3D Rendering

[Mabel Figworthy]

They look as though you could pick them up off the screen! I'm not a pen expert so can't comment on how accurate they look but they certainly do look lifelike.

[Serinde]

These came out very well indeed.

[rcperryls]

I think it came out fairly well also. Very fairly well!

Carole

[richardandtracy]

Thank you. Much appreciated.

Took a bit of time to model, and making the textures for the gold and silver caps was quite challenging. Ah well, it was a nice little rabbit hole to chase down.

Regards,

Richard

[richardandtracy]

This is a little freebie I released to the figure animation community a while ago, but I think it's amusing enough to show (and I need a bit of a smile & distraction at the moment).

If you're not from the British Isles, you may not be aware of the eccentric and talented cartoonist/satirist Heath Robinson. He was the slightly earlier version of the US based 'Rube Goldberg' and the term 'A Heath-Robinson Machine' got into the Oxford English Dictionary in 1913.

He lived through the Great War dreaming up ever madder and eccentric designs for defence and attack, then through the roaring 20's he reacted to modernism and all the silly ideas of the time with complicated, inefficient and frequently ineffective machinery.

This table and chair design was inspired by a chromed steel dining table and chairs that featured in a cartoon he drew in the 1920's. I made the design possible, but it retains Heath Robinson's impractical features. I hope it amuses you with its dottiness in the same way it does me.



This is the original cartoon image that inspired me, similar but a bit different:


Regards,

Richard.

[rcperryls]

I am always amazed at your 3D renderings. Hard to believe you could do this in only 50 minutes. It would be great without the "twist" which did make me smile. Glad that it did that for you!

Carole

[richardandtracy]

Truth is Carole, with my now seriously obsolete gaming graphics card (an nVidia GTX 1060), the render probably took less than 10 minutes (can't remember exactly now). The CPU on the machine working on its own took about 50 minutes for a portrait, but the graphics card helps enormously.

The types of graphics cards used for 'mining' Bitcoin are much more powerful than my current card, and would make the image much quicker to generate, though they would not alter the quality one iota, or reduce the posing and modelling time by very much. The high performance new cards such as the nVidia RTX 3090 are 10-15x quicker than my obsolete one. However, the result is the same despite the extra cost of the card.

Regards,

Richard.

[Serinde]

This is great fun! I always suspected that Heath Robinson represented much of what made England (in particular) such a marvellous place and able to punch above its weight -- the eccentricity, whether stereotyped or not, meant some solutions were entertained (no matter how briefly) that would not see the light of day in other places.

[richardandtracy]

I really don't understand the reasons why the UK became such an industrial power in the 18th and 19th centuries. On the face of it, the apparent loathing of the aristocracy for anything other than an agrarian economy where they were on top should have prevented it.

The current separation between the 'Arts/Classics/Humanities' and 'Technologists' is a hang-over from that time and a receding echo of the division present between workers and the owners when industrialisation occurred. As a brat I came across the same thought processes. One of my English/French teachers at school told me in all seriousness that nothing of any consequence had ever come from any anglophone country. He was not enamoured by Shakespeare even though he taught the plays, he felt French Literature was a bit decadent. What he did admire were the Greek Classics, considering them to be the epitome of style & sophistication. To him, Gothic architecture was gauche and childish, Palladian and Baroque were the only architectural styles of any integrity. Modernism; well that was an Anglophone abomination to its core as far as he was concerned, and therefore beneath contempt, with Le Corbusier being a counterfeit American (his term of ultimate derision was to call someone an American).

Despite this division in attitudes, the UK exploded in the 18th & 19th centuries. I simply can't find a real reason for it in the history books or anything I have read. In the 17th century, reading Peyps which is the nearest I have found to a 'Common Man's thoughts', everything in & around the court at the end of the 1680's is small scale and fairly inward looking. Busy, frantic even, but to no great purpose. No grand vision of the country's place in the world, no real vision of the future at all, with national survival still seeming to be barely practical and still open to question. And yet within 100 years the country was challenging the superpower of the time for dominance, and within another 50 years was the superpower. A little group of windswept, rainy islands off the top left corner of Europe with a tiny population and a few big ideas.

It seems to me as inexplicable as the Viking explosion on the world, who were also from a tiny wind, rain and snow swept corner on the top left corner of Europe.
And almost as short lived.

Was it due to outlandish ideas, wild eccentricity, a flexible attitude to banking, greed or anything like that? I really don't know. Nothing I have read convinces me. All the explanations I've read seem too facile, too shallow, too easy. A country doesn't suddenly decide to be a superpower, it grows into it. But how, or why, I don't know.

Sorry, hadn't intended to expose my ignorance quite so obviously.

Regards,

Richard

[Serinde]

An excellent question -- and not ignorant in the least, and one asked by many historians over the years. How did this little island, in a group of islands huddled off the northwest corner of Europe, come to dominate ¾ of the earth's surface? Seems unlikely, and yet we live in the backwash of that empire even today. (But the most unlikely European empire builders, to my mind, were the Dutch. Yet supremely successful, too.)

The countries of Britain were always trading nations across the narrow seas in an era when water was more a highway with attitude and less a barrier. England in particular had been a part of other larger political groupings -- first after the Conquest and then dovetailing into the Angevin empire (the Plantagenets as a ruling family are fascinating), followed by controlling half of France during the Hundred Years War, where the last landholdings by the English crown were only finally lost under Mary Tudor.

I'm not an expert in the 17-19centuries (I'm a 14th century it's-all-going-to-hell-in-a-handcart historian, me), but some things stick out. In no particular order (and with much left out):

*The Renaissance and then inevitably the Reformation. This isn't a popular idea anymore, and it certainly has it's difficulties, but it's curious that the areas that industrialised first (from certain states of the Holy Roman Empire, through the Huguenots in France, to England, Scotland and Wales) tended to be Protestant. I don't mean to imply that (for example) Catholic countries didn't industrialise -- they did, obviously. The northern lands are also areas to which the Renaissance arrived more or less fully formed and in a single chunk, rather than the way it did around the Mediterranean (for obvious historical reasons, as the Italian city states, for example, were the centre of the collapsed Roman empire, and they rediscovered their past history piecemeal first before it gradually spreads northwards).

*Spain and Portugal were already sailing the high seas and bringing back shiploads of treasure in the 15thc (to say nothing of the mayhem, death and destruction to the people they met). Atlantic seaboard kingdoms tended to have very good sailors, and their kings built impressive navies, which they used.

*Britain (as it was by this time) had thrown out its pesky religious dissidents to the New World where the Spanish and French were already trading and settling (the French in India and Spanish and French North America, for example); leading to proxy wars here and elsewhere where European rivals were establishing footholds.

*Access to new energy sources. Loss of forest cover in Britain made serious efforts in mining for coal worthwhile (which they'd always known about). And there's a lot of high-grade coal to mine all over the place. From there you get the Newcomen engine to get water out of mines, and that leads to James Watt's upgrade with a new-fangled condenser and a governor. From there, the rest is scale. And don't underestimate what historians probably still refer to as the Little Ice Age -- people had to find work or starve. (Sometimes, of course, they did both.)

*In the background, there are all sorts of other stuff happening: the rise of the aristocracy (separate from a military elite), the enclosure acts, new-ish raw materials coming (like cotton) from the New World as well as the East in bulk, and importantly, a change after 1688 in the way the King and Parliament interact. No more civil wars in Britain after 1745; no absolutist monarchy (despite attempts); status rules like sumptuary laws become unenforceable and non-nobles can purchase land, and, yes, different attitudes towards banking (especially commercial lending)....

I could go on. A lot of change is driven by necessity (it being the mother of invention and all), as we are seeing regarding climate at the present time.

Asking thoughtful questions is the exact opposite of ignorance. And I'll stop the lecture here!

[richardandtracy]

Serinde, I'm sorry for not replying earlier. Had an 'Interesting' weekend which was exceedingly busy.
I did thoroughly enjoy the lesson, thank you for taking the time.

The largely protestant countries of Northern Europe do certainly seem to have a more driven work ethos. Is it due to the religion, climate, history or anything else? That is a hard one to assess. In Germany, predominately Catholic Bavaria seems more laid back than predominantly Protestant North Rhine Westphalia which includes the industrial powerhouse of the Ruhr. Though, in all cases there are exceptions. BMW is based in Munich & that is far from free of manufacturing, yet is in the heart of Bavaria. The Dutch East Indies... don't really think of them as a force, but yes they were, weren't they? Colonies from South Africa to India & Indonesia. Much of the early plotting by the the Brits in India was more how to get one over the Dutch, and only later did the French seem to become a major opponent. I had forgotten that.

I will follow your suggestions and read up on it where I can. Some of the initial developments of industrialisation seem so inexplicable that I do want to understand. An apparently inexplicable fact that I think I now follow is that during parts of the later 18th century, Cornwall had more steam engines than the rest of the world. Just mind boggling that the remotest part of the South West should lead the way. The most productive mines in the world at the time were in Cornwall and they were being limited by mine flooding, and the only way to prevent it was active de-watering. Proper pumping allowed mines to do the unthinkable, to extend up to 5 miles out under the sea and make the mine owners huge amounts of money.

I will confess I hadn't thought about the effect of the extension to property rights, allowing everyone to own land. That is a happy rabbit hole I'll enjoy following up.
The little Ice Age. Hmm hadn't even thought of that as a thing. I will look.

That'll do my incidental reading for years...
I had an incidental research topic for about 30 years. I think I have come to the end of it though, I've read everything I am likely to ever find about Lady Harriet Granville (If you think of that part played by Keira Knightly in the film 'Duchess', well Harriet was her younger daughter). My interest was initially sparked by the Paula Marshall Mills & Boon 'An Unexpected Passion', a fictionalised re-telling of real events relating to Harriet & husband Granville's courtship. Harriet seemed so interesting, so intelligent, so sharp, but tempered with kindness & someone I wish I had known for real, it made me want to know her more. Reading her letters, those of her husband, mother and her husband's mistress before Harriet & Granville married (Harriet's Aunt of all people), were a fascinating insight into the person and the life at the time. It turned out that the 'Harriet' in her own letters sounded identical to the Paula Marshall version of Harriet and she had got the tone of voice so perfectly her book was like the real person speaking again (my admiration for Paula Marshall as an author is boundless for this regardless of her other superb books). I read all around the family, even finding that the 6th Duchess of Devonshire (Keira Knightly in the film) wrote an epistolary book published anonymously in the 1780's. The Duchess that so many people are interested in was so much less interesting or intelligent than her daughter, and the book was utterly utterly, cringeworthily dire. Unfortunately I think I have done all the research I can conduct remotely on the subject without trawling through the Duke of Devonshire's archives in person (which would be both terribly impolite and quite hard work), so it's probably time to look at something else.

Regards,

Richard.

[Serinde]

I avoid the 18th century, as I have an allergy to chaps in frock coats. I blame the little local difficulty in the New World in 1776. But it is a curiosity that over the last, oh, 35 years, I've been working (primary editing and mss prep) with a diplomatic historian whose entire world has revolved mainly around men in frock coats. Go figure.

I briefly lived in Catholic Bavaria, and we seemed to have most of the month of May off work. Wonderful. In the middle ages, peasants got more holidays than we do now. And why not -- all those saints' days don't become holy-days and celebrate themselves, do they? They also ate better, if plainly, and were generally in better health than their successors who worked in the mills, judging from skeletal remains. Arguably, that work ethic has landed us where we are currently, with a new Fearless Leader telling us how lazy we all are, the proof being that the earth is still just about liveable. I fear for any net zero pledges. But I'll not get sidetracked onto the present day because it's too depressing, IMHO. Anyway, if I need to rant, the S&G is the appropriate place!

Not just Cornwall. Most of the countryside was "working" -- and certainly from the Elizabethan era onward, everyone was presumed to have a job except under the most dire of circumstances. No holy begging allowed after the Reformation! Also no monastic powerhouses of prayer and farming innovation. My tiny village had a little sandstone quarry about 30 yards down the road, and (briefly) we were on a rail line between Glasgow and Stirling; we had joinery workshops (one of them next door but one), a weaving shed (up the hill, although most of the weaving was concentrated in the next village east) and a working forge on the main street. And gentlemen farmers, of course.

All sorts of things came together at the same time: continued draining of the fens, steam engines, canals, a workforce on the move, overseas trade in sugar and tobacco (there's a reason why Glasgow rejoices in place names like Plantation St and Jamaica St, after all). The roads were uniformly rubbish however; tho we were on the "toll road" and the Toll House is still standing and lived in again. By the end of the 18th century, what we think of as a civilised green and pleasant land of tea cups and Capability Brown's landscapes (and ferocious politics) was mostly off limits to almost everyone unless you owned it or worked there. Trespass is still taken quite seriously in England, I understand.

[richardandtracy]

To keep my mind off things last weekend, I played about with a number of pictures designed to persuade people to download a gate I had modelled up. The gate is similar to the sideway gate we fitted to our last house in the early 1990's.

In the end I didn't use it because.. well, it's more of a picture than an advert illustration. However, to be a better picture, the gate needs to be a bit grubbier and have a bit more grass growing up around the base of the posts.
As an image I was quite pleased with it, though, just needs a bit more work one day.

Regards,

Richard.

[Serinde]

Nice!

[richardandtracy]

I was reading about the design of various bridges and came to a site which ranked an architect's 10 favourite bridges. Well, one thing led to another and I saw a picture of a stunning bridge in China, the Leshan Old Bridge, shown in its Wikipedia image below linked to from this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leshan:


It's quite an inspiration, But.. while I'd love to model it, it may be beyond me. So, with a splurge of creativity(? Or was it wind? Not sure) I tried to model a more conventional bridge and went for something a bit like this one or numerous other similar ones to be found in China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanguantang_Bridge

That simpler shape was certainly possible to model, so, after a bit of fiddling I came up with this model:


Technically, wrapping the images of straight blocks around the curvature of the arch to look like curved blocks was an interesting task, but otherwise it's a very simple model. Finding a nice use for the bridge was fun.

Regards,

Richard

[rcperryls]

At first this photo didn't look as 3D as some of the others you have created. Then I looked at the Wikipedia photo and could really see the difference, especially under the arch. I wonder if it is because you usually are focused on people or if our eyes are so used to adding depth to landscape photos that it makes it harder to get the 3D perspective? Well done!

Carole

[richardandtracy]

Because I really don't know when to leave well alone, I have started modelling up a bridge inspired by the Leshan Arch Bridge. It's taking a while and the model is quite detailed, so I suspect it'll take a while yet.



I have to finish modelling, then apply the textures to the surfaces before it can look like a real bridge, but it's slowly getting there. There are probably 20,000 roof tiles modelled, so it is going to be a bit of a brute of a model once done. Need to finish the roof tiles, add in a few decorative finials (Chinese Dragons and maybe a cat) then I can start adding those all-important textures that make it look more realistic.

Great fun.

Regards,

Richard

[fccs]

It’s going to be amazing. I know it’s a lot of work, but is also relaxing?

[richardandtracy]

Relaxing. Hmm. That's a hard one. I hope you don't mind if I answer both yes and no.

I have an annoying need to create things. At the current stage I'm in with my projects at work, I'm doing what feels like thousands of documents. That leaves no room for creativity in my job, no way to make people smile, make something new come to life. So, this is an outlet. It also exercises the mind, makes me think in a way that achieves something other than thousands of pointless words in dozens of unread documents that allow meaningless ticks [checks] in boxes that will never be looked at again after being ticked.

So, in some ways, yes, it is relaxing in that it allows me to satisfy this need to create,. But it also takes effort & concentration. No question, it can be very tiring and I'd often appreciate a shoulder massage to reduce muscle tension - so that's the no side of the yes & no answer covered too.

Regards,

Richard.

[fccs]

It’s fascinating to see your work. And your yes and no answer makes complete sense. Things are often not black or white.