Doesn't necessarily make sense

Language and Mayhem pt. 2

Continuing upon the previous post on language and mayhem. Tracing the same lineage in Indo-European languages one undoubtedly comes upon spirituality and the effects of language on religion. This is something the Kabbalah (Sefer Yetzirath) goes into at great depth, trying to explain seed syllables (as in Buddhism) and their effect upon the perceived world. In simple terms, depending on which wovels we use for certain energies in nature, we will attach them to either natural points or not so natural. Like the sound “aaa”, that most place at roughly the same place. Later wovels differ quite alot at which part of the body they resonate. This will of course lead to a drastically different effect and meaning. Some languages have more wovels than others as well – that resonate at parts not possible in others.

There seems to be a correlation between spirituality and the search of enlightenment in said language tree. Most of the organized religions that we know of are descended from India, some spreading eastward some west. Any history buff can clearly see the line of thought from India through Persia to Greece, Rome and then the rest of Europe. The core of the teaching hasn’t really changed significantly over the years so I believe we can safely assume that the problem/solution remains the same.

On to the actual point I’m trying to make here, before I forget the whole thing.
As usual, not so much of a point as food for thought.

If we take the common definition of enlightenment as the natural state of being, without any ego issues – then this becomes a somewhat important point to consider.
I believe anyone with a bit of common sense could easily verify this.

Silence in meditation is the first step along this path, suppressing the word making part of the brain from interfering.

But there is a larger issue here which has to do with the state itself. If we are “programmed” to perceive/describe the world a certain way, our goal will automatically be somewhat off target due to the builtin inaccuracy.
The fact that all shamanistic societies that the indo-europeans encountered got wiped out and were largely considered un-godly probably comes from the fact that the poor little priest just couldn’t understand why the pursuit of a non-natural god was of no interest to them.
One culture that didn’t get wiped out before it imparted its knowledge upon someone else was the Bön tradition of Tibet, that of course spawned Tibetan Buddhism.

Hmm, don’t know if this makes any sense but at least it’s consistent with everything else on this site

Language and mayhem

Here’s something that struck the little brain the other day when I explained
languages to a friend.

Indo-European languages and their inherent problem regarding natural order and
all the mayhem that ensues.

Let’s take the language tree as a visual example, this is a site somewhat related to graphics after all:

Indoeuropeanlanguagefamilytree

Indo European languages.

Let’s see if I can remember the original train of thought. Let us start by regard culture
as an expression of language and imagine them as little branches and leaves growing
of the tree.

A common theme that strikes every one of these languages is the desire to take over
the world when their language/culture starts blooming. For some reason they become
very warlike.
Every one of the cultures in this image has expressed this behaviour throughout history.
The latest one of course English in the form of America. England had their hayday awhile back
and American can be safely regarded as its own languge, as it is a culture on its own as well.

I could go on to list the whole thing but I’ll leave it up to you the reader to verify this.
History books are available from the library at least for a little while longer.

Now, where this becomes interesting is:

There are languages on this planet that do not have a separate word for He/She, but use the word IT.
The common factor in Indo-European languages is the built in separation of He/She, some stronger like french, others slightly more forgiving.

The direct result of this is of course separation of sexes, and all that follows. Feminism was an unknown concept for these other cultures and a rather silly idea when it came along. All that could be said was, “What took you so long”.

Now, we might just shrug this off as inconsequential, but if such a simple idea, that everyone isn’t equal, is hardcoded into the language, guess where the class system and all other forms of sociological mayhem stem from.

There’s lots of other cool things to find down this train of thought. But this was something to start things out.
There are other words as well that are builtin that don’t reflect the world in a correct way.

Organized workflow

Here’s a sample shot from Last Chance being composited. Can’t stand the auto layout function – no way to remember where all the nodes are

LC_wires

R&D for Last Chance

Here’s some old R&D renders from Last Chance. This one shows an individual paint stroke. First flat, then displaced and finally with highlights. The idea was to have different paint pigments, some metallic etc. based on the actual “tube” they came from – but as usual, I didn’t have time for that.
The rendering doesn’t do paint mixing anyway so it wouldn’t have been worth it.

The last image shows the same stroke repeated – so it’s a little boring. What’s noteworthy is the curving of the strokes which gives some neat effects, especially on animated objects. There’s a couple of things that Really don’t work – namely UV borders. The strokes start rotating and flipping randomly because the direction changes. I solved this by having the geometry always face the camera – it kinda works.

This image shows the preview options available when constructing the image. Points, lines, sprites and strokes. This helps in constructing the image – the density can be visualized with Points, the direction and lenght with Lines. Finally the Strokes show how the render will look – although without the canvas.

From Project_Last_Chance on Flickr.

Custom shaders in 3Delight for Maya

Started tinkering with 3Delight again after a long break. One thing that has been bugging me for quite awhile is the inability to combine Hypershade nodes with my own shaders. For some reason the assignment panel doesn’t allow for this.

The main gripe I have with this is that textures don’t show up in the viewport. When doing lookdev or texturing it’s nice to see what you have plugged into the material. Last time I looked at this I ended up assigning a lambert to the object, and then using an override. But that’s a hassle.

There’s a couple of ways this can be done – either through the RSL hypershade node, or by writing a Maya plugin. In this post I’ll go through the plugin. (source can be downloaded at the end of post)

cnode1

Anything plugged into the slots here won’t evaluate as expected.

So starting with the Surface Shader example in the DevKit. This one has Color and Transparency, enough to start out with.

What we need to do is write a corresponding Ri.h file for our custom shader so that 3Delight knows how to translate this node. This .h file contains the inputs, outputs and RSL code to run the shader. For a surface shader this is simple, 2 inputs, 2 outputs and no shading inbetween.

cnode2

Ramp connected to shader. Now we can use all the nodes in the hypershade as normal.

cnode3

And finally the testrender from 3Delight. Pretty cool. I like the extendability of 3Delight. The forums are also extremely helpful and contain much more information that the manual.

Download the source files.

The windows free pipeline

One annoying thing about CG production is the fact that you have to keep a windows box or two around for Photoshop, since Adobe in their infinite wisdom can’t port it to Linux. Works on OSX so go figure.

There are a couple of really good solutions for running Windows inside Linux. VirtualBox and VMWare are easy to setup run fairly fast. A wacom tablet works as a mouse straight away but getting the pressure and tilt sensitivity to work can be a hassle.

First the driver has to be disabled in Linux. Either via rmmod or blacklisting the module from loading altogether. Then the device can be selected in the Virtual Machine and the windows driver will work correctly.

Photoshop inside VMWare with wacom tablet working. This is great news. No more maintaining a windows box just for one application. VirtualBox 3.1 on Debian Lenny didn’t want to play along this far. VMWare worked better even though VirtualBox feels slightly more responsive.

The last option is to run it under Wine – which is quite buggy and unusable depending on version. So far the best verson to use is CS2. This works out of the box – just make sure the Wacom is loaded in Linux. The good part about this solution is that the tablet will work in other Linux apps as well.

Performance wise the wine version is great.

Hello world!

Welcome to the redesigned webpage!

Haven’t quite figured out what to do with it yet… but I’ll get there. Maybe I will continue what Andrew started on the Last Chance site, that is, a project blog. Currently I’m working on the script for “Fuzzwuzz and the twins”, an animated feature. Making Last Chance was so much fun that I decided to start with the next one right away.

Ok, have a good one! SAmi