Red leaves, swaying in an alien breeze...

Readers who have followed my series of posts on alien plants and photosynthesis (here, here and here) will know that I have no objection against plants on other world not being green, so that is why there is  'red' in the title of this post. But this post will not be about photosynthesis, as I think that theme has been dealt with sufficiently. The next theme on plants will probably be about biomechanics, but I have not started that one yet.

This post is about portraying alien plants. Obviously it is possible to do a painting, and that is fine, but it is also a lot of work. Can't computers do part of the work? There are not that many software choices available to populate a landscape with alien plants. The one I have been using over the years is Vue by E-on software. Vue is difficult to handle, in part because there are many options that are not all well-explained in the manual, but also because the software can be very unforgiving depending the hardware you are using. In other words, it may crash. It is the kind of programme that you can easily develop a love/hate relationship with.

It has an ecosystem feature, in which you choose plants or objects, adjust their rations and relative sizes, and when you then press 'populate' the programme does just that. It can even take matters such as height or slope of a landscape into account, placing some species there and others not. The problem in designing alien forests was that Vue's innate plant designer was inadequate: it let you design variations of Earth plants, but made it impossible to design something more interesting from scratch. For that I used XFrog 3.5, a programme that allows the user to come up with intricate new shapes. The XFrog plants could be imported into Vue, and did allow worlds to be populated with alien plants. Some examples of my earlier efforts are here for Epona and here and here for Furahan swamps.

However, there was one disadvantage: Vue's own plants could sway in an imaginary wind, but the imported XFrog plants were static objects. For static images that is obviously not a problem, but for animations a forest in which no leaf moves is just odd. I have stopped doing Vue animations for that reason.

Recently, E-on introduced a new programme: The Plant Factory (TPF), which does let the user design plants from scratch, with the promise of having the result sway the wind. That was attractive, so I decided to try it, even though the user forum made it clear that this is a typical E-on product: it can do amazing things but often in a roundabout or unexpected manner, and sometimes it simply does not deliver. TPF has no manual whatsoever, so anyone wishing to use it should treat it as a voyage of exploration rather than as a productivity tool. There is a 'personal learning' version, so everyone can test it without spending (rather a lot of) money on it.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

 I first tried whether I could make it design oddly shaped plants, and here is one of first attempts. I tried to obtain a results resembling an earlier XFrog design, and that went reasonably well, as you can see above. As you can see, this tree has its major branches growing from a central trunk as do Earth trees. Its branches curve through the air to reach the ground, where they may take root, providing water and nourishment or simply offer structural support. The proportions are not right yet, it is a start.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

The image above shows a hillside populated with two species of simple plants, home made in TPF. The scene was intended to experiment with wind animation. The first result was disappointing in that there was hardly any movement. There are lots of sliders controlling wind, which I had left at their original settings. Apparently those are meant for an unnaturally calm day. Very well, let's turn the wind setting up to 100%. That did not do too much either. I remembered an earlier surprise in Vue, dealing with lens blurring; there too a setting of 100% was almost negligible; someone at a forum told me to not to treat 100% as a limit, and so here too I set wind animation to 500%, and now at least the leaves move. Apparently this is more or less a dimensionless unit; just one of those odd Vue quirks.

  

And here is the result; better, I think! It's not a storm yet, but at least there is movement! The quality of videos on blogger is not very good, so it can look a lot better. Meanwhile, there is still a very large number of options to discover or, given the lack of a manual, to blunder into, so do not expect a to see a marblebill brachiating through a Furahan forest. Not quite yet, anyway.

Hot Summer on Furaha

While thinking of new posts, I finally took some scenes I had prepared much earlier and assembled them. I have tried my hand at making animations before (here and here), but will stop doing so for a while. The program I used to to define plants (XFrog), does not allow for a full wind animation, and without that you cannot really animate natural scenes well. Vue Infinite, the program I used to render scenes, can in fact take care of moving foliage quite well, but its plant editor is sadly not open enough to allow me to define interesting alien plants. That is the main reason that this scene depicts a hot day: there is no wind at all. For fairly obvious reasons there are no animals to speak of, or at least none galloping through the landscape. You will need your imagination for that, I am afraid.

When an animation is lacking in movement it cannot work very well. Then again, I did like the way the 'time lapse' scenes came out, particularly the one in which you see the planet spinning during the night. The direction of movement of the stars (straight up) tells you that we are near the equator.

[Later addition: I guess I did not pay enough attention to logic. In the last scene you see the sun setting at a fairly low angle. If we would really have been near the equator, as suggested by the movement of the stars at night, the sun should dive towards the horizon at a more or less right angle...]


Anyway, here it is. There is a large ballont passing by, and look out, or rather, keep an ear out for splatterbugs at sunset.

There is a larger version on YouTube.

Furaha Swamp Scene II

If this scene looks a bit familiar, that is because I posted previous versions of it as well, in November 2009. This version is updated though, and so is still worth viewing, or so I hope. The end is a bit rough: the 'Fish' is visible for a short while only, which is intentional, and so I thought I could get away with a limited amount of detail. There is a better quality version on the site: simply go to the plant page and select the arrox tree.

Click to enlarge; copyright plant image Gert van Dijk

Here is a short 'making of'. The plants were all designed with XFrog, a program aimed wholly at structures that branch and grow, i.e., plants. The various rules and settings can be quite complex, but it allows very good control over the characteristics of any plant you create with it. There are not many good plant editors about. One of the few other candidates is the plant editor inside Vue, but that is unfortunately geared towards changing and mutating existing plants, and does not allow the creation of a plant from scratch. Vue has the advantage that it allows its own plants to move in a breeze, which certainly adds to the liveliness of a scene.
The image above shows one of the flowering plants in the swamp scene, as it looks inside XFrog.

Click to enlarge

The next stage is to produce a suitable environment, for which I use Vue Infinite. Basically you start with a 'terrain', which in this case is the ground with some grooves in it to hold streams. Vue allows the user to define 'ecosystems' as collections of 3D objects that are placed according to rules. For instance, one such system could be limited to high points in the terrain. In this swamp scene the arrox trees only grow on such relatively high ground. The marsh growths, with reeds etc., are limited to medium height zones, while in this case hardly anything grows in the lowest ones. That is on purpose, as they would be obscured by muddy water anyway.
Once the playing filed is ready, the camera is set to fly through the scene, and to produce a ray-traced image 24 times a second, or more. A simple scene lasting 4 seconds may take about 10 hours, so a short film of one minute takes many nights of lonely processing (for the computer, that is; I will be asleep).
And then it is a matter of turning the individual frames into films, for which I use VirtualDub. The resulting clips are much too large to show on the internet so they have to be compressed, at the loss of quality. Adding sound and titles adds to the fun, for which I use Adobe's Premiere (Elements).

And there we are; a Furahan scene that does not actually look that alien. One reason for this is that plants may yield less obvious visual 'alienness' than animals. Regardless , I could not resist putting in an animal at the end. a specimen of a 'Fishes IV' species. I do not yet know how to make the parts of their body move, something that would add greatly to the visual quality of the film. But this is the level of my animation skills at present. I do not think that I will try to become good at it, as there is too little time for that.

Click to enlarge. From left to right, typical examples of species from the Fishes IV, V and VI groups. Copyright Gert van Dijk

But I guess that some of you will want to know more about the various 'Fishes', that are just called that by Furahan people because the word came easily, not because it is biologically correct. In this sense the early Horizonists seem to have gone for the old custom of labelling just about any type of water animal a 'Fish'. 'Crayfish' and 'starfish' come to mind as well. I will not go into the early development of Fishes I, II and II, that follow one another in geological time. Not so for Fishes IV, V and VI, shown above in a rough sketch. Here is a quote from an authoritative source, Nyoroge's "Broad Stokes":

"From this point on hexapod evolution becomes more complex. ‘Fishes III’ gave rise to three new groups, ‘Fishes IV, V and VI’, all of which had three pairs of fins. This has caused a great deal of confusion. There are two schools of thought trying to explain the ‘Fishes III Division’, as the debate has become known. The ‘Hexaphile School’ holds that Fishes IV, V and VI evolved separately from multifinned ancestors, and have three pairs of limbs in common, because three pairs of limbs are innately superior to any other number, without actually explaining in much detail why this should be the case. The ‘Monophyletic School’ contends that all three groups have three pairs simply because they all stem from a single ancestor. This is somewhat surprising in view of other differences between Fishes IV, V and VI, which do not suggest a common ancestry. The ‘Contingency View’, which has been gaining strength lately, holds that there is no innate advantage in any number of limbs, and that all three groups have the same number of limbs by accident. Molecular Cladisticians keep silent about the matter, due to a lack of clear evidence one way or the other."

Epona Reconnaissance Flight (Epona V)

The Epona Project was, or perhaps is, probably the first serious attempt to build an fictional biosphere from scratch. There is still a website, definitely worth watching. Admittedly, the project has stopped in the sense that no new life forms have been developed for a long time, nor is that likely to happen. But the website is being added to, and I return to it from time to time. The last blog entry on Epona is to be found here, while another one that shows the same scene as is shown in the film below is right here. This time, I used Vue Infinite (version 7.5) to produce a film of almost one minute duration.

How does this work? Well, first of all, there were the life forms to consider. Steven Hanly had modelled them in the past, and it proved possible to port some of his models into the Vue environment. The 'uther' you see flying in the scene is entirely Stephen's doing. The plants could not be used directly, as present-day computer imagery requires more detail than was available when he first designed the models. They were therefore designed anew, using XFrog for the large leaves of the pagoda trees and for all small plants. The stems of the large pagoda tress were done in Vue Infinite. The trees were assembled in Vue, and Vue's 'ecosystem' feature was used to create a terrain with a stream running through it. Then just imagine that a 5-second fragment of film may need some 34 hours to render.

After that, a bit of sound was added, a process I have hardly any experience with. I hope the result is not too jarring.

Anyway, there we are: perhaps the film is about a robot drone taking a look on an Eponan archipelago, covered by a pagoda forest. There is a larger version on YouTube. The original film on my computer is much better; I wish I knew more about optimising quality while compressing a video...

Loose ends

Click to enlarge

Only a short post this time (well, there is such a thing as real life).

Firstly, I was in Paris last week, and as usual I picked up some bandes dessinées (BDs, comics). There is a collection of specialist shops, but you can also go to large shops selling books, CDs and DVDs, such as the FNAC. A short while ago I discussed Léo's series of extraterrestrial BDs, and had shown the cover of part three of the Antares cycle. The FNAC decided to increase the interest in this series: they are selling limited edition prints and have a small exposition of original sketches or plates that were not actually used. They also draw attention to all this by having posters put up in the passages of the Métro. That goes to show that the French really regard comics as seriously as they would films or other books, doesn't it? It was also nice to see a bit of speculative biology out in the open in one of the world's major cities.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Secondly, I have been working on an updated version of the cathedral forest that is already on the website. The reasons to work on it were that there is a possibility of it appearing in print, and I had spent some time on Epona; Furaha demanded more time!

I design such plants with a program called XFrog, and use Vue Infinite for rendering. Both have their share of problems: XFrog works fine, never crashes, but some parts of it are so complex that it is hard to predict what will happen. Vue Infinite is a program that may evoke more curses than compliments, but recently my opinion of it has improved significantly. The main reason for that probably is that I bought a new computer with much more processing power, and Vue does not seem to feel at ease with mere 'normal' computers. It appears a bit spoilt, in effect. Anyway, I can now produce scenes of higher complexity, and natural scenes quickly require enormous amounts of memory. Shortcuts disappoint quickly: in the past I have had to make leaves much to large in order to get away with a low number of leaves. Similarly, I tricked the eye into thinking that there were many leaves while these only consisted of small triangles without any twigs at all. Such tricks work until you get close, and then the illusion is shattered. Conventional painting is much more forgiving in this respect.

So here is a study of a Cathedral Tree. I think the leaves are small enough to convince the eye into thinking that this is a sizable organism. And now for the rest of the forest...

Furahan swamp scenes

I have used the 3D program Vue to produce some Furahan scenes in the past. I started when it was still called Vue d'Esprit, and now it is simply called 'Vue' (here is the website). Mostly, you will find the results in the plants section on the Furaha site. Vue is an odd program, and if you visit the forums on the website you will find people loving it but also many deploring its sometimes unexpected results, as well as errors.

One of the things that I am a bit disappointed about is Vue's plant editor. There is one, but it is fairly limited: it will let you alter existing designs, but you cannot design completely new shapes with it, and if you want alien forms, you need more freedom that Vue gives you. Of course, there is XFrog: it will allow you to do that, but it is difficult to learn and for several years now all development efforts have been directed at versions to be used with major 3D packages, leaving general users like me with the 3.5 version, that is by now rather old. Still, you can design very interesting shapes with it.

Animation is another subject that Vue must be able to do, as there are breathtaking demonstration videos available, but unfortunately most general users find it extremely difficult to get good results. In experimenting with animation I was not too disappointed, but my standards for animation might not be that high. It is possible that the latest version of Vue is better, but I am at least one version behind.

So here are two scenes from a very quiet swamp. The reasons it is so quiet is twofold: I should add some sounds, but I have never create an alien nature sound track yet. I do have ideas on how to do it, but it does not have a high priority. The other thing you will notice is that the plants and the water do not move at all. Vue can actually produce plants that move in a breeze, but that works only with its own type of plants, not with imported objects.

Copyright Gert van Dijk

You can find the same swamp in the plants section by the way.

Copyright Gert van Dijk

You may well find that the scene isn't that alien, and you would be right. I am guessing that branching plant shapes would converge in design across the universe, but I could have thrown in a few mixomorphs or ballooning plants to spice up the scene. Then again, there are items you cannot see that well. The 'spirflower' is a case in point. Flowery things are probably universal, in that it makes sense for sessile life forms to entice mobile ones to help with procreation. A flower is just an advertisement. There is no need for them to look like Earth flowers though: any form might do, I guess. The spirflower has two brightly coloured blade-like leaves in a double spiral, with small bulbs on top that exude the reward for landing there (while secreting some sexual cells, of course). Here is one in a close-up, done with Vue.

Click to enlarge. Copyright Gert van Dijk

Just some tree designs

Real life has a habit of getting in the way of more creative endeavours, so any trusty reader will have to wait a bit for me to write some more on how not to walk on tentacles. Meanwhile here are a few trees I have been working on, which perhaps also counts as creative work. They are designed with XFrog, and rendered with Vue (links in the appropriate section of the website). As always, click on the images to enlarge them.



First, this might either be called a Thistle Tree or a Galactère. It's surprising how quickly the number of polygons rises: this version weighs in at over 1.1. million polygons, and I don't think the ratio of leaf size to tree size is good yet: the leaves should be smaller in relation to the tree, but that is the quickest way to get really high polygon counts.


Here is the same tree shot from underneath, which perhaps helps to understand how it got its names. You can get away with much rougher leaves for long distance shots, but if you want to get in close you need detail.



And just for fun a Mollum, that is rather unlikely to make it through the utterly unnatural selection process determining continued survival on the planet Furaha, also known as Nu Phoenicis IV...