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“On those stepping into rivers the same, other and other waters flow. They scatter and gather, come together and flow away, approach and depart.” — Heraclitus
An engineering artist, Leonardo da Vinci.
Plan to regulate the Arno River
“Amid all the causes of the destruction of property, it seems to me that rivers hold the foremost place on account of their excessive and violent inundations.
Against the irreparable inundation caused by swollen and proud rivers no recourse of human foresight can avail; for in a succession of raging and seething waves gnawing and tearing away high banks, growing turbid withthe earth from ploughed fields, destroying the houses therein and uprooting the tall trees, it carries these as its prey down to the sea which is its lair, bearing along with it men, trees, animals, houses, and lands, sweeping away every dike and every kind of barrier, bearing along the light things, and devastating and destroying those of weight, creating big landslips out of small fissures, filling up with floods the low valleys, and rushing headlong with destructive and inexorable mass of waters.”
Leonardo da Vinci – From the Notebooks
A philosopher artist – Niccolo Machiavelli
“I liken Fortune to one of those violent rivers which, when they become enraged, flood the plains, ruin the trees and the buildings, lift earth from this part, drop in another, each person flees before them, everyone yields to their impetus without being able to hinder them in any regard. And although rivers are like this, it is not as if men, when times are quiet, could not provide for them with dikes and dams so that when they rise later, either they go by a canal or their impetus is neither so wanton nor so damaging.”
Niccolo Machiavelli – from “The Prince”
And then they worked for a warrior, a man who was no artist: a ruler with unlimited ambition. Cesare Borgia, to try and divert the River Arno, with disasterous results for both the artists.
“Caesar or Nothing.” – Cesare Borgia
And that story unfolds in the following link: http://www.historytoday.com/MainArticle.aspx?m=33197&amid=30273892
“As for Borgia himself, the truly astonishing extent of his ambitions only gradually emerged after his death. His plan had been to establish his own princedom in the Romagna. Backed by the diplomatic machinations of his powerful father he would then take Florence and eventually unite the whole of Italy under his power. To give Machiavelli his due he probably realised this earlier than most; he too wished to see a united Italy that would achieve a power it had not seen since the collapse of the Roman Empire over a millennium before. Yet even Machiavelli did not suspect the full enormity of what Borgia had planned with his father. Upon the death of Alexander VI a new pope would be elected by the college of cardinals. There is some evidence that Borgia planned to dispense with this centuries-old tradition for voting in St Peter’s successor to the rule of Christendom. Instead, he intended to seize the papacy, declare himself pope and turn this office into a secular hereditary institution ruled by the House of Borgia. As Machiavelli had seen, the key to Borgia’s success lay in his astonishing ability to outwit his enemies by means of treachery beyond wildest imagination.”
A quote from Benoit Mandelbrot, from where I found both excerpts of Da Vinci and Machiavelli:
http://www.amazon.com/Misbehavior-Markets-Fractal-Financial-Turbulence/dp/0465043577/
“But the sensation of roughness has almost entirely been ignored by scientists. Euclid, the Greek geometer whose Elements is the worlds oldest treatise with near-modern mathematical reasoning, focused on its opposite, smoothness. He and innumerable followers studied smoothness in exquisite detail. Lines, planes, and spheres are the matter of Euclidean geometry, as we are all taught in grade school. I love them, but they are concepts in men’s minds and works, not in the irregularity and complexity of nature. How many natural objects around you really fit these old Greek patterns? Maybe the surface of a pond, where there is absolutely no wind or wave, appears truly flat like a plane. Maybe the irises of your children’s eyes, if you gaze deeply at them, appear close enough to circular. But how many other smooth, natural things can you name? As I put it in 1982, in my book-length manifesto, The Fractal Geometry of Nature: “Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line”.
Now, to talk about fractals and roughness may seem like a digression from the workaday task of financial analysis. But a look at the extraordinary range and power of fractal geometry will provide insight into what is possible in finance – and set the stage for further chapters”
Second Life is idealised, like Plato’s solids. It has very little “roughness”: attempts to bring in the rough – such as improved tools for terrains, a better avatar mesh, better atmospheric rendering like Windlight, better procedural modelling, meshes and sculpties, and procedural tools like Speedtree, all met with strong resistence in Second Life.
Simply. The rough in our art threatens to blow away the smooth in Second Life’s finance, and it makes people fearful. But, this desire for a smooth financial model is doomed anyway. The real world is not smooth, it is turbulent.
This constant resistence to developing the roughness of Second Life’s graphics seems reflected into the financial mentality of the leadership, who believe they have tamed the river of finance and commerce in Second Life.
Rivers are never tamed. We can hope to make peace with them, but only if we work with them with at least some understanding of its uncertain nature, and a respect for that kind of uncertainty.
In economics, Knightian uncertainty is risk that is immeasurable, not possible to calculate.
“Uncertainty must be taken in a sense radically distinct from the familiar notion of Risk, from which it has never been properly separated…. The essential fact is that ‘risk’ means in some cases a quantity susceptible of measurement, while at other times it is something distinctly not of this character; and there are far-reaching and crucial differences in the bearings of the phenomena depending on which of the two is really present and operating…. It will appear that a measurable uncertainty, or ‘risk’ proper, as we shall use the term, is so far different from an unmeasurable one that it is not in effect an uncertainty at all.” — Frank Knight
It is only natural that I would love the opportunity that Blue Mars represents to independent artists: roughness is built into Cryengine 2 at every level of its graphics engine. The ability to more closely model the real world is unparalled – even the ability to create breakable items that people can rend into fragments, warms my Epicurean soul. Even if nobody else used it, I would use it. And I know there are more people out there like me, who are less concerned about ugly “conventional finance” and more concerned about beauty as represented by the real world, both in art and preserving that real life beauty. We may not be a mass majority, but we are a significant amount of people. I want to make that number rise.
I believe that roughness will influence this virtual world in unforeseen ways. I’m starting to raft on that river now. I know the ride will be rough, but I will see it to the end.
Latest thing I’ve created.
No photoshopping this picture… looks like this inworld. Will be out soon in the shop. I’m having the greatest time making metal and other shiny objects that well, LOOK right in SL. Very proud of this work. Forged in modo and zbrush, as usual.
http://community.softimage.com/showthread.php?t=250
Well, I am obviously going to end up buying Crysis soon 
I’ve held off till now, but I’ve been drooling over its character pipeline for a good long while to experiment with custom built avatars and viewing architectural models and furniture I’ve built in real time.
I’ve also been working with XSI Mod Tool for the last weeks, learning the animation tools. It’s a fine free package, with very few limitations (a polygon limit and none of the really high end XSI features, but you don’t need them for making game mods – the animation is not nerfed in it). XSI’s rigging is stellar, and I am finding I am enjoying it a great deal.
Eventually I’ll cough up and buy XSI Foundation just for the animation once I get my skills to the level I feel comfortable, for now though I’m happy futzing with Mod Tool. I highly recommend it to learn a high end 3d package for no cost and the ability to use work you created with it in pro editions of the product, something you can’t do with Maya Personal Edition.
I’ve made two major suggestions for a new revision of sculpted prims.
-
Edge stitching in a linkset
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-5189 -
Implement skeletal rigs and skin weights for animating sculpties
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-5191
I’ve moved on… to Modo. Behold my first sculpted shoes I’ve baked… and made and textured in Modo (with fine sculpting done in Zbrush). They can be bought in my ArtSeduction store.
Kerwin at Lovecraft Forest has posted my mod for his testbed for Modo to bake sculpted prims so go get it at the following link – Lovecraft Forest – Cool Alternative!
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