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.

Walking machines

The world of mechanics and robotics proved to contain some interesting analogues and even inspiration for speculative biological creations. That worked for flying animals, both of the heavier than air and of the lighter than air variety. No wonder that the thought came up that walking and other terrestrial modes of transportation could undergo the same treatment.

So, are there interesting mechanical contraptions out there that deserve to be 'biologified'? (I just invented that word but checked it on Google to be certain. Unfortunately, I was not the first: 'biologify' has 3 hits and its derived noun 'biologification' already has 91. Oh well...).

Well, the result of my search is a bit less dramatic than held for the flying animals, but there are some intriguing inventions out there. If you type in words such as 'walking machines' or 'robot insect' into Google, you will find many hits. Most concern toys with usually a high number of legs, of which only a few are lifted at a time. Most are not at all sophisticated in the sense of having integrated sensory and motor systems with balancing reflexes. No neural control at all, sadly. Instead there is just a motor and some mechanical bits and pieces that turn a rotary motion into steps. If you look at them, you realise how complicated and advanced biological walking really is. Still, that does not mean that people cannot have fun with these machines, and watching them is good fun as well. Just have a look at the following clunker:




I found it on YouTube, where it is labelled as a walking machine at "Burning Man '07" You can see that there are at least four legs on the ground at any time, so no delicate balancing tricks here. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of a suspension either, so it might pay to bring a soft cushion.

A more advanced machine is the so-called 'walking tractor'. From what I read, it was a design by a Finnish company meant for the logging industry, but the company apparently no longer exists. You can see they followed the double tripod design, in which three legs are always on the ground. This one apparently had advanced computerised controls. Here it comes:



A walker that really is beginning to look like an animal is the 'Big Dog' by Boston Dynamics. It is supposed to help soldiers cross difficult terrain. A very convincing demonstration occurs halfway in the video: someone kicks it, and it obviously has the reflexes to deal with that. If it steps in a hole, it can even deal with that without falling too. It is lengthy, but worthwhile:



I found it extremely impressive. Well, for a machine, that is. It is not impressive for an animal, which shows how much cybernetics still have to catch up...

None of these machines provide new inspiration in the sense of something that biology hasn't come up with yet. Surely there is something of interste for those who do speculative biology? Yes, there is: in the first place, machines such as the clunker shown above do hold some interest, as their legs work as 'pantographs': there is a system of bars linked together with movable joints, and no biological leg works like that. I will keep that subject for another entry, and that will also deal with Theo Jansens 'standbeesten'.

I will close with something for which I do not think there is a biological analogue, and I rather doubt the design idea lends itself will for biologification. It is a tripod walk. You will probably be disappointed know, seeing that tripod walkers go back as far as HG Wells in 'The war of the worlds'. (By the way, walking with odd numbers of legs might also merit a blog entry one day: there are pentapod walkers on Furaha, not to mention Epona!) But the design here has a twist. Almost literally, in fact. Its home page is here It is very creative and very crazy at the same time, so I cannot help but like it! Does anyone think it makes sense for an animal to move like this?

Rhinogradentia IV: final

Gerolf Steiner, the creator of the Rhinogradentia, died on August 14, at the age of 101. I found out by accident, as I wondered whether there was any news about him. Just a mention of his death, without any obituaries. Perhaps these will follow later, opr perhaps they are not on the internet. If none of this means anything perhaps you should replace 'Rhinogradentia' with 'snouters' and 'Gerolf Steiner' with 'Harald Stümpke'. I wrote about him and his creatures three times: first, second and third blog entries. Gerolf Steiner was one of the first, probably the very first, to publish a book on made-up animals that was well-based in biology. That is in act debatable, as I do not think anyone would really believe it likely that mammals with fully-functional legs would ever start walking on their noses. But his work on the Rhinogradentia is clear not meant to be taken that seriously, and doing so would ruin it - an attitude Steiner himself probably smiled at, given the way he portrays similar overly 'correct' attitudes in his book ''Stümpe's Rhinogradentia - Versuch einer Analyse'. That book, purportedly written by one Karl D.S. Geeste, but in reality by Steiner himself, contains ssome interesting insights in his life and times. In this last blog entry on the Rhinogradentia I decided not to show one of the Rhinogradentia, as they can, I think, all be found on the internet somewhere (the book is however still available and I recommend it). Instead, there are some comments on what we could not call 'speculative evolution', or 'speculative biology', or whatever name you prefer. First, Steiner writes that the habit of designing animals for fun is a much more common childish trait ('Kinderei') as is commonly admitted. He himself started doing so at a very early age. He writes that his first creatures were biologically implausible, and he provides an example of his work done in 1922, when he was about 14.

Click to enlarge Copyright Gutav Fischer Verlag Stuttgart

These animals are labelled 'elephant variations'. The comment for the animal at the bottom reads that it is a slimmed-down small elephant. Its no longer columnar legs show that Steiner has a good feeling for biomechanics. A few years later, at the end of the 1920s, he produced a group af animals entitled 'Balhörner'. Here they are (my scanner just gave up, so the quality is not too good -sorry-).

Click to enlarge Copyright Gutav Fischer Verlag Stuttgart

Steiner describes then as partly mammalian, partly reptilian, but does not consider them very good, as 'he was after all only a very young student'. Well, that particular young student lived to 101 years of age. I will close with a translated version of an interesting sentence, in the section where he describes that his own early inventions were still scientifically impossible (I followed the German structure of the sentence). "Later believable forms were produced; resembling fantasy animals in part, these have been published recently -a long time after the first publication of the Rhinogradentia- in England in 1981 (D.Dixon, After Man), creatures evolved from real lifeforms according to the rules of evolution." That is interesting: the writer of the first well-known book on speculative biology knew of the second such work. A pity he does not write more about it: did he see resemblances with his own work? We will probably never know.

Lighter than air: mechanical inspirations

A short while ago I wrote a blog entry on various ways of heavier than air flight. I was amazed to find that the quest to develop tiny mechanical flying machines had generated many intriguing modes of flying, which could be used as the inspiration for speculative life forms. Engineers often lend their ideas from nature, so perhaps the opposite can be done, too. Today, let's have a similar look at lighter than air flight.

I like to use the word 'ballont' as a general term for lighter than air flying forms, and have devoted some attention to ballonts previously, once while discussing Edd Cartier's work, and once in more general terms. Ballonts are generally large; how large they have to be depends largely on the density of the gas they are flying or floating in. The denser the external gas is, and the lighter the gas inside the ballont is, the more you can lift. It is therefore no wonder that most science fiction authors who come up with ballonts drop them in very heavy atmospheres, such as in gas giants. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that I cannot really get away with ballonts on Furaha. I have made the atmosphere denser than on earth, but it still is no Venus. In the end I will probably have to restrict ballooning lifeforms to small balloons for seed dispersal, and write off the truly large beings altogether. A shame, but what can you do? The laws of physics yield for no one.

Anyway, back to ballonts. My inventions were rather passive, in contrast to the inventions of other inventors, who did not hesitate to turn their creations into actively moving animals. There are even active predators out there. The reason mine were designed as relatively passive animals was that I always worried about the balance between lifting capacity and 'cargo weight'. The 'zeppeloon' on the Furaha site is a good example. In this context, any part of the animal that does not contribute to lifting capacity is cargo: eyes, jaws, a brain, a gut, flippers and muscles to move those flippers. The fewer of those you have, the more likely you can get away with a ballooning design. Besides, how believable are flippers anyway: wouldn't they need to be incredibly powerful to fly against the wind?

Those of my colleagues who design actively moving ballonts seem to prefer manta-like shapes, to the extent that a ballooning manta is now more or less the staple image of science fiction. Man-made balloons use propellors and the like for propulsion, making use of the one invention that is taboo in biomechanics: true rotation. So are there no mechanical manta-like balloons?



As the above video proves, there is one! The German firm Festo seems to revel in amazing biomechanical wonders, and they could not resist making a flying manta balloon. Here is their website. Just click on the various entries saying 'Projekte' to find more gems. Amazing, isn't it? This thing is really flying inside a building, which makes you think that perhaps I am too critical about ballonts: if this thing can fly on earth, couldn't a ballont fly on a terrestrial planet as well? I wonder... But what would a breeze of wind do to it?

The next question is why all my fellow 'exocreators' settled on the manta shape. After all, among swimming lifeform it is not exactly the most common design. In fact, manta shapes form a definite minority. Fishes and squid are the norm in Earth's oceans. So can balloons be propelled in such a way that they resemble the most likely shape, that of a fish?



And once more the answer is yes... This particular film was not derived from Festo, but found on YouTube; here it is on the YouTube site. Once we're at it, some animals swim with flippers. Can you have a balloon propelled by flippers?


Yes, you can, and Festo did it, with their 'air penguin'.



And an 'air jellyfish'? No problem for the people at Festo.

Enough for today, I should think. My conclusion is that there is no need to shape ballonts as manta's. I rather like the 'air jellyfish' design. For those who want yet more, there is an intriguing clip on YouTube showing a balloon lifting a young woman strapped underneath. She moves about with wings attached to her arms in a hangar. As the commentary rightly says, what would happen in a breeze? I guess that the rather neat idea illustrates the limits of ballooning on a terrestrial world...

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?

Encyclopaedia of Furahan Life

Click to enlarge

It's summer, there are many things to do, and writing this blog is not always one of them. But here is something to whet the appetite: just a preview random page of the new and great 'Encyclopaedia of Furahan Life'. Intriguing, isn't it? Mind you, at 930 pages it is not for the faint of heart. And those who have use for a coffee-table book better get themselves a sturdy coffee table.

It will be available soon through New Hades Publishers; just be warned that in backward areas of the Galaxy delivery may take up to a kiloyear.

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.