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 Those older videos reflected ideas about Furahan wildlife that are no longer current, with as the most obvious example the presence of ballonts.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' 

Photorealistic spidrid animation (maybe...)

 Now that The Book is out of my hands, I can pick up some old Furaha projects that I had to pause earlier on. I used Matlab, a programming and analysis tool, to produce animations to see how various animals moved. The resulting 3D representations helped a great deal to get a better feel for the gist of the movement and were very useful to get the paintings right. However, I also wanted to produce more lifelike, even photorealistic, animations. Those with good memory may remember that I used to do entire Furahan scenes using a 3D rendering programme called Vue (or Vue Infinite) from the firm E-on. There are some on my rather inactive YouTube channel.  

Producing even short animations proved to be extremely time-consuming. Vue is a raytracing programme that produces very good atmospheric results, but each frame took ages. I used to leave my PC running for one or more nights. The problem with animations is then that you only get to judge the the quality afterwards, and you may then have to do it all over again. 

The main reason I stopped making visually rich animations was that they did not contribute to The Book; by consuming time, they in fact postponed its completion. Another important reason was that programming animations was often frustrating. I could achieve my goals in Matlab, where the problems boiled down to defining rotations and translation of every body part of a radially symmetric eight-legged spidrid walking on uneven ground, with the body attitude compensating for the slope. That was complex in that it was difficult to keep track of everything, but the key parts required fairly basic trigonometry. The seriously frustrating part was to reinterpret the resulting data with Python code to direct Vue. The coordinate systems never really matched up, even if I started with both the y-axes up in both systems and similar handedness orientations of axes (that means whether the positive x,- y- and z-axes pointed in the same direction in both programmes. Even though I made sure of that, I still had to swap y- and z-axes, which in turns messed up all rotations.  

Here is an old example I posted back in 2013. There was a problem with the legs: sometimes the leg segment closest to the body (that wasn't shown) flipped around, so the pale underside is suddenly placed the wrong way. This happened when that segment rotated beyond the vertical position; let's say the rotation angles moved from 85 to 95 degrees. This was almost certainly because a function such as arc tangent interpreted 95 degrees as 5 degrees. At the time, I gave up and shelved the programme. 

I have now tried again, helped by the fact that I now have the latest and much more stable version of Vue. Sadly, Vue's parent firm (Bentley) decided that it would no longer develop Vue at all, so the 2023 version is the last one ever. The good news is that Vue is now available completely free. This version is a pleasure to work with. You do not need to be able to code at all to use it.

Here is a Matlab example of expanded spidrid animation functionality. You can see that the spidrid follows the terrain perfectly, meaning that the body posture echoes the terrain under the body precisely. You can also see something new, present in my spidrid paintings, but not yet in earlier spidrid animations. In earlier animations, the body consisted of one part whereas theyere should be two: a bottom part (the abdomen) that bears the spidrid's eight legs and a top part (the cupola or cephalothorax). The cupola can move on the abdomen. In this animation the copula is stuck firmly to the abdomen. 

In this second example, the abdomen is partly stabilised and no longer follows the terrain completely, so it stays more horizontal than in the previous animation. The cupola now moves independently and has its own tilt-dampening stabilising reflexes, so it stays even more horizontal than the abdomen. That should help the animal get a more stable platform for its senses.

After rewriting the python code the next step was raytracing with Vue. After suffering much misery and new dents in my wall where I banged my head, I got it working. The next phases include adding an abdomen and a cephalothorax, perhaps even feelers, and then it is time to add plants swaying gently in a breeze. 

Wish me patience...

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For those who wish to use Vue, or its associated plant editing software 'PlantFactory', you can download them here. 

As I said, this last version is quite stable. With Vue it is not that difficult to produce an image of a forest with prehistoric trees or something like that. If you wish to have more control over Vue's myriad options, be advised that this is a complex piece of kit that needs attention and time. 

For tutorials, there are several; GeekAtPlay provides good ones. 

Postcard from Furaha

It took longer to get back to blogging than I thought, for several reasons. As usual I had less free time than planned and a shoulder problem made painting and other computer work unpleasant. Last but certainly not least, we had such a long hot spell here in the Netherlands where I live that heat records were shattered one after the other. A few nights ago we officially had the warmest night in the Netherlands since official records started in 1854: 23.6 degrees. The temperature in my computer room reached 29 degrees... If I can't sleep, I can't write, paint, or even think properly. If the climate continues in this direction, we should stop calling ours a 'temperate' climate. Global warming anyone?

Anyway, I have worked on a painting, but extremely slowly. As I save the files often, I thought I could produce a quick post in the form of a 'making of' video. I will let the video do its own talking.
 

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

The video is small, so here is the last frame at a larger size. The painting is not finished! The potator ('Amnesialata blansjarii') still needs much work. I think I will morph it into a microrusp. Rusps do not actually have necks, but I thought it would be useful for a tree climbing animal to be able to move its head around freely. The rusp's snout will of course solve that problem to a large extent, but another way might be to recruit the first several body segements: they could become slender and lose their locomotor function, with perhaps some tiny dangling remnant limbs. I'll see. The bioluminescent stayways may reappear in the from of tetrapters. It is fun tying the various Furahan clades together, while keeping room for new developments.     
 
The sooner the weather normalises, the sooner I will be back with more posts. 

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.