So I fixed his fingers somewhat – still not perfect, I can’t get a good fist, but the fingers no longer twist in an awkward way.
After a bit of fiddling around, I got Steve’s hand to look a lot better. The fingers are straight, at least.
Stand-up comedian
As mentioned in a previous post, I’m a fan of comedy. Also, I’m a fan of Stewart Lee1. To my mind, he elevates stand-up to an art form2 and is also hilarious. To Mrs S he just drones on about stuff3. Anyway, I have a picture of the man in full flow.
Stewart Lee in action.
This photo was the inspiration for Steve’s new job as a stand-up comedian. But to make it more obvious that Steve is in a comedy club, rather than giving a lecture (on the use of Lammas bread in recipes for hobbit), I thought it was necessary to add comedy club trappings. This means a curtain and lights such as Stew has and a neon sign so we know he’s in a comedy club. And a microphone, mike stand and a suitable pose.
The sort of thing I was thinking of for the Mordor Improv stage. Sadly, Aisling Bea was not available for comment.
The mike stand was the easiest part. A cylinder for the upright and another, cut in half lengthways, for the clip.
The microphone was also fairly simple. I decided to just show the top of Steve’s hand, so I didn’t need to model the flex, mainly because the right arm looks a bit weird when it’s bent. So a cylinder, tapered a bit, a sphere as the inner part of the microphone and another sphere given a wireframe look as the input bit. And a flat cylinder as the metal ring around the bit you speak into4.
Posing Steve wasn’t too hard since I’d done a bit of this already. Getting the hands to look reasonably realistic depended on getting the curl of the fingers right, which I had done already.
Now I just needed to set the scene.
Blender can add physics to an object, and the physics I needed for the curtain is the Cloth Modifier. Using this, an otherwise flat object can be made to act like cotton, silk, leather whatever you like. You can drop it, drape it or pin it in place to react to gravity and other forces.
Cloth can be pinned in place to drape. You can also change how many faces are in the cloth. From left to right, there are 400, 4000 and 50000 faces. More faces means more drapable cloth.
For this, I followed a tutorial to make a curtain which would hang behind Steve. And I decided that the Mordor Improv is a slightly down-at-heel establishment, so the curtain is drooping a bit.
More interesting is the neon sign behind Steve. I had to go through a couple of tutorials to get from ‘I have this idea’ to ‘I can do this now’. Two fonts are in this – Bauhaus (Mordor) and Freestyle Script (Improv). The Eye of Sauron was originally the O of Mordor, pulled around a bit and given a different colour to look more evil eye-like.
Curtain, original neon work, added plastic backing and as the sign appears in the final render after some bashing around.
So now Steve has a job. He’s struggling to keep Sauron’s minions entertained at the Mordor Improv.
“Two hobbits walk into a bar. Must have been a low bar.”
If you have any Middle Earth jokes, let me know!
Some would say the two are mutually exclusive. Mrs S, for one. ↩︎
Now that I have Steve the orc, what can I do with him?
Orc with Balloon
One of the best-known British artists is Banksy. Best known, even if we don’t know who they are1. Most of the works attributed to Banksy are stencil-based, the work is in the preparation of the stencil, rather than the application of the paint which was done stealthily and quickly.
Here, I’m redoing their ‘Girl with Balloon’, which first appeared on Waterloo Bridge in London in 2004.
Blender allows you to add a reference image to the work so that you can use guides to pose or build the model you’re making. This was used in a couple of the earlier lessons, building the spitfire and also the original modelling of Steve was done using an outline provided as part of the lesson plan.
Adding a version of Girl with Balloon, I used this to get the pose of the orc similar to the original. Not exact – Steve has longer arms and I wanted the balloon to be a bit closer.
Original image of Steve with the balloon. The wall behind has been lit to look a bit like a wall – Banksy’s work appeared on several walls around the world, one of them must have looked like this.
Modelling the heart-shaped balloon was done by using a Webding heart as the base. Text in Blender is treated as an editable object with access to all the fonts you have on your computer. For the caffeine molecule mug design, I had used Berlin and Bauhaus fonts and added a bit of a curve to the text. Here, I coloured the heart and added a curve to the top surface so it would look a bit more balloon-like.
For the trailing ribbons I used Grease Pencil to draw black lines. I’d used grease pencil before in the caffeine molecule, adding lines automatically. This time they were hand drawn.
The cartoon effect I used on the caffeine molecule was repurposed to give a stencil look to the posed orc. Instead of using one colour for the light parts and another for dark, I just used black and white. Shading in black and white wasn’t difficult, but getting the lighting right so that the finished figure would look like a stencil and be recognisable as an orc took a bit of fiddling around.
Orc with Balloon. Final image of Steve with his balloon.
And finally, a short video of the transition from live orc to stencil.
The transition of Steve from rendered to stencilled in four seconds.
Next up, Steve has a go at stand-up comedy.
According to Wikipedia, his name is Robin Gunningham, he’s from Yate near Bristol. ↩︎
Now that the GameDev course is complete – I even got a certificate! – I can have a look at other tutorials and find out more about what can be done with Blender.
Don’t forget about Steve. He will be back! I just need to fix his fingers.
Textures featured in the previous course, not only in getting Steve’s skin and clothes looking good, but also in the mech when I added glitter. More interesting textures can be downloaded for use from several websites and the uses for these are only limited by your imagination.
To keep this blog post short and to show some of the things you can do with textures, below are a few spheres with added textures. Despite their appearance in the rendered image, they are just spheres and can be edited and shifted around as such. Using these textures instead of trying to sculpt your own lava flow or mossy stone reduces the load on the computer and is a lot quicker. The downside is that you are restricted by what is available.
Five textured spheres. Two types of rock and a hollow plastic ball (back) and snakeskin and leather (front).
You can make your own textures, but that’s way too advanced for me. What’s interesting is that the shadows agree with the textures. The jagged rock (middle back) casts a jagged shadow. And also the hollow plastic red ball is see-through, the holes act as they would in real life.
For further mucking around, I downloaded an anvil model and decided that it would be nice if the blacksmiths didn’t have to put up with all the noise of hammering metal all day. So I made an anvil with a soft furnishing texture – a Chesterfield anvil.
Anvil with a Chesterfield texture. I don’t know why nobody thought of this before. Think how quiet forges would be with soft anvils to work on.
You could also have a glass anvil, for those extra-delicate jobs. Or as the focus for a strokey-beard discussion about the juxtaposition of use and material as a Dadaist/surrealist concept1 , or as a satire on the impermanence of the permanent and the transparency of the solid.
Anvil with a textured glass appearance. Add your own philosophical musings in the comments.
Or an inflatable anvil, for the blacksmith on the move.
Just because it looks like metal, doesn’t mean it has to behave like metal.
I think I’ll step away from the artistic discussions, it’s well above my pay grade and makes my head hurt. I’m only a simple scientist!
Next, more work with Steve, trying to get him to earn a living.
See also Man Ray’s “Cadeau”, an iron with 14 nails glued to the base. ↩︎
The next stage was quite complex and not very visual for blogging purposes, except that the end result was obviously an image. It involved baking textures and it’s why we spent time on getting the musculature and the facial features right. It’s all to do with poly count.
The number of faces (polygons) in a model is an important factor in 3D modelling. The more faces you have, the better your model will look. The drawback is that these polygons take some time for the computer to calculate. This slows down your work and can result in the computer crashing.
By way of illustrating this, the face count for the model shown at the end of the last section and below was 14.5 million and a file size of 160 MB. By baking the textures onto a lower poly duplicate of the original, this comes down to 47,000 faces and a 64 MB file.
The unpainted orc on the left as 16 million polygons, the painted one on the right has 47,000 and more detail. The down side is that I can’t easily change anything about this model.
Baking is the process where details from a highly detailed model, such as shadows from clothes and weird veins and scars, get painted onto a lower poly mesh. The details aren’t there, but look like they are.
Baking textures allows you to use a low poly mesh that looks like a high poly mesh. The disadvantage is that you can’t change you mind about, for example, the position of the clothes once the bake is done. You can always repeat the bake, which takes a bit of time and isn’t very exciting.
Now that the rigging is in place, I can move the orc to give it an action pose. Might need to move the loincloth, it looks like it’s digging into the thigh.
In the end, I’m happy with how Steve turned out. There are a few mistakes with the painting, but if you can see them keep it to yourself. I should go back and re-do where I went wrong as an exercise.
So I had an orc with bones that I could manipulate and pose in a threatening manner. But the hands were wrong – the fingers looked awful when I tried to make them grab anything. That was the next thing, because I wanted to make Steve grab things and make a fist. That was for another time, though.
Two views of the orc’s right hand. The rigging allows you to move body parts and the controls for curling the fingers are simple enough. However, I did something wrong when I set the fingers up because the fingers don’t move properly.
So that was the course finished. Next up, I’ll have a look at getting realistic textures onto objects and then I’ll try and get those hands looking right so I can pose and animate Steve. And don’t forget to look for science-related opportunities for Blender.
When I made Bob the non-demon (see below) I was introduced to sculpting in Blender. Virtual clay you manipulate with a mouse without having to consider gravity and then paint any colour you like offers huge opportunity for creativity.
After lighting and colouring, here’s Bob.
This promised to be a longer sculpt, since we were making not only a head, but a body and some rudimentary clothes – boots and a loincloth. I’ll split into three parts. Second part will look at the finishing of the sculpt, the third will look at some of the other stuff we can do with posable figures.
We used squashed spheres to block out the main shape of the head, body and hands. It’s the hands that proved the most tricky to get looking good. Later, the hands were to cause quite a lot of frustration when it came to rigging. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Progression of the orc sculpt. From blobs, to a bit of shape, to rough definition of muscles and hand. We only did one half because we can apply a mirror to the sculpt once we’d done fiddly stuff.
The body was the first part that got any proper attention. We added clay to the spheres and built up the main muscle groups. For much of the lessons I wasn’t sure what the end goal was, other than the final orc. So we spent some hours adding and refining the musculature, getting the boots right and sculpting a loincloth and belt shield.
Progress of the sculpt. The face was a detailed task, since we want to give the orc some personality. Then adding detail to the body muscles and then adding clothes to cover such bits as an orc feels it necessary to cover.
I’m not sure why, but I didn’t save any of the progress during the face sculpt; it followed a similar path to the work we did to create Bob, but adding tusks and shaping the mouth around them was different.
Next was to make the basic figure a bit more characterful. As with Bob, this involved adding asymmetry, scars and general wonkiness to the face. Further, this time we added ugly lumps and diseased parts to the orc. It was a shame to do this, I’d spent some time getting the musculature of the shoulders right and they were covered by the shoulder plate and the hideous growth that I added.
To make the orc a bit more interesting and to seem like he’d had a bit of a life, we added unsightly lumps and a horrible growth to his left shoulder. That’s what happens when you mess with wizards.
Raised veins were added using a texture brush – basically paint on a texture and it makes whatever shape is on the brush. I’d need to go back and be reminded how to do that again.
As part of the messification of the sculpt, we had added some detail to the belt boss and bashed the metal bits around because this orc has seen action.
It was about here that I showed the sculpt to our daughter, who named him ‘Steve’.
So I had an orc ready to colour in and use to learn about animating characters. But that’s for next time.
His most satisfying novel is now a Penguin Modern Classic
As long-term fans of Terry Pratchett (see previous post), the publication of his 29th Discworld novel “for adults of all ages”, Night Watch, was eagerly anticipated in the Steele household. It was published in 2002, a year of changes for us. I finished my PhD that year and secured a placement at Monash University as a post-doc researcher in the Victorian College of Pharmacy1. Mrs S had been headhunted by a mortgage company late in the year, but had to turn it down to move to Australia. We also had our kitchen re-done that year. We completed the work the day before we left the country.
By the time Night Watch was released we had got into the habit of buying the hardbacks for each other on birthdays and Christmases. If Mrs S bought one for me she would be impatiently waiting for me to finish. I’m a slow reader.
All the little angels rise up, rise up…
Twenty-three years down the line I’ve no idea who bought who our copy. But from the first line, we knew it was a good ‘un.
Sam Vimes sighed when he heard the scream, but finished shaving before he did anything about it.
After a brief interview with an apprentice assassin who’s fallen into a cesspit (the source of the scream), flowering lilac reminds Sam of the date – 25th May – the day when the Republic of Treacle Mine Road is commemorated. It went out of his head, what with his wife, Lady Sybil, due to give birth any time soon.
We get reacquainted with The Watch in this, the sixth novel in the sub-series. The fortunes of the watch have improved beyond recognition since “Guards! Guards!”2. We meet the main players at a graveyard where they privately remember the fallen of the Glorious 25th May. One of the gravestones bears the name ‘John Keel’, which sits among five other graves (one of which is normally empty, but Reg Shoe, now a zombie and officer of The Watch, buries himself in solidarity with the other fallen).
But official remembrance of the fallen has to wait. A serial cop-killer, Carcer Dun, has been spotted. A rooftop chase ends by the library of the Unseen University, the most concentrated region of magic in the Discworld. Lightning strikes Vimes and Carcer, sending them back in time 30 years.
Faced with being unknown and out of time, Vimes adopts the identity of John Keel, the sergeant who trained Vimes as a young watchman. The real Keel has been murdered by Carcer, the first change to the timeline and an event that the History Monk Lu-Tze3 spends the novel trying to rectify. Carcer, having falling in with pre-Guild thieves, is soon established as a sergeant in the city’s secret police, the Cable Street Particulars (aka The Unmentionables).
What follows is a mix of social commentary, Les Misérables, philosophical musings on what to do if you meet your younger self (other than be shocked at what a twerp you were), fun with an ox and a piece of ginger, a new spin on the expression ‘Look after yourself’, and, finally, the way home.
How do they rise up, rise up?
This isn’t his funniest book. That’s a toss up between Witches Abroad and Last Continent4. Too much humour would have been out of place in a book where political corruption culminates in the assassination of the city Patrician, where we witness the intense loneliness of Sam in his home city but 30 years away from his current life, and where a torture chamber is unearthed that makes watchmen vomit.
We also get a timely reminder of an earlier Pratchett aphorism that it’s not only the cream that rises to the top in society.
But there is gallows humour and the sort of social observation we love in Pratchett’s work. The use of old ladies as psychological warfare, the topology of a revolutionary state (if there’s more of the city inside our barricades than outside, that makes us the majority) and how seamstresses differ from needlewomen.
They rise up arse up, arse up high!
Eleven years after his death and just after what would have been his 77th birthday, Night Watch has been published as a Penguin Modern Classic. As such, it joins the ranks of Brideshead Revisited, The IPCRESS File and Nineteen Eighty Four.
This new edition has a new cover – rather than Paul Kidby’s pastiche of Rembrandt’s Night Watch5, we get a black and white version of the original. This is a rare example of the cover art determining the title. The working title was “The Nature of the Beast”, but when Kidby visited Pratchett and showed him the painting (Kidby’s first for the series), Terry changed the title to reflect this wonderful artwork.
Comparison of the original Paul Kidby cover (left) and the cover for the Penguin Modern Classic edition of Night Watch. Kidby’s original features characters from the book, including Sam Vimes, Sam Vimes, Nobby, Lu-Tze, Havelock Vetinari and Reg Shoe (pre-zombie).
The cynical part of me suggests that this cover art is more fitting for serious readers to be seen with. It must be a proper book because it has a black and white image on the cover. Either that or a bold abstract design, because one can’t be seen reading fantasy, can one?
The new edition has notes and annotations to contextualise the novel. I’ve not seen a copy yet, but the authors of the notes are known Pratchett fans. One even nominated Terry for an honorary doctorate at the University of Dublin.
I don’t know how many new Pratchett readers this new edition with generate. It is a rare author who can blend satire, fantasy and properly good jokes. And despite – or perhaps because – Sir Terry was, for a time, the best selling author in the UK, there is still an element of sneering at fantasy and science fiction from some quarters, especially when it’s funny. It may be that Pratchett is seen as putting a hat on a hat – he should have written fantasy, or comedy, not both.
I don’t really care. I’ve never been personally mocked or attacked for reading Pratchett, and it’s likely that I would never have got to know Mrs S were I not a fan. All praise to the Republic of Treacle Mine Road!
The motto of the Republic of Treacle Mine Road: Truth, Justice, Freedom, Reasonably Priced Love and a Hard-Boiled Egg.
‘Victorian’ as in the Australian state Victoria. Not ‘Victorian’ as in men in tweeds with handlebar moustaches riding penny-farthings. Though that remains the image I have in my mind whenever I hear the phrase ‘Victorian Police’. ↩︎
This includes the presence of the troll Detritus, who we first met in “Guards! Guards!” working as a splatter (“like a bouncer, but trolls use more force.”) then in “Moving Pictures” as hired muscle. His transformation from animate rock to respected Sergeant in the City Watch is the most remarkable character growth in the series. He’s truly a renaissance troll. ↩︎
Six thousand year old monk, practitioner of déjà fu, devotee of The Way of Mrs Cosmopolite. He was a main character in Thief of Time; first seen in Small Gods. ↩︎
Inevitably, this is a personal opinion and subject to change depending on how recently I’ve read them and which bits Mrs S and I have quoted to each other. ↩︎
Officially, the painting is called The Company of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch, but that’s much harder to fit on the cover of a novel. ↩︎
Today is the tenth anniversary of Terry Pratchett’s death.
We knew it was coming, but it wasn’t any easier.
I read The Colour of Magic just after it came out in paperback in 1985. There was a very favourable review in White Dwarf, I may have borrowed my brother’s copy before splashing out a few quid on my own copy. I’d enjoyed Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series (lightly parodied in CoM) and read the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series a year before. Conan/ Hrun the barbarian was a trope I knew and I had probably seen Schwarzenegger in the film. I later learned that Bel-Shamharoth was a parody of the Cthulu mythos. I have tried to read Lovecraft, but I can’t get on with him. Just get on with the story, already.
By the time I went to Uni in ’89 there were seven Discworld books. Pyramids, detailing Pteppic’s time at the Assassin’s Guild (modelled on public schools) in the first part had come out, not long after I’d tried (and failed) to read Tom Brown’s Schooldays. This was unrelated to Pratchett – I’d read the available Flashman books and thought I’d try the original. This did nothing to assuage my antipathy towards Victorian literature, which was based on having to drudge through Oliver Twist for O level English. I also have issues with books set in public schools – by brother loved the Jennings books, I was never keen.
Anyway, I was a fan of his work and bought the paperbacks when they came out and I could afford them. I also came across The Unadulterated Cat and, by chance, Good Omens in hardback at the irresistible price of £8.95. I was in Quiggin’s in Liverpool, looking for cheap clothes probably, and was astonished to see this for sale.
I had no idea who this Neil Gaiman person was.
First edition (I think) Good Omens, bought in Quiggin’s Market, Liverpool.
Back at Loughborough, I was sharing a house with Simon, a fellow metalhead who was doing English and Drama. As is the nature of Drama types, they tended to congregate as a group. One of the group became friends with Simon’s girlfriend. Over a curry one evening, this friend and I got chatting about books and fantasy. We shared a love of Anne McCaffrey and a growing disdain for high fantasy, but she’d never read Terry Pratchett, could she borrow one?
By the time she’d borrowed all my books, we realised that we really liked each other. So much so, that we got married, bought more Pratchett books and had two children together. But not before we got to meet him and nearly poison him with a bananana dakry.
Pterry at Loughborough University, signing for Witches Abroad in 1992. Our friend Emma and I colluded to get him a bananana dakry which, to his credit, he drank and pretended to enjoy.
So Pterry meant a lot to us and we were saddened by his death, although we had known it was going to happen. Not as sad as when family have died, but still upset.
Not long after my dad died, I read “A Life With Footnotes”, Rob Wilkin’s biography of Sir Terry. My dad had had vascular dementia, which stripped him of his memory, his independence and his dignity. Reading the last part of the biography was difficult for me. Not only because of how accurately Rob described his final days and Terry’s decline, but because I was crying while reading it.
I’m rereading A Life With Footnotes. I keep meaning to do a re-read of all the books, revisit old favourites and maybe, finally read The Shepherd’s Crown.
But I do need to find a copy of The Unadulterated Cat.
Grim up North Heath 