Furaha microdocumentary 1: The spiny desert slantie

Well, here we go: a Furaha microdocumentary. I gave it the number one, although that is not entirely accurate. I have made several videos in the past that might also be called 'Furaha microdocumentaries'. Those older videos reflected ideas about Furahan wildlife that are no longer current, with as the most obvious example the presence of ballonts. That is one reason to regard them as behind the times; another is that my new breed of microdocumentaries is of higher quality, or at least I like to think so. Finally, the new microdocumentaries tie in with the Furaha book and will hopefully increase sales. The Book is set to become available at the end of this month, October 2025, or next month. (The reason for the uncertainty is rather sobering: the books are printed in India and have to be shipped to the UK, but unrest in the Red Sea may cause a detour around Africa.)

  

Here it is! Blogger only shows videos at a rather small size, so I strongly recommend that you have a look at the video on my YouTube channel, where you should be able to see it in its full 1920 by 1080-pixel glory.

 I aim to produce more such videos, although they take a long time to produce. I thought beforehand that ray-tracing the images would take the most time, at three to five minutes per image for 24 images per second for something like a minute and a half. Although that amounts to about 144 hours, rendering can be done at night without paying much attention to the process. Programming the animals' movements takes devoted attention though, and that costs time, as witnessed by my previous post on such animations.             

If all goes as planned, there will be three or four microdocumentaries for each of the clades spidrids, cloakfish and tetrapters. Don't expect one every week! There will also be a general 'advertising video' out shortly.

As for the spiny desert slantie, its scientific name is Obliquambulator serratus. This is probably the first time I use the word 'slantie' in this blog; it occurs more often in The Book and represents a colloquial term for 'slanted spridrids', as described here first. In 'normal' spidrids, the legs move in a vertical plane and each leg segment is bilaterally symmetrical. In slanties, the plane of the leg is at an angle to the vertical and that angle is now part of the anatomy: slanties cannot in fact rotate their legs to become fully vertical. The slanting had no effect on leg shape early in slantie evolution, even though one side of the leg was now habitually up and the other side down. But later the legs segments evolved asymmetry, as shown clearly by the spines on the legs: these spines stick out in a horizontal direction, both on the top side and on the bottom side of the segments.

There is more to tell about slanties and spidrids. Making a video raises questions that paintings do not, such as whether the animals make sounds, what kind of sounds, and what they do, socially or otherwise. The video answers a few of those questions.                     

"Future Spidrid Microdocumentary May Feature Silly Walks"

 Well, there's a headline for you. This post contains a quick update on the evolution of the intended 'microdocumentaries' about spidrids, cloakfish and tetrapters. 

Why microdocumentaries? Because even animations of a few minutes take a long time to make if every frame is raytraced. Why spidrids and the other mentioned clades? Because seeing these animals move definitely adds value, compared to a diagram or a still image. There won't be hexapod microdocumentaries because my animation skills do not include such soft-bodied animal shapes. Not yet, anyway. 

The key elements of programming tetrapter movement are already there and I expanded the Matlab programmes that control cloakfish movement. I have almost completed work on programming spidrids, allowing visualisation of walking over uneven ground, separate movement of the abdomen and cephalothorax, slanted spidrid legs, and spidrid social signalling. I am considering having multiple spidrids walk about in a scene; that would be nice but is not essential.   

There was a very major snag along the way. I had intended to use Zbrush for 3D modelling, and had thought that I could use ZBrush, Sculptris, Photoshop or even Window's 3DPaint to paint body parts and produce texture maps. Unfortunately, Sculptris and 3DPaint no longer work well, maybe because Windows changed too much. Adobe abolished 3D painting in Photoshop because they now have a separate program for that. A glance at internet sources convinced me that ZBrush made texture exporting extremely complex, in true ZBrush style (for some reason the people at ZBrush keep clinging on to a horribly unfriendly user interface). What now? Well, with trepidation I turned to Blender, which had scared me off years ago because it was equally unfriendly. But the Blender user interface was said to have become friendlier now, so I downloaded Blender and selected the subjects of sculpting and texture painting for study. About 9 days later, I had modelled and painted all body parts of a new species of spidrid and had exported them successfully along with roughness and colour maps. I think that is telling, as I started with zero Blender knowledge. Mind you, Blender is still complex, because it does complex things; but there is a solid logic behind it.

 

So here is a try-out of a new spidrid species, produced with Matlab, Blender and Vue. There is a version with better resolution on my YouTube channel.  You may expect this species to feature in scenes of higher quality with sound, plants and more scenery.

 

 

And here is my rough starter species walking with a 'pronking' gait to impress potential mates. In this spidrid gait, two sets of four legs move together. It is an eight-legged version of the 'double tripod' gait used by insects, so I am calling it a 'double table' gait. In the pronking version, the body is held high and the legs are lifted much higher than needed. I think this walk is objectively silly, but you should ask the intended audience what they think of it, and that would be other spidrids, not me.       

By the way, I am trying my hand at Instagram too; you should be able to find me using 'J.Gert van Dijk' 

The 'Oh dear' sensation

Not much time to write a new entry in this blog. Let's just see what it takes to improve the quality in the fields needed to produce a nice and interesting book on Furaha:

1. Photoshop!
It is time to make the transition from painting in oils to purely digital art, I guess. Perhaps not so much to produce new main paintings, because doing those digitally would clash with the style of those already done. But each main painting could probably use a few nice instructional diagrams, close-up views, views of related species, etc. Those could be done digitally.

2. Blender!
Blender is a free 3D design programme. Expanding the human interest on Furaha means I need to do more work on people. Sofar they are hardly visible. I will also need some buildings, and chiefly some vehicles to show on expeditions. For that a good 3D-application will be needed, so I have started working with Blender.
It is clear, however, that designing a range of appropriate mass-repulsor floaters will take some time. 'Mass' what? 'Mass repulsors': a technology with which you need a reaction mass to lift slightly more than that mass itself. They are fairly cheap, and do not require much energy to keep them floating, but that is the best you can say about this tech. As the efficacy factor is only about 1.01, you need a mass of about 10,000 kg to lift a useful mass of 100 kg, or one human with some equipment. Think of a machine the size of a steam locomotive, but filled with concrete or metal scraps, but much slower, and with all the inertia...

3. Indesign!
Lay-out and design software. I think I would probably have to design a at least a few sample pages to show to potential publishers. I've opened a demo version of Indesign, but that's about it.

3. More species!
You can never have enough species. I really need to do a big image of a rusp. Clografts would also be good (that's clog-rafts, not clo-grafts) .

4. Cladograms!
I need cladograms. Those shouldn't take too long, at least not if I do not work out each and every group of species. Meaning I can make branches that won't be accompanied by many drawings.

5. Textures!
Well, I am working on a texture, and am beginning to force Photoshop to do what I want.

I do not really dare to put time estimates on all these tasks. Sometimes you just have to begin. But there is a slight sensation of 'Oh dear' involved, which by the way conforms to one of the limited number of emotional states of the Droodle (Lorica segmentata). The others are 'wet', 'dry', 'cold', 'warm' and 'Oh shit'.