WIP: the strange Rick Griffin homage

Just a quick post with WIP on the homage to psychedelic legend Rick Griffin which I'm working on. Griffin sadly died in a motorbike accident in 1991 at the age of just 47 but I'd like to think that if he was still working today he'd had thrown himself into the weirdness of digital 3D with great enthusiasm.

So far so good: a nice eyeball based on my original sketch and the rest is coming along nicely. More to come later!

Vue from the top

Since it's the holidays, I've got around to spending some time tinkering with another one of those 3D programs I like so much, and writing up a little bit about it.

This one's called Vue and it's from E-On software. They bill it as "digital nature" software, which in plain english means it's a landscape generator. Fellow old farts like me will remember a package called KPT Bryce from the mid nineties which did roughly the same thing (Bryce still exists by the way as the property of DAZ software and is well worth playing with) and Vue owes that dinosaur a lot for its evolution.

The work flow is simple: pick a sky with sun, clouds and mist, add seas, land and mountains as you see fit, sprinkle it with trees, bushes and flowers then render it all. If that sounds suspiciously like good fun, it's because it is - great fun! You'll definitely feel a bit god-like as you create and alter your own little worlds. The package does manage a neat trick: it's very good at producing instant results with masses of preset skies, clouds, mountains and materials to choose from but if you want to you can actually tweak every minute detail of the environment to get exactly what you want - this is no toy, the software is apparently well-used by film studios to produce landscapes for special effects.

So far so good; it's fun to use, clever, intuitive and can produce pretty incredible results.

So what's the downside? Well, there are a couple of issues that keep this from wider use. Most important is that the ability to create new objects is limited - terrains and simple solids are easy enough but that's about it. If you want anything even remotely sophisticated - the spray cans in my examples were created and textured in Maya - you'll need another package with a proper modeller. Vue can import most common file types though (I used .obj) so it's not a disaster.

The other niggle is a real double-edged sword. As I said earlier the renderer is great at producing instant results and it has a range of environment types which simulate physical lighting conditions. Most will be familiar to experienced 3D users - radiosity, global illumination and spectral models. These can be selected and swapped in a couple of clicks and generally produce good results. This is great for beginners and the time-poor but if you're used to using Mental Ray or another third-party renderer the lack of fine control will quickly grate. In short if you like the ground-up approach of Mental Ray, you probably won't like the renderer much, but if you think MR is fiddly, you'll love it. The renders generally have a pretty distinctive quality which marks them as being Vue images, but that's true of most renderers and not really a criticism.

So all in all, it's a bit of a conundrum. I definitely recommend it even if you just want to have some fun and it should find a place in most 3D users' collections as an alternative renderer once in a while. But since you'll need to already have a separate program for modelling anything beyond the most basic, you'll probably use it less than you might like.

Evil hackers will ruin your life. Stop laughing, it's true.

Whilst idly browsing TV channels last night, I had the misfortune to stumble across the BBC's Watchdog, a "consumer affairs" programme which exists to complain about unfair treatment of consumers and as it turns out to invent some if none actually exists.

This particular episode screamed that "WIFI HOTSPOTS ARE NOT SECURE!!!!!!!! BADDIES COULD, LIKE, STEAL YOUR IDENTITY AND, LIKE, STUFF, AND, LIKE, DO THINGS TO YOUR CHILDREN AAAAAAAAAAAAAARGHHHH!!!!!!".

So I was a bit interested. Who were these unnamed evildoers and how exactly, I wondered, would they spoil my twenty minutes with the hideous sugary crack the cafe had foisted on me?

Well, Watchdog wouldn't actually reveal how the supposed satanic kleptomaniacs would steal everything I owned, which is pretty handy if you happen to be a scare-mongering weasel who wants to keep it all as shadowy and frightening as possible. Instead they made oblique references to "available technology" and hooded "security experts".

So you won't be too surprised when I tell you that in fact the process of hijacking wi-fi hot spots isn't actually all that easy, in fact it requires quite a high level of technical skill. Which of course raises the question: if someone has enough skill to get into a wireless network like that, why the bloody hell would they want to read my emails? I mean, even I don't want to read most of my emails, and they're at least vaguely relevant to me!

Let me explain it this way: if someone was a heavyweight boxing champion, they could probably beat the living shit out of me without any difficulty. But then why would they, when they could be earning millions in the ring fighting other champions?

So if you're one of the anonymous evildoers the programme referenced so freely, please feel free to read my emails. Clean out the spam and let me know if there's anything interesting in there will you?

People not Processes

Does your company have a form for everything? Do you have acronyms and technical jargon and procedures and KPIs for every task?

A lot of companies want their business to run like a machine, so they build it like a machine with different parts assigned different tasks, inputs and outputs all measured. It's well meant - they want to achieve consistent standards, reliable performance and dependable profits, which is good sense, right?

The problem is that if you run your business like a machine, people will expect it to perform like a machine. We get angry with machines when they don't work properly in a way that we don't get angry with people, as anyone who has owned a computer will know. When we deal with people on the other hand we make allowances, allow them to apologise, fix their mistakes and make good. When machines don't work we switch them off and throw them out.

It's good for companies to talk to their customers - and tweet and reddit and digg and email and instant message - but not because we enjoy it. It's good because then we know that they're not big pink robots who mechanically consume what we produce, and they know that we're not machines, we're little tribes of people who try hard but deserve a break when we show a blue screen once in a while instead of being shut down and binned.

(This post was inspired by Dave Peters at Reddress, whose clients love him more than their own children)

The Holy Trinity of Design

Project management is a minefield. A mine field you have to negotiate blindfolded in lead wellies while clients throw rocks at you. So here's a simple tool to help you deal with those tricky project details.


There are three criteria which apply to any given project: how cheap it is, how soon it can be delivered and how good it is. But you can only have two of these at any one time, never all three.

So it can be cheap and you can have it soon, but then it'll be so ugly that if it was a dog you'd have to shave its arse and teach it to walk backwards.

It can be cheap and really good, but you'll have to wait until the crack of doom before it's delivered.

Or it can be really good and you can have it soon, but you'll get a bill so huge that it'd make a pelican blush.

It's so simple I don't know what we all worry about.

The After Effects Puzzle.

So I spent the weekend tinkering with Adobe's After Effects CS3 and having a bloody good laugh doing it.

So I like it, right? Well yeah, but bugger me with a fishfork if I can see what it's for. See, at it's most basic level it's a bit like animated Photoshop: easy to use, quick results but a bit limited and heavily reliant on gimmicky plugins. On a more advanced level it's got a slightly irritating scripting function and some interesting but fiddly ways to build up complex effects which can create some genuinely good visuals but are really quite finnicky to get working.

So here's the problem: if you're still at the stage of wrestling a bit with Photoshop, most of After Effects' worthwhile abilities will be well and truly out of reach. But then if you're advanced enough to quickly get to grips with the annoying scripting and linking, you're probably already using something really powerful like Autodesk's astonishing Maya, which wipes the floor with After Effects in almost every respect I can see, urinates on its shoes, pleasures its wife and flies away laughing.

Maybe I can learn to love it as I use it a bit more. But it's going to have to come up with a really incredible party piece to stop me from leaving with Maya at the end of the party.

Thanks to Adobe for the free trial!

Still not found what we're looking for?

Well, if less is more, this is the most you can get!

It looks great. It works great. But is it too little? How much can you strip away from a brand before it loses strength?

But is this the future of searching? The magic word in the cyber-air right now is "aggregating". Everything is aggregated: blogs, twitter, digg, reddit, flickr, content and pics, drawn together in one easy to access place. So will searching be aggregated too? Will Google, Wikipedia, Youtube and all our other favourite content warehouses be searchable from pop-up, desktop, widget, add-on tools?

If that's what we want, that's what we'll get.