Archive for the ‘Photographs’ Category

In the winter a slightly odd phenomenon sometimes happens when I do the rather mundane task of doing the washing up. When its cold outside and I fill the bowl with hot water steam produces tiny water drops all over the bar of soap on my window sill. I’ve normally only seen this at night but a few times I’ve found its happened late in the day. Tonight it was light enough to get a few photographs before the drops succumbed to gravity and ran into the soap dish.

Last weekend I took myself to London to throw myself round a series of exhibitions. One of the highlights was going to see the 2011 Pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens by Peter Zumthor. I’d only seen shots of the outside and have to admit I was a bit concerned it was going to be a rather boring black box. Fortunately while from the outside it appears to be a plain black box punctured by rectangular openings on two sides it has a more interesting interior.

Going through one of the entrances you find yourself in a passageway that runs around the entire outside of the Pavilion openings into the interior staggered from the exterior lead into a rectangular courtyard.

The outer edge of the courtyard, below the buildings inward sloping roof, has continual bench seating broken only by the entrances. Simple chairs and tables are arranged around the edges. At the heart of the courtyard is a long thin bed planted densely with a variety of plants of different heights and colours.

I managed to get to see the gallery on two trips to the park. It reminds me of a cloister but as though designed for monks who have a very modernist, minimalist aesthetic taste. With its inward sloping roof I’d have been interested to see what the interior is like during a heavy rainstorm. I imagine that water races off the roofs, especially at the corners.

This years Pavilion will be at the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens London from July to October and entry is free.

The Colonnade (or Loggia) at Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire.

A photograph of the overnight torrential downpour and hailstorm with thunder and lightning from the bank holiday weekend just gone. You can see a few of the hailstones bouncing off the top of the street light as bright dashes flying away from it.

In September 2010 on a trip to London I stumbled into the sets being built for the London sequences of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich.

It’s funny how your memory can play tricks on you – I thought I had quite a few pictures of the sets but I’d only taken two. Thinking back though I’d gone a bit mad taking photographs earlier on the Thames, at the Observatory and around the National Maritime Museum by the time I got to the College my feet hurt and it was trying to rain so I put my camera away and used my eyes for looking instead.

I think this is the first time DarkDwarf and I have independantly taken photographs of the same thing for our blogs. Here is a shot of the Port of Liverpool Building reflected in Mann Island Development I took a couple of weeks ago but fell through the cracks of being busy doing other things.  Scarily we had almost the same title.

The ruins of Hardwick Old Hall, Derbyshire, photographed from below through the hedge beside The Hardwick Inn.

When I took this picture of buildings all jostling for space with each other on a Liverpool street I was going to just post it as a throw away picture post. However this was one of the views, with its variety of buildings from different eras, that inspired my render Accretion City. So I thought I might expand a little on the idea that pictures (especially 3D renders) need to be careful of avoiding mono culture scenery. I really like CityEngine (I think my reviews of CityEngine Indie and CityEngine Vue made that pretty obvious).

A lot of 3D scenes reveal their artificial nature because they use the same elements over and over again. I can’t remember which film it was but I do remember one of the 3D cartoons with insects films a few years ago where all the background insects looked the same. Every time I saw a group of ants in the background I knew I was watching a CG movie and it pulled me out of the story.  Vue users have become so used to EcoSystems they almost forget the power the variety gives in making scenes more believable through variation.

The sample scenes are great but they tend to create models of settlements that are very mono culture in nature. Even when they feature different types of area they tend to be of one era. CityEngines way of creating models of a city is great but they aren’t settlements that grow over time – and trying to making them do that is a task that would scare me and probably wouldn’t have huge benefits. So the trick will be to include a variety of building types to make it seem a model has grown over time. That will include creating models that fuse multiple styles so the old can be extended sometimes in a way that would have Prince Charles talking about carbuncles if these were real buildings.

Anyway somewhere along the lines before I’d finished writing what should have been a complete post I was struck by how I don’t just think this way for 3D stuff but also when I’m world building for stories or games. In fact I went as far as writing up a formalised way of doing that when I put together STEEPVM. Thats quite a formal method and I know that most of the time the ideas for a setting layer themselves by accretion until, hopefully, I have something believable.

Thankfully I don’t have to create some sort of procedural set of instructions for this to work. However I do have to be careful of the trap that lies in wait – a curate’s egg setting.

It is far too easy to be lured by lots of shinny, shinny ideas and to throw them all into a setting and be left with a mess. I hate to pick on one particular target but the RPG Waste World seemed to me to suffer baddly from this.  On the flip side I was really pleased when Nightfall Games posted on their new(ish) forums that they won’t be updating SLA’s technology because at the moment, for me, its achieved a level of accretion without tipping over into being a mess.

I was starting to write something about that when I remembered I’d written Leave out the (Steampunk) Kitchen Sink last year so I’ll not go back over that old ground again…