances in procedural rendering into Flight Simulator to produce what appears to be a vast, realistic world.
I think, with this type of thing we sit at the edge of an interesting sea-change where it’s in fact easier to conceive of the game as a god-mode tour of Microsoft’s GIS data trove as opposed to a simple flight sim. Similar to the way video-game publisher and faceless world-eaters Electronic Arts have become the de facto gatekeepers of all football data, real or virtual such that it’s easier to see them as data brokers than game developers. But, even with all this global data the trick of realism only works at the scale within which you were intended to interact with it.
The new Flight Simulator extrudes 3D buildings and forms from Microsoft’s own Bing maps. The priority of this procedural generation is to create ‘natural’ looking cities and landscapes and so Buckingham Palace is rendered as a drab office building. Source.
For instance, it uses Bing maps (lol) to generate the whole world and then extrudes building and landscapes from available data. However, limited by its technical frame (Internet connection speeds, desktop computation) it makes best-guesses about how to generate these 3D forms and so you end up with Buckingham Palace rendered as a drab office building. In the form of interaction intended by the designers, these oversights are forgivable being that you might for instance decide to cross the whole of Eurasia in one session and as a gestalt experience, the whole thing needs to be accurate enough. The social necessity (believable, global flight) makes use of a an imperfect tool.
Buckingham palace to a 68kg cyclist with a 256W FTP in Zwift has a very short draw distance, but more importantly, looks like a passingly believable Buckingham Palace.
Briefly then, Zwift also offers a rendering of Buckingham Palace, hence the useful parallel. Again, it’s worth pointing out that the designers have no intention of suspending disbelief; the Zwift maps are playgrounds – everything is out-sized, brightly coloured and simplistic. Zwift took a punt on the chance that most users would either not be Londoners or be not familiar enough that they would believe it by landmarks. London in Zwift is a trope of London, and Buckingham Palace is a trope of Buckingham Palace; all stone and imposing but this isn’t streamed, it’s all on your hard drive so the models are low-resolution with simple geometry and recycled assets. In fact, the quality of the palace model in Zwift is comparable with the one in Flight Simulator for geometric detail. The realism of Zwift has nothing to do with the visuals, it’s all in the relentless stream of data and feeling in the legs. It’s never going to convince you that you aren’t in your living room and it doens’t want to. It just needs to hit the tropes and symbols of London to make it cartoon fun.
Flight Simulator‘s glitches are a counter-factual rendering of reality in which the expectations are well-defined (Buckingham Palace is a big stone, classical building) but the reality (it is an office block from like, Swindon) conflicts. In Zwift, the expectations are cartoonishly reduced and out-sized, enough to trigger acknowledgement but not enough to suspend disbelief.
Really I’ve been writing a lot about expectations and reality so this stuff is jsut rattling around up there.
I almost made the whole post about this ↓ but I got distracted by renders of Buckingham Palace. Anyway, when Epic Games aren’t busy trying to disassemble Apple and Google’s app gatekeeping monopoly they’re also making significant leaps in special effects and developing the Unreal engine (of ‘Holy shit! Have you seen the Unreal 5 demo?‘ x 16/week fame), the world’s most successful video game engine. This totally slipped me by but it was used on The Mandalorian: a massive LED screen with a Unreal real-time rendering on it, on a sound stage. The death of green-screen? They’ve basically collapsed a massive part of the post-production chain. This is super cool but very upsetting because of all the Manovich and Levitt theory I’ve read that draws on the aesthetics of post-production, which may not be around much longer. Oh well.
You ever get the sense that Facebook still hasn’t figured out what it’s for? That the pomp and bombast is wearing thin? Like Robespierre toward the end they’ve both failed to bring the promised land and keep the advertisers happy. Sort of easy to forget that it’s a dying empire. The latest 20 Minutes Into The Future bulletin concerns the world after Facebook. The signs of ageing are already there; it’s slow to respond to changes and threats, can only survive by copying or stealing and is hitting an upper limit of the viability of an out-dated model. (Literally. The number of dead users is set to surpass live users in the 2060s.) But what happens to cultural memory and heritage when one private company holds all of it?
In my apparently weekly reading on Disco Elysium (why haven’t you played it yet? Its only like 20 hours, take the weekend my friend.) I was frustrated by this article on Vice about how a lack of sincerity holds it back from ‘being the game about Communism it could have been.’ I’m not sure I agree with all of it. The author seems angry that the games’ steer towards characters that self-deceive and obfuscate their feelings makes the fabled revolution impossible. I agree that a better world requires sincerity and honesty but calling on the main character to get over his own very real internal emotional turmoil because his ‘solidarity should be elsewhere’ is a flawed political strategy that we should not be inspired by. If you read any interviews with the creators (who are avowed communists) they highlight self-deprecation as a starting point in levelling the playing field of political discourse. And boy, does Disco Elysium self-deprecate.
Here’s beloved collaborator, colleague and friend Charley Peters on the Art Fictions podcast. It’s all structured around the Yellow Wallpaper, which I’ve never read but there’s so many great things there; ‘might as well talk of a female liver.’ I listened to it while writing this (me n Wes get a shout out).
Since this whole thing has been about simulation. Go to this, which looks at the other side of the whole thing.
I had more short stuff including something related to the new Epic/Unreal tech but once again I am using A Content Strategy and saving it for next week.
Those short stuffs weren’t very short, I appreciate that. But, you know, once I start I get too lazy to stop. Anyway, I love you as always, I’ll write you next week.
DS005: A heavy one this, done as a side-project of a side-project of a side-project and consequently taking too many hours. I used Botaniq Lite for generated tree and shrub assets (I’m lazy, Matthew Plummer-Fernández has been making his own.) The rocks, grass, ferns and floating leaves are particle systems with some silly physics chucked on. In Eevee you get quicker rendering at the cost of global illumination (the way light bounces into shaded areas) making everything too dark. If only someone could figure out how to make screen-space global illumination oh wait.
The weather’s moody and unpredictable, which makes it difficult to talk about. Like a troubled relative that you brush off when asked about in polite company. You don’t want to privately acknowledge that what you’re witnessing is a very terminal collapse and so you mark it down as eccentricity and hope that it’ll just go away.
Years ago I did a project (naively and clumsily in retrospect) mapping the flow of power through a very Eurocentric view on history. I still hover around the thesis that the power remains the same but the institutions mutate and I’ve been listening to and reading a lot of stuff about ‘deep state’ conspiracies recently, particularly the aesthetics.
Anyway I thought it might be fun to mess with it in the context of this ‘deep-deep state’ conspiracy I sort of speculated on. Let’s get the hashtag #DeepHapsburg going and maybe write a Twitter bot that just replaces all the Q nonsense with things from the Austro-Hungarian empire. What do you think? Good idea? Pointless distraction? ‘Schleswig-Holstein; Tell The Truth #ReleaseTheProclomations’ #WherePalmerstonGoesWeGoOne‘
Practical Thinking
At the moment, the planet might seem poised more for a series of unprecedented catastrophes than for the kind of broad moral and political transformation that would open the way to such a world. But if we are going to have any chance of heading off those catastrophes, we’re going to have to change our accustomed ways of thinking. And as the events of 2011 reveal, the age of revolutions is by no means over. The human imagination stubbornly refuses to die.
I’m sure you’re aware David Graeber died last week. I didn’t know him at all but he was a significant influence on my political thinking through my student years and beyond. I came across Debt while working in a bookshop, read that, then went back and read everything else. I remain pleasantly surprised, word-eatingly so, that the post-apocalyptic wasteland ‘marketplace of ideas’ Twitter dot come hasn’t torn his legacy apart yet. Instead, the expressions of loss and meaning in his work appear genuine. His words, activism and general optimism seem to be universally admired and acknowledged.
Thinking about it, there are two things about Graeber’s writing that makes him stand out and may account for this wild exception of why the piranhas of the Irish microblog haven’t turned on him yet.
Firstly, he never seems to trash anything. Nothing was unsalvageable; everything could be a tool put to other uses, subverted and improved. Similar to the way Pratchett never had true villains, just individuals with different, maybe misguided motivations, Graeber’s optimism is rooted in a real belief in change and an optimism for the world to come. This appeals very much to (and possibly formed) my designerly strategy mindset. In writing about Occupy, he describes the strategy as about being cleverer and understanding ‘the system’ better than the the system itself; from occupation to taxation laws. Institutions, systems, organisations and machines are all assemblages that are exploited in a particular way by those who hold the levers of power. Instead of resorting to fire and brimstone, identify those levers, figure out where they’re weakest and exploit them yourself.
The thesis of Debt is a demonstrable argument of this kind: Graeber suggests that ‘Abolish capitalism’ is unfeasible, unimaginable and even undesirable to most and may be snarled up in left activism forever. However, ‘Abolish debt’ hits a chord with a wider audience, drawing on the near-universal experience of debt while identifying it as the actual technical thing that underpins the inequities of capitalism.
This ties into the second point; knowing how to communicate difficult, complex ideas to a wider audience. After all, it was Graeber who (reluctantly) took credit for the ‘We are the 99%’ slogan.
What this means for his writing is that it’s actually readable. I half-joke a lot that I hate reading but that’s because it’s half true. Reading is hard and very often incredibly boring. It is a physical effort involving squinting and an intellectual effort involving memory and thought. Just like a designer, you, as a writer, have a job to make that effort as easy as possible for your reader so they can get to the actual substance of what you’re describing.
I’m hardly unique in suggesting that the intellectual class reward obfuscation and dodging and glamourise it as ‘nuance.’ Fuck nuance. You don’t nuance a toaster or a fridge, which is why everyone knows how to make a cheese toastie. Graeber’s writing was popular because he made difficult ideas easy to understand through applied examples that drew on most folks’ experience and in doing so progressed not only society but his field of thought. Maybe it’s because I’m an educator but I don’t believe you can move ideas forward if you’re not willing to be generous about inviting other people along with you. So much bad intellectuality is about protecting, hoarding and demarcating those ‘in the know’ against everyone else. More crucially, and particularly for left, liberal stuff, writing and theory is riddled with an unspoken notion that if you, the reader, don’t understand the ideas, then it’s your fault for not being educated, aware or revolutionary enough. Reading Graeber felt like being warmly and generously introduced to the interesting kids at school you thought were way out of your league.
A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse explains his whole philosophy in one title – pragmatic, optimistic, straight-forward but grounded in serious cynicism and fashioned through humour. I hope there are more Graebers in the years to come or we’re going to have big problems.
Short Stuff
There’s a lot of short stuff this week. So much that I’m saving some for next week which is a Content Strategy.
I have a growing theory that Death in Paradise and Lost belong to the same universe. Ask me about it some other time.
The Navier-Stokes equation and the unresolved problem at the core of it is one of my favourite mysteries of maths. You may have heard me bang on about it to you some time: The equation is very good at predicting how fluids move at any scale up to the galactic except that as you get closer and closer to an infinitely small scale they approach infinite speed, which is impossible. I watched this terrible film recently in which the problem was given much less than a starring role next to Chris Evans’ fatherly redemption story, despite being mentioned all the time. Don’t watch that terrible film. Watch this Numberphile about it instead.
I linked it up the top there but, a very exciting thing to happen for Blender Eevee is someone has made an add-on that simulates the effect of global illumination. Eevee is Blender‘s newish real-time rendering engine made to compete with Unreal. The cost of real-time rendering is you’re never going to get the top of the reward curve of “realism” that comes with really superheating your graphics card for hours like used to happen with Cycles – the other Blender rendering engine which uses the much slower but more accurate ray-tracing lighting method. Real-time (or rasterised) rendering always looks like a video game – harsh lighting, high contrast – unless you engage in loads of trickery. Physical reality is generally softly lit and coloured from all directions – called global illumination. This hysterical gentleman does a good job of explaining it, but I’ll be messing around with that this week, for sure.
Your favourite solarpunk and mine Jay Springett has a new channel – ‘Come Internet With Me‘ which sort of explains itself.
That’s it. I love you as always. Sorry for getting frustrated at academic and intellectual culture. I know Certain People will lambast me later and tell me how I’m wrong but I don’t think they’ll ever change my mind: There’s a reason that good ideas keep losing out to conservatism and wilful ignorance and it’s partly our fault for making them hard to get at.
