Before there was Photoshop
I don’t know how many thousands of dollars this baby cost new. Several, many. Can you get a feel for the scale of it? I should have shot the picture next to a Junior High School gymnasium for comparison. This is a Truevision videographics adapter, but everybody called it a Targa board. They were the only game in town for image manipulation in 1987.
Before there was Photoshop, there was this. Before there was this, people had a touching and almost religious faith in the veracity of photographs. It was my job to crush those tender feelings under the heel of my sneaker.
Truth is, we didn’t really need the bzillion dollars worth of graphics computing we bought in the ’80s. In some measure, the main purpose was to make our customers go, “woo!” My computer room was a stop on the company tour for every client. My boss would keep up a snappy patter about what the machines were capable of while I demonstrated in real-time. Like a freak show.
Or sometimes an engineer would drop me the client’s annual report before a meeting, and I would digitize a picture of their headquarters and set fire to it. They walk into the meeting, see a picture of a half-destroyed Conglamco Industries’ flagship facility projected on the back wall and dive for the phones. Ah, it was sweet.
Then there was a time I almost bought myself a lifetime of unwanted attention from the Feds. See, somebody was going to talk to Boeing, and he gave me this really crappy, blurry picture of a jet to use on the title slide. That wasn’t right, so I cleaned it up. Sharpened it, drew in the obvious lines. My boss saw it and nearly wet himself; it was the first released photo of a certain stealth bomber; it was supposed to be all blurry.
All our computer graphics stuff lived in a small, purpose-built room with a real door. A real door, and walls that went all the way to the ceiling. It was that important. Two complete graphics workstations, five monitors, assorted cameras and bernoulli boxes. Things that whirred and things that hissed, blinking LEDs of every color (except blue…those came later). The bridge of the Enterprise wasn’t a patch on it. The whole room worked on one circuit that was operated by a single knife switch by the door. I got to work before dawn and it was my great privilege to hit that switch and bring the whole glittering, wheezing chromium beast to life every morning.
I couldn’t possibly have used this board. It was nonstandard in every way. But my boss is a great thrower-awayer of things, and I’m a hoarder. (They had to wait until I was on vacation to biff our original three computers: an IBM XT and two ATs. Oh, god. Where are they now?). And I have the monitor that this board drove (also useless). But, you know…it just wasn’t fitting to let something this amazing and world-changing go into a dumpster. It had earned itself a flaming Viking funeral ship, at the very least.
Eh. I’m sure I’ve told you guys these tired old stories before, in some thread or other. Indulge me. It makes it easier to say goodbye.
August 21, 2007 — 6:46 pm
Comments: 20
Down and out in Visitorville
Anybody else notice the ad for this thing on Sitemeter? It’s a program that takes your usage logs and turns them into a Second Life for deaf mutes. They call it Visitorville. Your web site is rendered as a city, incoming queries from search engines are drawn as buses, and you guys shuffle off the buses — a bunch of unshaven zombie retards sunk in existential gloom with IP addresses floating over your heads — and drift around not interacting with each other. So, no change there.
It’s supposed to be a way of better visualizing website flow: rooms and buildings correspond to sections and pages. Repeat visitors have special little things floating over their heads, buyers little something elses floating over their heads, and repeat buyers are served with sticks up their backsides like all-day suckers (not true, but my posts are required by law to have at least one butt reference per).
Reminds me of the game Black & White — the last (but not the first) game I bought a whole new computer to be able to play. You’re God, and you make these little people, and they walk around doing stuff with their thoughts floating over their heads like, “I have to pee” or “I’m sad” or “I have a disease” or “I’m lonely” and I’m, like, “look, there are millions of you and you all look alike to me — needy, high-mainenance bastards, every one of you. I’m only a god here.” I got bored with it real quick. But I learned an awful lot about theology.
We must be in another wave of 3D visualization marketing ideas. Microsoft is trying it on again, with Photosynth (which I saw at Enas Yorl‘s place) and Surface (which I’m sure you’ve seen, unless you live in a yurt on the windy steppes milking horses).
I have to admit, Microsoft hater that I am, Surface is very cool. Watch some of the videos, if you haven’t. I love the idea of setting cameras and phones on the table and pulling data onto or off of them with your fingers.
But I saw prototypes of these things — not these literal things, but ones very like them — twenty years ago. I saw (and lusted after) a drafting table that was a giant pressure-sensitive tablet combined with rear projection video. I saw high-def and 3D screens and 6D mice and visualized worlds. I saw all this at a Siggraph show in…1990?
By the time we got videophones (backhandedly, via webcams) we were bored with the idea. Too much time elapsed between the tease and the release.
I damn well better still have a license when they roll out the rocketcar.
June 21, 2007 — 5:49 pm
Comments: 40
Dustball
Check out this cool Shockwave. I know…you’ve seen stuff like this before, but this one is an especially good exploit of Flash’s animation characteristics. Style, as the man say, is based on limitations.
See, in Flash, little chunks of animation are wrapped into packages called symbols. Symbols can be nested (so you could have an eye-blink animation inside a larger head animation as part of a larger character animation) and can include sound. Symbols only have to be downloaded once and can then be used multiple times in the larger animation — a whole lot of shaking for a very small download.
By using symbols in different sizes, with different starting points, flipped in different directions, apparent crowd scenes can be built out of a few components. You can zoom in and pan around and move characters and it’s all, in bandwidth terms, free. It’s a technique you’ll see used a lot in animated banner ads, which are almost always Flash these days.
This is also an obvious use of rotoscoping — animation derived from tracing live action film footage. Rotoscoping was invented by Max Fleischer (later the father of Betty Boop) in the teens. It’s been in use ever since — most recently in A Scanner Darkly, a 2006 animated film made from a Philip K. Dick novel. It’s supposed to be really impressive…ummm…so I’ve just ordered a copy, because I totally meant to see it in the theaters.
Rotoscoping is easy to spot. It always has a certain look to it. It’s fun to watch, but there’s a stiffness about the animation that conventionally-drawn characters don’t have. Disney often used rotoscope characters for the humans in his films. Contrast the rotoscoped Snow White with the conventionally animated Seven Dwarves to see what I’m getting at.
It works very well in this example. He’s thrown a fat vector line around (presumably) himself. It takes half a dozen of these clips to build an effective percussion set out of himself. The intro and outro movements of each character are separate animations.
Not to take anything away from this guy — he’s done quite a bit of animation — but one of the neatest things about this piece is that it didn’t take insane art or animation or programming skillz. Just a good idea. I’m really enjoying this whole interwotzit democratization of content thing.
Anyhoo, the artist is Dustin McClean, aka Dustball. And now I’d better get back to my desk before somebody realizes I’ve nipped over to the lobby of the building next door.
June 5, 2007 — 12:00 pm
Comments: 5
It doth suck and, verily, doth it blow
Today’s the day I had to show my current multimedia dingus to the client. It’s basically a little interactive thing that asks a question, stores the answer, shows a video, and gives some feedback, times ten. Easy, right?
Then the artistic genius building the kiosk decided he wants it to run vertically. Like, portrait. Computers do not do this, says I. Well — says he — I’ve never done it before, either, but I think you build it sideways and we’ll physically rotate the monitor. Oh, and no touchscreen — we’re tucking the computer out of sight and giving you three hardwired buttons. Three whole buttons. This’ll be packed with interactive functionality.
Um. Monitor #2 will rotate (I have three monitors — worship me), but you can’t design rotated. Up/down arrows become side-to-side arrows, the mouse is all over the joint. I can rotate the monitor to run the application, but I have to design it sideways and crane. Fabulous.
I had to bribe the video guys to use their +3 Video Editing mojo to rotate all my .avi files for me. My primitive video stuff doesn’t have a “make it sideways” spell. I’ve been excreting building supplies over this for a week.
So today I pitch it to the client — no, the client, the client’s boss, and the client’s boss’ boss. The latter is a woman whose name strikes fear in the hearts of cubiclemonkeys everywhere. Say it aloud and hear the gentle pitter-pat of ass-cheeks clenching. She isn’t a cruel woman. She’s that potent combination of stupid and powerful. This is cubiclemonkey kryptonite.
They gather in my office. I rotate the monitor for them, and in so doing somehow hit a button that kills the signal. It goes black. I have a feeling now is a really bad time to figure out what all those little buttons at the bottom of the monitor do. Time rubberbands while I punch buttons and sweat, though it might’ve been kinder if I hadn’t gotten it working eventually.
I love working for a research and engineering company. I love learning about geeky, science-ish things. But there’s no getting around it: engineers hate subtlety. I designed an interface of duotoned photographs: all muted blue and dusty red. Earthy variations on our corporate colors, with a nice, bangy video window in front.
“My eye goes right to the video window in the middle”
“Excellent! That’s just what I intended.”
“But I can’t really see the photos in the background that well.”
“Excellent! That’s just what I intended.”
“Change it!”
“Okey-doke!”
They discuss among themselves what color goes best with red and blue. Something nice and bright. Orange? Yellow? And then one of them leans forward says, “you know those web sites where there’s text and it’s on this sort of lozenge thing and it’s tumbling over and over — can we have one of those animations?” Something inside of me rolled over, pulled the covers over its head and cried itself to sleep.
I had originally promised them a bunch of functionality, but I presumed I had a full keyboard to work with. Now I have three buttons: “yes” “no” and “reset.”
So they’re all like, “can we skip to specific scenarios?”
And I’m like, “no. I have three buttons, and they’re totally spoken for.”
“Can we have a demo mode?”
“No, I only have three buttons.”
“Can we have a help screen?”
“I have three buttons.”
“Can we have fast forward?”
“Yes, sure, if you can fast forward with your mind.”
Thank you, Ace, for planting that dangerously insubordinate snark in my brain.
It got back to me later that they were, on the whole, pleased. I mean, I’m going to have to rape and pillage my own design, but I’ve been professionally outraging my artistic sensibilities for decades. I’m getting good at it.
And, anyhow, it’s Friday. Like I give a rat’s ass about anything on Friday.
March 30, 2007 — 10:02 am
Comments: 14
We’re naming the next one Mr Whiskers
Question: How do you make an authentic Texas chili?
Answer: There’s no doubt that the quality of the beef is an issue, whether ground beef or steak is used. First, brown the meat thoroughly in very hot bacon grease and pour off the excess fat.
Most importantly, however, before you begin cutting up the peppers and onions, make sure you rub the surface of your cutting board vigorously with a cat’s rectum.
March 16, 2007 — 1:45 pm
Comments: 3
Nineteen white, fuzzy cat bellies
It felt like Spring yesterday, which compelled Charlotte to leap out the back door, fall to the ground and wave her stuff around in the air. This is the tragic consequence of teaching your cat that her white, fuzzy belly is the most beautiful object in the whole wide world.
This was not at all the image I was originally going for. I was headed for a straight-up montage of cat belly photographs. But because she’s black and white, Charlotte is an especially strange and wonderful object to play with in Photoshop.
When you ctrl-click on an image layer, Photoshop automatically selects the brightest portions of the layer. So I did that and made a mask of the white parts and saved it, then I inverted the image and made a mask of the black parts and saved it. This theoretically gave me a combined mask that would cut around the outlines of Charlotte and save me the trouble of manually erasing or blending the backgrounds (on account of, I am lazy), since the background is largely gray. But, of course, the darkest part of the white fur and the lightest part of the black fur are gray, too, so when I subtracted the mask from the photo, this was what I got. Well, after some fussing.
It looks like one of those old masters drawings. The ones on gray paper with the ink and chalk. I tried adding a paper texture, which looked cool but not cool enough to justify tripling the file size. To be economical, .gif files rely on large areas of totally solid color.
Please enjoy my cat’s white, fuzzy belly nineteen different ways. She would want you to.
March 14, 2007 — 8:09 am
Comments: 3
Tell me a story, Dr Fang
Okay, now I feel bad for dissing scientists. The ones I’ve known all share at least one excellent characteristic: they’re natural born explainers. No scientist would dream of letting me draw something until he was sure I had a basic grasp of the science.
This probably does result in a slightly better illustration than they could’ve squeezed out of me otherwise, but I don’t think that’s why they do it. They do it because they can’t stand to be around ignorance. And for the sheer joy of explaining things.
To do science takes all sort of depth and, like, math and stuff. But the underlying concepts are usually pretty accessible. All you need is one excitable scientist with a pencil and a lunch napkin. Some of the top scientists in their respective fields have sat at my workstation and told me stories. Lordy, I love that.
My favorite scientist was an elderly Chinese. Call him Dr Fang. Everyone hated to work with Fang, because he was a high-strung chap with a completely impenetrable accent. And yet, he was a popular public speaker on the science circuit. That’s because he was fizzing with excitement. Old Fang was chuffed to buggery about science. But it was especially important for him to have good art, because otherwise no-one could tell what he was gabbling so happily about.
I always got stuck with him, because I have a good ear for Chinglish (and Indianglish, for that matter). Being, as most Chinese are, a fun-sized human being, Fang could barely peer over my head as I sat at the work station and he stood behind my chair barking instructions.
“Make it blue! No, make it yellow! No, make it green! No, blue! No, delete the whole thing! Ahahahaha! No, bring it back again!” That last order was especially off-pissing, as the software we had then didn’t undo.
I never heard how Fang got to the States. But the first time he was allowed back into China to visit his family, they had been disappeared. People, furniture…everything gone. Nothing was left but empty houses. Next trip, everything was back where it should be and no-one would talk about it. Spooky place, China.
On one of those trips, he brought me back this piece of artwork. He says these are ubiquitous in rural homes in China (he didn’t actually use the words “ubiquitous” or “rural” — I think his soft palate would’ve exploded). It’s a thin, translucent sheet of black and white marble and something that looks very like a Chinese ink painting of a landscape can be picked out of the dark streaks. An appropriate poem is painted on them. I asked what my poem was, and Fang said, “Ohhhh, I dunno. Rain, somethingsomethingsomething.”
He carried that thing in his hand-luggage all the way from China so it wouldn’t break. Very touching.
Dr Fang died this year. I was shocked. I didn’t even know he was ill. He retired several years ago, but he kept an office in our building and he was working on a book. I’d seen him around.
I hope he finished his book. I wouldn’t be able to read it, but he knew more about the thing he knew about than anyone in the world, they say.
Goodnight, Dr Fang. I shall forever hear your voice in the “rain, somethingsomethingsomething.”
March 9, 2007 — 8:20 am
Comments: 4
Wherein Weasel makes a fancy party hat
Sarah D. to the rescue. She teleported me out of the naughty scary place and into a community college for Second Life newbies. Here you can click on various kiosks and posters to download notecards explaining how to do stuff. There are live classes. Nobody is wearing exogenitals. It’s cool.
Then she took me to the closest sandbox. A sandbox is an area in which you may create and manipulate objects. She reached into her inventory, flung a ballpark frank on the ground, scaled it to the size of a sofa and sat demurely on the edge of it, typing explanations at me with hairy paws.
I should mention, communication is by ascii text (for now). When you hit the chat button and type, you hear clickity-clickity sounds and your avatar hands rise up and play air-keyboard. You look like the silly boo-boo you truly are. It’s hysterical.
Then my hour was up and I had to go.
Next afternoon, I went directly to the sandbox. Right click on the ground and choose “Create” to get the modeling menu. This resembles, not surprisingly, a cut-down version of an application like 3D Studio Max. You got your shape primitives (“prims” in SL-speak) — spheres, cubes, toruses, whatever — that you stick together and carve 
away from and apply textures to in order to build stuff. There are many textures already in your library for free, or you can upload new ones of your own (for a $L fee). There are also particle systems and atmospherics (fire, water, smoke) and behaviors (scripts), but basics first!
First, I jammed a red sphere onto a marble cone and made a pretty party hat. Whee! I’m a beautiful fairy princess!
When I model something in Max, I typically see four windows simultaneously: my object from the front, the top, the side, and the camera’s point of view. Here, you have to pan your camera around continually to get the same 360º understanding. Working from the front, my hat appeared to be jammed firmly on my head, but the overhead view revealed that it was flying fifteen feet out in front of me. Mmm. Rookie mistake.
Next, I applied one of the textures I found in my inventory. 
It was called moss-something. It was a mostly alpha (i.e. transparent) rendering of some hanging Spanish-mossy stuff and, applied to my compound object, the red stayed red, the green stayed green and transparent transparent.
Neat. This was a jaunty, plumey effect. I look like Koo Koo the Bird Girl! Thus, delighted with myself, ended day 3.
Wednesday is, apparently, Retarded Day on Second Life. They do system overhauls on Wednesdays, after which nothing works for shit. Or so I gather from reading the angry comments on their blog. Never mind. My task today was a simple one: build a hat better suited to my dignity and station in life.
See you soon! Why? Because we like you!
March 8, 2007 — 2:14 pm
Comments: 9
Life sucks. May I have seconds?
I was a fool to think I could resist Second Life forever. I’m not made of stone.
I can’t remember when I first heard of Second Life. It bobbled to the surface most recently last month when John Edwards’ virtual campaign headquarters was vandalized by some merry anarchists (Their statement: “We simply did it for the lulz… The fact you were so bent out of shape to make a blog post on the OFFICIAL JOHN EDWARDS BLOG about how some people placed a bunch of shittingdicknipples on your lawn is mighty telling.”)
I’ve played MMORPG‘s before. In fact, I played them before they were massive. Electronic Arts had a very primitive online game platform in the early eighties — I forget what it was called — which included crude modular, build-yourself-yourself avatars.
The current crop are beautiful to look at, but the gameplay tends toward repetitive and boring. Especially if, like me, you don’t particularly want to interact with other people that much. I spent a lot of my Anarchy Online time running across the desert watching the sun rise over fantasy alien landscapes. Cool, but finitely interesting.
SL isn’t that sort of game. Aside from the ground under foot and the basic body shapes, every object there was created by its users. Clothes, buildings, furniture. These can be made, copied (or copy-protected), bought and sold in the local currency, and the local currency can be exchanged in both directions for US greenbacks (though how it goes from Linden dollars to realworld dollars, I have no idea via whatever credit/debit/PayPal you set up with them. Current exchange rate $L1,000 = $US4.04). And Linden Labs has wisely declared that all things created in-world are copyrighted by their creators.
There’s a basic built-in 3D modeler included, and a simple scripting language that goes with. So you can build physical objects and give them behaviors. Yeah, that’s what I’m after. A second life that’s identical to my first. Come home from a long day 3D modeling and Photoshopping and coding to an evening of the same.
I’m not being sarcastic. That sounds really fun.
Basic account is free (you have to pay money if you want to own land apparently, non-paying members can own land, but not on the mainland), so…here we go. Avatar creation first. 
Initial appearances are grouped in broad classes such as goths or nightclubbers, M and F. My first thought, naturally, was a furry…but then I thought, ugh. Furries. (I have since learned there are many on SL who wear animal costumes that aren’t furverts).
Physical appearances can be changed at any time, so it doesn’t really matter. It’s just fun to play with the buttons and knobs. I decided to start out as a small Japanese woman with no hair. I’m going for a “leave me the hell alone” look. In addition to broad body types and clothing, SL breaks physical features into a number of fine sub-categories that you can play with, too. Arch of the eyebrows, tip of the nose, length of the chin. I wanted something that says “I’m as sexless as the angels” (I really, really don’t like grownup games), so I twiddled the knobs until I realized I was the spitting image of a shaved Michael Jackson. That freaked me out, so I shifted male and bulged my jaw and forehead. Hootie-hoo, Monkeyface! Oh, well. I’ll fix it later.
So, behold! Monkeyface McShavedaperson! Looks like a gray, no? I’m pretty sure that tattoo on my arm says, “I’m a giant dweeb for getting mixed up in this.” Either that, or, “ow! Holy shit! Compound fracture of both arms!”
And thanks very much to Sarah D. for the hotdog ‘n’ stuff.
March 7, 2007 — 9:58 am
Comments: 7
What did YOU do at the office today?
I built this thing. It’s not the only thing I did today, but it’s the only thing I did today that made me go “eee!” It’s a ripple displacement. I’ve never done one with this software before. “eee!” (If it’s making you nuts, right click and uncheck “play”).
This would be an intermediate step in most 3D animation, this slightly off-white, textureless place. I call it Milkworld. A lot of the things I build never make it out of Milkworld; I’m usually called upon to explain stuff rather than re-create a photorealistic scene.
I’d like to live in Milkworld — it’s very soothing here — but I’m such a slob, I’d probably get some color on it.
Have a good weekend. I’m going someplace with my new camera. “eee!”
Update: Huh. Doesn’t work in Opera or Firefox. Just IE. That’s odd because Damien’s Jaunty Balls works fine.
Update II: There. Don’t know what was wrong, but I fixed it by paring the embed code down to the minimum. Of course, now you can’t right click and uncheck “play” — you have to watch it loop. Bwahahaha! Wait! What? Close this window…? Nooooo!
February 23, 2007 — 2:21 pm
Comments: 8