Fun with Maths

I've been having a bit of fun with a topological modeller called Topmod, which creates pretty complex 3D meshes using some pretty fancy techniques. And it's free. Only on the web.

Download Topmod here.

Get a copy of Blender for free here - Topmod is only a modeller and won't animate or render your creations.

Black Arts & Strange Fruits

Black Arts web site has been featured on the excellent design blog Strange Fruits - they even said it was "elegant". I'm blushing.

The Strange Rick Griffin Homage

Finally got round to uploading this. Hopefully Mister Griffin would approve. ;)

Dental as Anything

Saturday morning - got up at stupid o'clock and legged it through to Glasgow for the Scottish Wedding Directory Show with Spring Grove. Naturally they all looked like they'd just stepped out of a spa and we looked like and felt like we'd been abducted and expertly beaten up by the KGB before being dumped back in our beds after two hours' sleep. Which is why I'm not in the photos.



Gill, Colleen and Naomi arriving at the show, fresh as daisies!



The lovely stand, courtesy of Davy Peters.



Detail from the stand.



The grrrrrls getting warmed up: (left to right) Colleen, Naomi, Paula, Dawn and Nicola



The gang's all here: (left to right) Dawn, Colleen, Paula, Naomi, David, Natalie, Gillian and Nicola. If you look closely this shot also captures a rare instance of Davy Peters in the wild.




Last but not least: cameras are funny things and are picky about who they make look good. It's been great fun shooting the Spring Grove staff, almost all of whom have that mysterious quality and take a great picture with almost no effort. But a special mention must go to Nicola here, who is just brilliant to photograph and has a totally natural way of lifting her chin and turning to a good angle when she smiles which makes every shot a cracker. I could just shoot her all day. (okay enough creepy stalking)

Editing and effects for Spring Grove!

Lots of computers + a couple of terabytes of disks + lots of luck and guts = Dave & Steve getting stuck into editing the video and adding overlays, effects and titling for the Spring Grove Clinic videos. Yummy!

Flash Particle Wipe Effect

Lunch hour well spent yesterday: a nice wipe effect with flaking particles in Flash. Coming soon: an After Effects version with Trapcode Particular. Probably.

Shooting Spring Chicks

Great fun at the video & photo shoot for Spring Grove clinic on monday - here are some of the retouched shots. Looking forward to working with Nat, Naomi, Nicola and the others this Monday!

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.

Quick is not always best.

If Shakespeare was alive, would he use Twitter? What about Da Vinci? Or Mozart? Would they blog? Or use Facebook?

Maybe they would. Let’s say that Mozart could certainly see the value in a networking site that let him organize wild parties* and Da Vinci would have loved to let the world know in 140 characters or less how he really felt about Michelangelo**. But would they have used those tools to write Romeo and Juliet? Or to show off the Sistine Chapel ceiling?

Probably not. Here’s the message: some things are just complicated.

Some things take time and effort to learn, to do and to explain. In a culture in which we’re constantly offered newer, faster ways to do stuff, we can sometimes feel that taking time and care over things is a bit old-fashioned. But that’s okay. Quality is worth the wait. Don’t confuse blogging, tweeting and so on with work: it isn’t always. It has its place, but sometimes a church ceiling just takes 40 years.

* Even if it enabled the the authorities to raid those parties.
** He hated his guts. Really, really despised him. Seriously.

Your Market Needs You

"Long live the web!" "And long live the people who use the web!"

I'm sure we all want the web to continue to succeed, inspire and grow, don't we? Most of us now recognise the enormous potential it has to enrich all our art, our intellectual lives and our culture. We love to talk about and share those things, at length in blogs, tweets, sites, feeds and just day to day chatter.

But we're noticeably silent when the question turns to one particular matter. It's the dirty word in business - we love to talk about exciting products and projects but there's inevitably shuffling of feet, red faces and mumbling when it's time to talk about how much they'll actually cost. Nobody likes the M word. We'd rather call it something nice like "revenue", "capital", in fact all in all we'd probably prefer to call it something nice and non-scary like "candy floss".

And that's a problem. It's a problem for most of us, but it's most especially a problem for the web, in fact it's a great big elephant in the room that we're all not talking about. We're not talking about how Facebook has 200 million active customers and makes hardly any candy floss. We're not talking about the real struggle to get any candy floss at all out of Twitter.

This coyness is partly to do with the way the web grew up. At most of the parties we call industries, the entrepreneurs arrive first with the great ideas, then the financiers turn up with the candy floss, the marketers arrive to sell the tickets and last but not least the geeks build the thing and the party gets started. Part of the difficulty on the web is that at this particular party the geeks turned up first, not last. They were there for a long time making small talk about computers before some entrepreneurs arrived and started phoning the financiers to drag them out of the wine bars and along to the party. It was much, much later that the marketers got to the party and found that it was very much in full swing with candy floss everywhere - and nobody had thought to sell any tickets.

What the web needs, what Twitter and Facebook needs, is marketers. Not the old-fashioned Sherriff of Nottingham type who sees something people like and simply slaps a tax on it and asks for your credit card number - a new breed of marketer who can see ways to make these incredible online communities produce candy floss and lots of it, without shouting stand and deliver every someone touches a keyboard. This is a once in an eternity opportunity for marketers to change society and commerce as we know it by finding creative ways to produce money (there, I said it) without charging at the point of receipt. Marketers are the experts in finding ways to generate revenue from ideas, the experts in making industries sustainable and stable by incorporating them into the fabric of our economy. We need you, marketers. We need you for a task as far removed from washing machine insurance and cheap deals as going to the moon is from selling bus tickets. A task that really, truly matters to every single one of us, and a task which could change the public's view of marketing forever. Can we count on you?

We're a people company. Stop laughing, it's true.

How many times have we heard big organisations say they are "people companies" or that they believe "people are our number one asset"?

Suppose this were true. When times got tough as they are now and companies needed to save money and cut costs, would the employees be the first thing to go or the last? Yet we all know that when belts are being tightened, the people in these "people companies" are the first thing to get the chop.

This is stupid for numerous, obvious reasons: if I wanted to build a really cheap car I could in theory at least do it by getting rid of the most expensive bit: the engine. The car would certainly be cheap, but it wouldn't be much use because I'd got rid of the bit which makes it go. The same is true of companies: the people are not "assets", they're what makes the company go. No people, no company.

So for all their posturing and bluster about being "people companies", we all know that really, if the cost-cutting were to continue as far as most companies wanted, all that would be left would be a building containing only furniture, computers and the board of directors. We all know reality is harsh and times and are tough, but if you're really a furniture, computer and director oriented company, do us all a favour and at least stop lying about it.

The Simple Questions

The most complex, difficult issues we face often stem from very simple questions. But these are also the most important ones to ask.

A good example of this is Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.

You've probably heard of it, and you probably know very little about it, in fact you may well think it's a hugely complex and difficult subject.

And it is. But it all started with a very simple question. Einstein was a genius, and he loved to ask questions. In doing so, he often asked questions other people thought were stupid or irrelevant. One such question was this:

If the earth is travelling through space, why is the speed of light measured at the "front" of the earth as it moves not higher than the speed of light at the "back" of the earth?

It's a simple question. It makes sense: after all if we're moving "into" light falling onto the front of the earth and "away" from the light falling onto the back, the light at the front should appear to be moving faster, like two cars moving towards one another.

The answer is both incredibly simple and incredibly complex. We calculate the speed of things - their velocity - by dividing distance by time. That's easy. But in the case of light falling on the earth, there's a problem. We know that the distance the light travels in each case is different. So in order for the velocity to come out the same each time, something else must be changing too.

Einstein came to an unbelieveable but extraordinary answer. He realised that if the distance was different then to give the same velocity, time must be changing. It's bizarre, incredible and profound, but it's true and it's the entire basis for the theory of relativity, which has now been studied worldwide for over almost 100 years.

There are no stupid questions.

This is your life (minus the assholes)

Clearly the explosion in social networking is having far-reaching effects. Ordinary people (that's us) are discovering that the scribbly, chaotic mess which serves them for thoughts and ideas are genuinely interesting, in fact other people are actually willing to read them and even follow us in the hope that we'll make more.

So what happens when ordinary people start to credit their own opinions and ideas? Well, lots of things. But here's an idea for you: in a world where we have access to a vast audience who take what we say seriously, what happens when organisations or people treat us badly? Well, we tell people about it. And maybe they tell other people.

Obviously we can't lie about how we were treated. That's libel (or slander) and is illegal, for good reasons. But if we're telling the truth... what happens? Most of us know a business sociopath or two, maybe a middle manager at work or a telephone company. And most of us know that they continue to be employed and continue to dish out totally unacceptable behaviour precisely because until now, we had no way of letting other people know what these lunatics were doing. So there were little in the way consequences to their behaviour, and on they went with it.

Well, now there is a way we can let people know. Welcome to the age of treating each other fairly.

The BNP: please don't shut your stupid, fascist face.

So the BNP, the British National Party, have had two representatives elected. Debate has exploded all over the country. Even the BBC, advoctes of the cheap and lowbrow, are screening a debate this morning entitled, "Does the BNP have the right to be heard"?

This is an issue which is close to home for me. The BNP's racist policies mean that if they were elected to government my adopted brother, who is half West Indian, might well be forced to leave Scotland, the country of his birth, possibly with his children - tearing both his and my family apart.

So surely I must think the BNP should not be heard?

Well, no. I'm sure everyone recognises the parallels between the state of our country now - the economic difficulties, the social unrest, the weak government, the emerging fascist sympathies - and Germany in the nineteen thirties (beautifully parodied by The Daily Mash here).

And yes, there are consequences to allowing extremists like fascists to be heard. In fact there are two chief consequences:

1. The risk of extreme policies being implemented.

2. Freedom of speech.

Are you prepared to lose the second to avoid the first? If so, should you not ask yourself whether there's really much difference between saying that one section of society should be silenced based on their race and saying that another should be silenced based on their politics?