December 2004 Archives

This image was created with 3 randomly shuffled tiles. It uses discrete tiled noise

...and a limited set of texture map tiles to create the illusion of randomness and variety.

If you quantize the noise function into discrete tiles, you can do all sorts of fun things with it. Let's look at how to do this here, and why you'd want to do this in the next entry.

When you UV map a sphere, you normally expect distortion at the North and South poles. If you preprocess your texture map in the right way, you can hide the North pole completely, at the expense of an "extra bad" South pole.

Think of it as wrapping paper over a lollipop.

Telephoto lenses don't "flatten" a scene, they merely crop it tighter. Wide angle lenses don't "distort" a scene, they merely crop it looser.

Here is a collection of photographs (copyright Ian Britton, FreeFoto.com) taken from the same camera position but with lens focal lengths of 300mm, 200mm, 100mm, 50mm, 35mm and 24mm.

Let's see what happens when we carefully compare one to the next.

When your Maya transparency map's RGB channels precisely fit its alpha channel, you must take special steps in order to avoid matte lines. Here's how to use the multiply/divide node to "unpremultiply" the RGB channels, and how to use the conditional node to avoid "division-by-zero" errors.

My work on a 1992 Kodak television commercial led me to invent the idea of assembling meta images out of mosaics of smaller, often thematically related images - Photo Mosaics.

Once you become sensitive to the basics of how the human body is constructed, you start to see the same patterns in use in animal anatomy. Since all living creatures on Earth trace their origins to a common ancestor, the same basic patterns arise again and again and again and again. Here's an example:

A human has two bones in his forearm, the radius, and the ulna. When a human rotates (supinates and pronates) his wrist, his radius rolls over his ulna. The relationship between the two bones at the elbow remains unchanged.

A cat (in this case a Sabre Tooth Tiger) needs the ability to manipulate its prey, so it may not surprise you to notice that it, too, has a radius and ulna in its forearms.

Let's take a stroll through the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits and see if any other animals use this mechanism.

Compare a county-by-county 2004 electoral map with a NASA satellite photo of the United States at night.

*** UPDATE 3/31/2005 ***

Following a link from the Air America web site on the eve of its first anniversary, I see the "purple map guy," Robert Vanderbei, also made this comparison
http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2004/

*** UPDATE 6/6/2005 ***

Even more on US state maps and their statistical interpretations. Link.

In one-point perspective, all parallel lines perpendicular to the image place recede to or radiate from a common point in the center of the image. That center can only be moved by cropping the final art in one place or another. The "speed" with which lines parallel to the image plane "pile up" can be altered by changing one's sense of camera lens and placement.

When talented artist Robert Chang mentioned on an art forum that he was experimenting with layouts to explore the depiction of depth in 1-point perspective for a new work of his, I decided to take a closer look at the issue myself.