Droodle

Still working on a good texture map. It takes quite a bit of time, so little time is left to post anything here. Still, the Droodle from the previous post may deserve to be seen.
Any takers for its name?

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'.

'Textures'

The maps of Furaha are at present available in two forms: a line map showing coasts, and a pixel-based map showing elevation. Both were done in Matlab, allowing myriad different projections and many display options. The pixel-based one has 4320x2160 pixels, meaning it has a resolution of 5 minutes of arc. In the neighbourhood of the equator that's about 11 kilometres per pixel. Not bad, but not very detailed either.

Unfortunately, there's one thing such maps cannot do, and that is to show the planet as it looks from space. Height is one thing, but colour is another. NASA publishes great maps of what Earth looks like as seen with satellite imagery. What these show you is that seasons make a difference, which isn't too surprising, and also that deserts are yellowish and the rest of the land is green, varying from bright green to dark green and grayish green. Height is only important in that it is more likely than other regions to be either snow-white or desertlike in colour.

Others have found their ways to such data stores as well, to give their fictional worlds that realistic look. Some great examples can be found at Celestia, a program allowing you to zoom through space and have a look at realistic and real objects. At the Celestia Motherlode you will find objects made by users that are equally realistic but as unreal as the others are real.

How do they do it? You have to paint a 'texture', meaning a colour image of what the image of your planet would look like. The best way to do so is probably to 'borrow' bits of Earth texture from NASA, shift and rotate them, and paste them together to obtain a good result. That sounds easier than it is, and many hours of work go into a good texture. I have just started work on a Furaha texture. I decided that this was a good accasion to learn to use Photoshop anyway. My first experiences with it are frustrating: nothing works the way I want it do, and nothing is where I expect it to be. This is probably my punishment for not starting to use it many years and versions ago, when learning it was more or less manageable.

The good news is Celestia. At least that program, which is completely free (!), allows you to obtain a quick and rather good looking rendering of your texture. Generally you just hijack Earth's or Venus' texture and replace it with your own, and, voila, a realistic rendering. Earth is shown at the top of this post, and my first attempts at Furaha follow.



The golden sheen means that the 'texture' is just a monochromatic yellow rectangle. Still, you can see how Celestia makes land dull and oceans shiny, and uses the height map to good effects in that it helps form lighting and shading effects. The final image, below, shows an extremely rough Furaha image, with very coarse colours. The clouds make a big difference though, don't they ('borrowed' from Celestia's Earth map...). By the way, if you are surprised by the spelling, Celestia somehow figured out I am in the Netherlands, so it changed its language to Dutch, but with a distinctive Flemish spelling.


Oh yes, to do it right, I still have to figure out where to place deserts, and to that properly I need knowledge of climatology. Which I haven't really got, so it will have a be a hopefully reasonable guess...

Glapum'tians

There are many interesting animal designs in fiction. A specific supply that may not be well-known in many parts of the world are SF and fantasy comic stripe in France, There, comic strips are found in large numbers in book stores, bought by young as well as adult readers. However, their flavour is different enough from what you will find in other parts of the world to not to call them comic strips or graphic novels, but simply 'bandes dessinées', or BDs for short. I thought I might start with an old favourite, an intelligent creature from the world Glapum't; hence he is called a Glampum'tien in French, which would probably translate to a Glampum'tian in English (I have no idea why the apostrophe is doing there, but presumably it is doing the same thing it always does in SF, and that is make names sound more alien). Glampumt'ians can be found in the BD series 'Valérian et Laureline', running since the late 60's; it now numbers 20 albums. The scenarios are written by Christin, and the drawings are by Mezières. The protagonists are space/time agents from the future. In the course of the series they have been through many adventures, always with a human outlook on things, a degree of feminism (Laureline is usually the one who solves the problems) as well as mild social criticism. There was never much 'hard' SF in the sense that technology featured much. Instead, the series has always been about people more than anything else. The same goes for the designs of its aliens: great fun to look at, and no-one cares much about their believability. In the course of the series the world was destroyed in 1986 in an album written before that time. As that time approached in real life the story went through some intriguing twists to reconcile the real history of the Earth with the storyline. Even later the previously assumed future history of the Earth, which had become a galactic force to be reckoned with, was more or less erased, so Valérian and Laureline are now on their own. For those who want to know more, Wikipedia has a section on 'Valérian and Laureline' that includes references to English translations. All albums can be obtained in French through amazon.fr or through fnac.fr (and probably through other outlets). Time to discuss the Glapum'tians, or Ralph, as he is the only Glapum'tian we get to know. He first appears in the album 'Les spectres d'Inverloch' (the ghosts of Inverloch). Ralph is the individual with the large flat head in the left background. He caught my attention by looking quite different from most of the other intelligent races that inhabit the series, lmost of whom look roughly humanoid. Ralph doesn't look like that; if anything, he is like a cephalopod in having a head that merges with the body without any neck, and his tentacles are attached to the body directly. The painting at the top of the page and the one below provide a better view of Ralph. Both were scanned from the book 'Les habitants du ciel' ('The inhabitants of the heavens'), showing paintings and providing biological details of many species occurring in the series. This is in fact only half a painting; it was a two-page spread, and scannning the entite painting results in an ugly stripe in the middle where the pages come together. The text in that book describes Glapum'tians as oviparous mammals living on their birthing nest (that's the round shape sticking out of the water); additional texts and drawings refer to this as an egg as well as a habitat, and show it to be a living form. Intriguing (is it an organism in its own right?), but no more details are given. I rather like the Glapum'tian body shape, which looks rather elegant. As is typical of this series, there is no attempt to make alien species truly alien in the sense that their motivations are out of the ordinary. Quite the contrary, greed, power, influence and sex are common motivations for all intelligent lifeforms here. The same goes for their emotions, easy to read for us Earthlings. This is true for Ralph as well: his eyes betray his emotions exactly like a human's would. But think about the trouble the writer would have if he designed a completely different system: how do you explain it to your public? The picture here shows Ralph, a natural amphibian, under water. If you start thinking about his shape, you start to wonder how he can be a good swimmer: there are no clear propulsive adaptations in the sense of flippers, a fluked tail, or any flat surface at all. Then again, octopuses don't have such visible means of propulsion either, but they have their own jet propulsion: the siphon. Perhaps Glapum'tians have one too, but it isn't visible... As far as walking on land is concerned, Ralph's tentacles might work, but they would be very costly from an energy point of view. After all, bones are very useful in that they limit the number of points that have to be controlled by muscle strength, greatly reducing energy expenditure. Anyone who has ever seen an octopus on dry land will understand why a skeleton is beneficial on dry land: the poor octopus resembles a puddle rather than a graceful animal. Still, Glapum'tians aren't the only animals for whom a cephalopod design was adapted to live on dry land. In the television series 'The future is wild' there are land-dwelling cephalopods, including the 'megasquid', walking around on 8 tentacles. The website on The Future is Wild has this to say about their design: "an invertebrate, meaning it has no backbone or skeleton, it has strong muscles in its 8 thick legs. These need to be strong enough to support such a large body." Well, yes, but how and at what cost? Without a good explanation, the question becomes one of guesswork: wouldn't evolution kick in an adapt these 'legs' to become more efficient? Perhaps 'Walking on tentacles' is a good subject for this blog, but not now. Meanwhile, allow Ralph to swim with orcas. He does that, and enjoys talking with them, in the album 'Les foudres d'Hypsis' (the wrath of Hypsis').

Tetropters

Those who visited the land and sea pages on the site may have wondered why there is no page on the biomechanics of flight, seeing there are pages on 'Walking with...' as well as on 'Swimming with...'. So where is the 'Flying with...' page?

The simple answer is that I am not happy with it yet. There is material on ballonts and on tetrapterate (four-winged) large flyers, and some are in fact shown on the 'air' page. But these organisms are fairly like Terran birds. For a true oddity the tetropters should be considered; in their case, 'oddness' does not reside in them having four wings. After all, Furahan tetrapterates and Terran insects also have two pairs of wings, i.e., four wings, so that isn't really extraordinary. No, the ordinariness resides in the description: 'two pairs of wings', and that says it all: the wings are arranged in pairs. Insects and birds (and Furaha tetrapterayes) all have a body scheme with bilateral symmetry, so their limbs are arranged in pairs.

Not so the tetropters. To be honest, the very first sketches I did of them did show bilateral symmetry. The top animal in the following image shows that primordial tetropter. In fact, their wing movement patterns had already been worked out, and showed a pattern that was exactly the same for each wing. So the wings showed a radial pattern, like a four-pointed star, but the body hadn't kept up. Here is one of those early tetropter designs under attack from a larger tetrapterate.

With their radial wing pattern tetropters were excellent hoverers, and control over wing movements should have allowed omnidirectional movements. But the animals still had a front and aft side. If you have a flight system that allows such tremendous manoeuvrability, why limit it with a limited body design? That is where the concept of complete four-sided symmetry came from. The next sketch illustrates the next logical step in the evolution of the tetroper concept. The top animal has bilateral symmetry, but the bottom one represents a conceptual novelty: the body follows the wings! So the entire animal now shows complete quadriradiate symmetry. By the way, I was taught that you should not mix Latin and Greek roots, and that is explains the switches between 'tetra-' (Greek) and 'quadri-'(Latin). Can't be helped.


I know of no such designs on Earth, although there are animals with five-sided symmetry (starfish, sea urchins etc.). The rest of their body scheme hasn't been worked out in much detail. The design problems are like those of octapods, with eight-sided symmetry. Tetropters too have eyes above as well as below their 'equator', and the mouth parts are all on the ground side. But I haven't done a complete drawing or painting of one yet, so the details remain sketchy - for now.

I found that the flight patterns had much in common with the movement patterns of flying and walking organisms. After all, each leg or wing or flipper moves repetitively, and any gait is no more than a cycle in which the limbs move with a specific set of phase offsets. Although there are an infinite number of ways in which you can do so, only a limited number make much sense. And so tetropters have 'walks', 'trots' and 'paces'. The first pattern shown here is a rather silly one.



I can't show the animated gif here; to see it click here.

Imagine the sphere as the animal's body, seen from below and to the side. The four wings are rotated around their axis to provide lift while going clockwise as well as moving back anticlockwise. While such a pattern does provide lift, it would also result in a net rotation effect on the animal as a whole, which is impractical. To offset that, the rotation forces need to be cancelled by having two wings swing in the opposite direction from the other two. A rough animation of just such an effect follows:


I can't show the animated gif here; to see it click here.

You can see the wings going through one another; in reality they would of course not do so. That's why I need to do a better animation, but it is not as easy to do as it sounds. In the smallest tetropters the wings clap against one another and then to move in the other direction. Many Earth insects use this technique, by the way: the clap their wings together behind their backs, and this apparently generates lift when the wings move away from one another again. In insects, there is just one such 'clap' in each cycle. Tetropters have taken the idea one step further, and the clapping occurs twice in a wing cycle, not just once.

Larger tetropters usually avoid clapping the wings together, so they reverse direction without touching. Whether this is aerodynamicaly better or simply avoids damage to the wings remains to be seen. There is so much to be researched...

Edd Cartier

Every once in a while I will show a painting or a drawing of an alien, a dinosaur or other extinct life forms that I find particularly appealing.

The first one is a drawing by Edd Cartier. I first saw it in the late seventies in a book called 'Science Fiction Ideas and Dreams' by David Kyle. The legend simply said 'Two aliens drawn by Edd Cartier for "The Interplanetary Zoo" in the Gnome Press anthology'. I wondered for a very long time how many such animals were in that book, other than the two I could find.

Today, of course, Google helps: The drawing appeared in a 1951 book called 'Travelers in Space'. here is the cover as shown on Wikipedia.


A page by David Kyle on his career in SF resulted in the following: 'I collaborated with Edd Cartier in several ways, the best being the illustrations for my story of the "Interplanetary Zoo"; this was an interesting project because the full color signature or folio in the anthology Travelers of Space was actually done from black-and-white drawings. All color was laid in by a talented printing plant technician who worked with me for the final results.' That is interesting, since it shows that the original drawing must have been in black and white.

More searching revealed a number of drawings from the book on a Japanese site.
The drawings there all have a very strong yellow background, which was not present in the book I first saw the drawing in, so I guessed it was a later addition. I mostly took the yellow away again, which brings the colours out more.


I still find this creature very appealing: it looks pensive and rather serious. Somehow it doesn't actually look very alien to me, or is that simply because I have known the image for long enough to have become familiar with it? Much as I like it, from a biomechanical point of view it is odd. What seem to be arms and legs at first glance turns out to be just one pair of limbs. These are attached to the body with what look like shoulders. In effect, the large head and small rump are suspended between these limbs. The creature must be top-heavy, and it can't have been a very elegant walker. The legs are wide apart, and it doesn't look as if its hands (feet?) can bend inwards enough to be placed directly underneath the body. That's a pity, because if you cannot do that, and still want to walk around on two feet, waddling is the only way.

Its restful appearance might be ruined if it starts to walk: it will probably draw laughs for the same reasons waddling ducks and penguins do (why is that, by the way?).

Humans on Furaha

Why are there even humans on Furaha? The idea started without them, and for a long time I thought that adding humans would only result in ecosphere destruction, turning the story into a human one rather than one about biology.

The answer is simple; without humans the stories would become dry and boring. Human interest requires a human viewpoint, at the least here and there. Some readers probably wouldn't mind if there wasn't a human in sight, but I thought that adding humans to the mix increased the complexity of the world enormously: the mixture became richer, spicier and more interesting.

This doesn't go so far that all lifeforms are exclusively viewed through human perceptions: that would take it much too far. There should be images and explanations that have nothing to do with humans.

But once there are humans, they must have a background. All of a sudden, there has to be space travel and there has to be a reason to travel. This is touched upon in the site. There also has to be a society, preferably one that does not look on animals as food only. Although references to eating wildlife may be found, Furaha is not about 'To serve Man'.

The history of the human settlement of Furaha and the Horizonists' challenge explain the current society of Furaha. Sean Nastrazurro's pathetic 'adventures' in the Spiny Desert only make sense if you know that an academic career, or at least the trappings of one, function as a rite of passage in this particular society. Sean, not well-equipped for real hardship, rather pitied himself on his Field Trip and in later life tried to enlarge everything he had done in that time. He tried to seduce young female students with his stories, but failed completely.

Sofar not much of this society has been shown on the site, although a few hints are dropped here and there. But there are reasons why people have names such as Sean Nastrazurro or Wladimir Kokkinopoulos. In this society a person can belong to various groups. One of them is cultural background, called the 'clade'; Nastrazzuro's mother is from the Italian clade, and his father from the Irish one. Another is academic achievement, and there are literally several dozens of titles one can have. The small sketch above shows a 'professisimus' in formal garb.

More on that later, when I will at one point put up a page on humans on Furaha. I will also have to think about their dress code, and their vehicles. I'm thinking about mass repulsor technology, resulting in floating vehicles with enormous inertia and a small lifting capability. That will be much later.