"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' 

Are there dragons on Furaha?

 No, of course not!

Dragons are mythological beings, usually shown as very large scaly reptilian animals with four legs and two batlike wings. Did I mention that they breath fire and that some of them can talk? Of course, there are no such creatures on Furaha, but the human citizens of the planet did not shed their myths when they relocated to another planet, so they brought stories and depictions of dragons with them.

The citizen-scientists duly observed, with great interest, that six-legged beasties had taken to the skies and now had evolved into excellent flyers (‘not long’ should be taken literally: the animals flew around the spacers’ heads the moment they stepped out of their ship). Closer inspection revealed that some of these animals had four wings (and two legs) while others had two wings (with four legs). 

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Later speculation suggested that both groups, the Quadrialata and the Dialata, had separately evolved from animals using membranes between all six legs to glide down from one tree to another. In one group, the middle pair of limbs had increased quickly in size, whereas the front and middle pair of limbs turned into wings in the other group.

While the scientists started studying mechanisms of lift and anatomical adaptations to flight, classifying everything meticulously, the general public took one glance at the four-legged two-winged avians and shouted ‘They’re DRAGONS!’. Now, scientists generally dislike lay people interfering with their subject matter, and protested that the animals were not dragons at all; they were ‘Dialata’, not dragons, and dragons did not exist anyway.

Of course, this resistance was futile, and the concept of ‘Furahan dragons’ was quickly assimilated by everyone except the scientists in question.                 

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So much for the ‘in universe’ version of dragon lore. What happened is that the ‘Great Hexapod Revolution’ is in full swing, and I am now working on flying hexapods. The good news, by the way, is that I now think that I only need to do about four of five new paintings to finish The Book. I am aiming at some 140 pages, so you will get your money’s worth (if I find a publisher, that is).  

The unfeathered bird by Katrina van Grouw

 

I am working on my first painting of a Dialate flyer. I took the revamped general hexapod body scheme and thought about how it would need to be modified to become a successful flyer (also see here). Beautiful examples of such anatomical adaptations can be found in the book ‘The unfeathered bird’ by Katrina van Grouw. The image above was taken from that book, and shows the extent of anatomical  modifications.

The elongated hexapod body would have to go, to keep the mass centred. That meant that the frame of the animal had to be shortened, with the hind and front legs bending down towards the middle of the animal. These walking legs also became small and slender, whereas the wings, the middle limbs, increased in mass. The wing skeleton resembles the ‘bat mode’ more than the ‘bird model’, as it has  intact ‘finger’ bones. Of course the toe/finger pattern is not as nicely radial as in Earth’s vertebrates, but flows a Devonian branching pattern instead. The wings themselves are only partly membranous, so they do not really resemble bat wings that much.  

 

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Here is a simple model done with Zbrush. People can achieve amazing results with Zbrush, but I am definitely not one of them (and I am not alone in disliking its complex convoluted completely counter-intuitive interface). The body and walking legs are sculpted and show the by now general zag-zig-zag basic hexapod pattern.  The wings are only shown as a sort of scaffolding (‘Zspheres’). Their Devonian branching is obvious. 

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Here I have given up on making the sculpt follow the scaffolding, so you only see the scaffolding. The scaffolding is NOT the animal’s skeleton, but just a shape placeholder (the bumps on the body just indicate its size). Notice how the walking legs are tucked away against the body. 

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

And here is the same animal (Draco umbraferens), clinging on to a reed or stem, looking down to see if here is anything in the water it might eat. It unfolded one wing to provide shade, either to lure animals to the shade, to see better underwater, or both.

I liked that pose, so I developed it further. I am not going to show the painting, which isn’t finished yet anyway, but thought you might wish to see part of it. The Draco will be sitting on a reed in a marsh in bright sunshine. I used Vue Infinite as I often do to compose the scene to help with lighting and perspective, but only roughly. 

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

The scene provided a challenge, as it deals with reflections, transparency and shadows. The image above shows a detail of the future painting: a background plant. Panel A shows the shadow the plant casts on the marsh bottom; B shows the part of the plant that is underwater; C shows the shadow the above-water parts of the plant casts on the water surface; D shows the part of the plant that is above water, and E shows the reflections of that part on the water surface. Finally, panel F shown all parts together, with transparency adjusted to provide a realistic image; or I hope so anyway. The Draco and the reed it sits on will be constructed similarly.

That's it; the next post will probably be about hexapod gaits, and will include the sounds of some gaits, including a hexapodal gallop…      

It's a Fish! (yes, again...; this one's in 3D, though)

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

This is just an extra post. Regular readers may remember that I tried my hand at ZBrush in the past. I still try it from time to time, but found that it, as everything, takes time to master, and digital painting takes precedence. The ZBrush people keep out churning new options, so I will probably never get around to mastering even the simpler elements. Pixologic, the same firm that produces ZBrush, now offers a similar program but completely free: Sculptris. It offers only a few controls, which really helps to learn it. It is very impressive. The controls are the same as those of ZBrush, so experience with one program helps the other. I could not resist trying it, and found it a pleasure to work with. Go to the Pixologic site to see what can be done with it, because my meagre efforts only show what you can do with it in one evening. It is very useful for 2D artists who do not plan to go into 3D, becaue it is easy to sculpt a rough shape to help get the perspective right.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

So here is a Fish, of the Fishes IV type; I showed one before. I painted four now for The Book, and will not publish these paintings here on the blog. But having done that, Fish IV anatomy came natural to me, and here it is: six flippers, usually attached higher on the body as you go aft, a large head merged without a neck to a stiff body, and three gills on each side with separate inlets but a fused outlet. You knew about the four eyes and the four jaws. As I said, typical Fish IV anatomy.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

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P.S. As Luke remarked in the comments section the Fish shown so far are fairly large. Aren't there smaller ones? Yes, there are. I had realised I had a tendency towards larger ones, so I explored the possibilities of size on purpose.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Here is a rough sketch in Painter11. Its smaller size is indicated by relatively large eyes and by having thinner flippers, that as a result resemble fins more (the second pair are probably too large). I also experimented with a general 'fishy' look by giving it a glistening skin. The counter-colour pattern (dark on top, pale below) is probably a universal trick to blend into the background.

Three years on

More than once in the three years I have been writing this blog I thought there were no more interesting speculative biology projects to be found on the internet, but each time I was wrong. Will the supply dry up? Perhaps not: there are more and more exquisitely detailed Z-Brush monsters, but mostly those are orcs, dragons and the like. In other words: they are not very interesting from a biological point of view. The reverse situation can also be found: well-thought out projects with artwork that does not do it justice. I guess I will simply have to wait and see how much content I can find to fill the 'allied matters' component of the blog. The number of page views slowly went up over time, which is rewarding.

So how about the 'Furahan biology' component? There is progress, if you account for the glacier-like advance of a very large project that you do not really have time for. Then again, in the last three years I got to grips with InDesign, Photoshop, Painter and XBrush (not that I am proficient in any). The most noteworthy skill I am trying to acquire is digital painting, which is the most needed one. I think I need to do some 10 additional illustrations of the "It's a fish" type, and then I will have some 15 two-page spreads to show to potential publishers. An example of those can be found in the New Hades book shop on the Furaha site: got to the brand new 'Living World Series' and you will find the 'Encyclopaedia of Furahan Wildlife' (also shown here). I aim to use that lay-out to present the book to publishers.

Rough tetropter animation; copyright Gert van Dijk

It is not difficult to think up many new animals or plants; many forms that I have now could do with some adaptive radiation. But my interest is mostly aroused by more complex puzzles. As an example I will explain the struggle to produce a good tetropter flight animation. The basic principles have been outlined before (start here to work back in time), but for good measure I have repeated an old animation above. As you can see the animal is shown from below, and the four wings move to and fro while rotating. They also move through one another, because the animation uses stiff planes for the wings: it is not good enough. I want a better one firstly, because I am curious: I wish to see what a spotted farfalloid looks like, when its beating wing reveal electric blue surfaces at one point in their cling and flap cycle, and bright orange ones the next! The second reason is that I would like to paint a variety of tetropters -talk about infinite variety-, and getting the perspective right of four warped surfaces in complex motion can be done by hand, but would be easier to manipulate by computer. I will break the problem into pieces:

Problem 1: defining movement
The wings can easily be modelled as surfaces in Matlab. These move through the wing cycle, meaning there are different requisitions for movement around the x- y and z-axes. To control them I wrote editing programs, now nearly done. The surfaces cannot remain simple planes throughout the movement cycle, but will have to be bent and warped. The animation above shows where I am now, meaning at the phase where all the 'warp factors' have to be tweaked to get it right. What you see here represents 'untweaked warping' though!

Problem 2: exporting the wings
The 3D program I am most familiar with is Vue Infinite. I had already written a program to convert Matlab patches to obj. files, which helps. But I then stumbled upon a new program, ad that was the imported wings for successive frames did not end up at the same spot in the scene. Apparently Vue calculates the mean of all x-, y- and z-coordinates to calculate the centre of an object, and if the object changes shape so does it centre. Well, I can counter that by shifting the object each frame to compensate. This needs work...

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Problem 3: texturing the wings
Obviously, the wings will need interesting patterns on them as well as partial transparency. That, as well as bump maps, proved to be in the obj. definition and could be manipulated.
Here is a rough example of a warped wing with transparency and all in Vue.


So now you may understand why it has taken such a long time to put up a 'Flying with...' page, along the 'Walking with..' and 'Swimming with...' pages: the tetropter flight animation has to be ready first, and that is a big job.

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

© © Marc Boulay / Sylvia Lorrain / Gert van Dijk

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.

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?

An experiment with digital 3D sculpting

Computers have created enormous changes in the creative arts, to the point where some artists never smell oil paints or India ink anymore, but instead merely hear the characteristic soft scratching sound of a stylus on a graphics tablet. I have not crossed over to the Digital Side yet, or at least not entirely. I am still hesitant to embrace Photoshop as the sole means for drawing and painting.

Then again, I have used computer graphics for many other things, from producing maps to depicting photorealistic planetary surfaces. The plant section on the Furaha site is in fact entirely computer-generated. I have now started using a bit of software that perhaps I should have considered much earlier. I had been looking for software to design 3D, that could then be depicted (in 2D) from any angle. The program Blender is completely free, but I found that the initial learning curve was very steep. I have now come across ZBrush, and while that has some odd quirks, it does allow you to more or less jump in and start sculpting. Mind you, it is not free at all, but at least there is a demo to play with. There are other similar programs (Mudbox), but ZBrush seems popular. Here are my very first and rather clumsy attempts to do something with it.

Click to enlarge

The program allows you to produce a quick first outline of a shape using interconnected spheres. There are various symmetry options, useful if you want to draw two limbs at once. As you can also produce 8 radial limbs, I started drawing a spidrid (if you need information on spidrids, go to the land section of the Furaha site and select 'walking with...') . What you see above is its basic body pattern, all drawn with spheres.

Click to enlarge

If you are happy with the spheres they can be turned into a mesh, which you can then push, distort, add to, etc., somewhat as if you are dealing with clay. And so, after some detailing, here is a spidrid in with some details added.

Click to enlarge

Another attempt - a failed one-. The evolutionary history of 'Fishes' on Furaha needs to be detailed, so I can show the early evolutionary changes from six jaws to four, and the subsequent dwindling and specialisation of two of them, and the loss of two of the four eyes. Why not jump in with the head of a Sawjaw? (go to the water section of the Furaha site). It has four jaws. To detail their inside I needed good access, so I started working on them with the jaws in an impossibly wide gape. I then thought I could rotate them to close them somewhat, but rotation of entire body parts is something that I haven't mastered yet...

Will I be doing entire animals in Zbrush, and stop painting them altogether? I think not; I still like painted 2D images too much, digital or 'real'. There is a risk of losing vitality if uyou produce computer-generated scenes. It takes extraordinary skills to overcome that, I think. It is evidently possible to produce very detailed shapes with ZBrush, but it is something else to produce pleasing images with the result. There are people who can, and as an example I would like to draw attention once again to the work of Marc Boulay and Sylvia Lorrain: one does the ZBrush modeling, and the other does the texturing and produces the images. Here is a link to my last post on their work, and if you follow the links there, you will soon find what I mean.