Furahan Biology and Allied Matters: Sylvia Lorrain

Showing posts with label Sylvia Lorrain. Show all posts

Sunday, 11 October 2009

Furaha in France 2

One week ago I had the good fortune to participate in a 'rencontre littéraire' in the city of Ganges in the South of France. I presented Furaha using Powerpoint with a variety of images, most of which are also visible on the Furaha site. I enclose a few of the slides just to satisfy your curiosity. I met a number of interesting people and had a great time.

Luckily, Marc Boulay and Sylvia Lorrain, who were responsible for my invitation (merçi!) and who live nearby, were kind enough to help me with the French text. Just as well, as it turned out, because one my translation of the word 'seasucker' (you will find them on the 'swimming with...'page) in its literal form turned out ot have unfortunate connotations. And no, I will no mention it here either. Doing the talk in French was quite an adventure, but I think it well fairly well.

© Gert van Dijk

During the visit Marc and Sylvia were kind enough to invite me to their home, where they demonstrated the process of designing animal shapes in ZBrush as well as texturing them. It is clear to me that this process requires considerable expertise, and also that they have mastered it. Anyone interested should keep an eye on their sites.

By the way, all this traveling means that I haven't had much time to work on this blog (or on anything else). Still, I am collecting material on walking with odd numbers of legs. 'Odd' here is used as the opposite of 'even'; most what you find here is odd in the other sense anyway.

Sunday, 27 September 2009

Furaha in France

The world can be very interesting: while travelling home I stopped over at one of Brussels' railway stations and leafed through the magazines at the shop. I picked one magazine up because its cover showed odd animals. The journal is available in the Netherlands (where I live) as well, but chances are very high I would not have spotted it. it is a good thing I did, as the cover had some very odd animals on it. Well, a few blog entries later (here, here and here) I am in contact with the French couple designing these great animals: Marc Boulay and Sylvia Lorrain. The next stage was that they wanted to model a Furahan animal for fun (more on that below), and the very last phase is that next week I will be holding a talk on Furaha in the city of Ganges, at a 'rencontre littéraire'. There is a slight problem in that my French is mediocre at best, so I hope the images will do the talking...

Those of you who visited the sites of Marc Boulay and Sylvia Lorrain may have noted that the bulchouk, a decidedly Furahan avian, has flown onto their sites. Just for fun I will repeat some of the images here. The bulchouk itself is only visible on my site as an illustration on a book cover, so here is a bit more of it for you to see.

Click to enlarge © Gert van Dijk

The next stage was that Marc Boulay used ZBrush to model it in 3D, resulting in images like the following:

Click to enlarge © © Marc Boulay / Sylvia Lorrain / Gert van Dijk

And then Sylvia took care of the textures and colouring and put the model against a good backdrop:

Click to enlarge

I am also now fooling around with Zbrush, which is fairly easy to get into. But if you want to see how it ought to be done, Marc has put a video on his site on which you can see how he modelled the bulchouk starting with a few simple spheres. Just go to his site, click 'FUN' on the menu at the top. Alternatively this will take you there directly (but you will miss the Triceratops!). Just click on the play button on the second window, and be prepared to be amazed.

Sunday, 2 August 2009

The Bulchouk in 3D

Look what happened! A good deed never goes unrewarded, some say, or unpunished, as other with a more cynical disposition would say. In this case, we're definitely dealing with the first possibility. So what happened?

Well, there I was, trying to relax a bit and not working all the time, and so I devoted one of my latest blog entries to my amateur efforts at modelling something in 3D with ZBrush. In the post, I mentioned that, in contrast to me, there are also those who really know how to do 3D modelling: the people who also featured in the 'South of Brussels' post and its sequels.

Well. Marc Boulay and Sylvia Lorrain, with whom I have had pleasant email conversations, contacted me and said they would like to have a go at one of my Furahan creatures. I of course accepted gladly, sent them a list, and they chose the bulchouk.

The 'bulchouk', in case you did not know (and how could you?) is the species depicted on the cover of the "Field Guide to Furahan Avians' (just go to the books section of my website, and you will find it. It's a tetrapterate, or a hexapod-derived flying animal with a wing pattern I wrote about a few weeks ago.

Click to enlarge
© Marc Boulay / Sylvia Lorrain / Gert van Dijk

But now, without further ado, Marc Boulay's 3D ZBrush version of the bulchouk. The next stage is hopefully that Sylvia Lorrain will texture it. I am very happy with it; isn't it great?

Monday, 13 April 2009

South of Brussels; again...

With spring and all that, there is the garden to consider, so real biology took precedence over speculative biology this Easter weekend. Then again, New Hades Publishers just announced two new books on the Furaha website (one on Epona and one on Snaiad), so don't complain!

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Anyway, what I can do is to direct you once more to our French friends: stirred perhaps in part by the attention given to their work Marc Boulay has been working on a gallery of their future animals. Just go to his site, click on the image of the penguin-like head saying 'Creatief met Darwin' (now where did I see that picture before?) and you will have found it.

Do not worry about the French on the next page. There are four oval links at the top right. Clicking on two of the ones starting with 'ecosystème' should make you happy (the third should make you patient).

Click to enlarge

Here is an appetizer: an Arthrodon, a shark with some interesting characteristics: the row of fins looks like an atavism, but the 'moustache' is a new development: they are electric and are used to stun prey by electrocution.

I really will have to ask them one day how they obtain these nice effects on their sites. Very neat.

Saturday, 28 February 2009

Future evolution south of Brussels

So they have a Propellonectes on display in Brussels, but on the websites of the artists who designed it is a Calcitriornis.

If the previous sentence makes no sense to you whatsoever, please read the entry dealing with this subject first. In effect we are talking about an exposition in Brussels that includes some future animals. I had been using Google to find out more, but need not have bothered, as the material I was looking for is available on the websites of Marc Boulay and Sylvia Lorrain. The three sites contain largely the same material but are not identical, so it pays to visit all three.

Click to enlarge
© Marc Boulay / Sylvia Lorrain - ADAGP Paris 2000-2009
© Jean-Sébastien Steyer - CNRS 2000-2009

I will just show you some images of 'Benthogyrinus' to make you curious. What you see here is a poster-like image with some explanatory text. This states that we are looking at the very last amphibians, descended from the frog genus Xenopus. The species now is an ocean dweller, filling the niche whale sharks once lived in. The animals have developed a salt-excreting gland allowing them to cope with their salty environment. They do not actually look much like frogs, but there is a good reason for that. They are neotenous, meaning that they become sexually mature while formally still being in a larval stage. In effect, they are giant tadpoles. Very giant tadpoles, as they measure up to 20 meters. The males are two or there times smaller than the females and are shaped differently. The next two images illustrate all this nicely.

By the way, if you see a heading 'demos' on their websites, do click on it, as it will lead you to some 'exe' files that provide a slide show with music showcasing their work. Those are definitely worth taking a look.

Nice as all this is, it does not explain why Calcitriornis is the same as Propellonectes. Calcitriornis predates Propellonectes, as is evident from the copyright dates on the images. The answer is given in one of the interviews, and if you want to read it, there is a link on Boulay's site. Here is part one, en here is part two if you need a shortcut. The interview dates from 2006 and mentions a plan for a park on evolution, and that was to contain a section called 'Demain; les animaux du futur' ('tomorrow; the animals of the future'). The same protagonists were involved that we encountered in the Brussels expo: Steyer, Boulay and Lorrain. I do not know whether Dixon was formally involved, but the text makes it clear that they were in contact. That probably explains the traces of his 'Zoology of the future'. Unfortunately for those of us who like such things, nothing came of the plans.

That is sad, but at least it explains the history behind the Brussels' beasties: they were part of an earlier attempt to create a new future. I wonder whether we will hear and see more of the plans from this trio. I hope so.

Oh yes: Jean-Sébastien Steyer has written a book on life before dinosaurs; compared to the dinosaur era that is a time that deserves more attention, and the book looks very good. It is in French, and here is a link.

Saturday, 14 February 2009

Future evolution in Brussels

The February 2009 issue of the Flemish magazine Eos, focusing on the popularisation of science, has as its cover theme 'De dieren van de toekomst' ('the animals of the future'). Now that is an interesting theme! Anyone with an interest in the subject will immediately think of Dougal Dixon's book 'After man, a zoology of the future' (see my installment on 'Why there's no walking on tentacles' for a glimpse at one of his other works). Eos' story is about a new exhibition in Brussels' natural history museum, in which a new evolution gallery opened on February 12 2009, the 200 anniversary of Darwin's birth. Apparently the museum people decided not to let evolution simply stop right in our age, but to leave the clock ticking for another 50 million years into the future. This period is called the Dixonian, so it's clear the people behind it have done their homework. Congratulations Dougal!

The page of the museum website is in Dutch, French and English (but not in German, which is odd, as it is spoken in Belgium and the main museum page does have a German version). It is frustratingly devoid of images of future lifeforms. A bit of internet searching led to a site promising a video of the animals, but at the time of writing the video did not work; I will include the video link here in the hope that it will work later on. So all I had to give you some more information was the magazine. Pick it up, if you can (and can read Dutch).

Above is an image taken from the cover; it shows five of the to-be-evolved animals with their names.

This is a close up of Neopyghoscelis, a penguin descendant reaching up to 4 meters in length. I wonder whether the image shows a young animal, as the size of the eye seems much too large for a 4-m bird. Eyes don't usually increase in size at the same rate as overall body size.

Anyway, one of its more interesting features is that it redeveloped teeth. Looking at the image I thought that these were pseudoteeth, i.e., bumps developing from the rim of the penguin's beak, but the text suggests that the teeth are the result of the genes for teeth, dormant in present birds, having become active again. I wonder if that event is more likely than reshaping the rim of the beak, but either 'solution' would do the trick, I guess. The text says 'Creative with Darwin' in Dutch.

And this is a Propellonectes (remember that name!). The legend says that is a descendant of a present-day petrel, that has lost its wings and swims with much enlarged feet. It is about 1 metre in length.

Very nice work. I will keep an eye on the museum site to see if more material appears. The magazine story is largely about how evolution works, but also provided some names on the people who thought all this up. It looks like a very interesting set of people. Jean-Sébastien Steyer is a palaeontologist working in Paris, and I guess he's the one responsible for coming up with biologically sound lifeforms. As an aside, I think that that particular activity could with reason be described as 'creationism', to be defined as thinking up animals based on sound biological principles. It's a pity that the word seems to be in use already, in a rather less entertaining setting...

Then two people come in to breathe life into the designs (I think I had better be careful with my metaphors here, but in Darwin week some leeway is allowed). The first is Marc Boulay, who does 3D computer sculpting in Z-brush, and just looking at his page makes me wish I had chosen to go into creative work in my life rather than pursue an academic career; oh well, I admit it, perhaps I am just a tiny bit envious...

The image above should whet your appetite for more. Dixon lovers will recognise this as one of his creations, a Tetraceras. But if that isn't enough, the task force also included Sylvia Lorrain, and her website tipped me from just containable envy after seeing Boulay's work into a feeling of deep inadequacy; they are that good. She combines 3D models with photographs to produce realistic depictions of animals, which is very tricky as it soon becomes tacky. She pulls it off.

This particular bird is something I found on her site. Be certain to visit their sites, as there is more to see there. Obviously, this is a diving bird, and it's called a Calcitriornis. Hang on, that is the same bird shown in Eos as a Propellonectes! What is going on here? Calcitriornis evolving into Propellonectes? I think I will try to find the story behind this matter another day.

Now it's back to Brussels, so to speak. The team so far had everything it took to depicting 3D animals, but in 2D! The museum apparently wanted 3D items to display; ironic, in a way. The sculptor Yves Gaumetou did the final job of putting flesh on the digital bones. It's probably modeling clay or something similar, but the results can be touched and you can walk around them, and that was the point. His site contains excellent sculptures of present day animals in life-like poses.

I definitely think I will have to go to Brussels one of these days.

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Remarks added in December 2010: Seeing that Darren Naish of Tet Zoo directed some traffic to this old post, I looked at it myself, and found that some links no longer worked and that the post is behind the news. Here is an update.

Marc Boulay is now here: http://www.marcboulay.net/
Sylvia Lorrain is still here: http://www.sylvialorrain.net/
Sébastien Steyer's page has moved as well: http://www2.mnhn.fr/hdt203/info/steyer.php

Other newsworthy items may be that Sébastien has written a very nice book on early vertebrate evolution, available in French and Dutch (as far as I know). Marc and Sébastien are working on a book on future evolution on Earth; you can read more about it on Marc's site.

Finally, I later wrote some more on the Brussels expo and on Marc and Sylvia's work. If you want to read it, here is a post that links to the other posts.

Sigmund Nastrazurro

PS. I still haven't seen the Brussels expo myself...

Furahan Biology and Allied Matters