Gun too long

A question.

If you take replication of specific theatrical creations out of the equation, what is the point of building a prop raygun?

It is straight-forward to carve, cast, assemble, print, or whatever a nice looking raygun. And it is fun to do. But at the end of it, you have a gun-shaped object. And you could spend ten bucks at the local toy store for a NERF or water gun. Or spend a few more bucks to get a nice looking thing -- assuming you either don't care or even, rather like that it is a duplicate of something used by the third Stormtrooper to the left on the second film of the first trilogy.

To my mind, there are a few possible reasons to do your own.

First is that it is fun. You are doing it because you want to do it.

Second is to save money. And this is a "Sort of." You probably can't get something as nice as a quality replica prop for less than it would cost to just order one. But you can get something better than a water pistol for less than you'd spend for a quality replica.

And last is to get something that just isn't out there. Leaving aside, again, the question of wanting a replica of a specific (licensed or unlicensed, historical or fictional, whatever) item, this question narrows into uncommon design elements.

The raygun I made for my sister qualifies; it is a type of retro design that is uncommon and hard to find pre-made (well, hard to find pre-made in semi-realistic form).

A direction I've been tempted in for years is towards the sort of materials and fine detailing of watches and expensive lighters. For that matter, there are few fictional hand-arms (available as reproduction or not) that have the sleek hard simplicity and the look of precision machining of real hand guns. The most typical design form is oversized, rounded, sort of lumpy (pretty much any first-person shooter game with a future setting).

So maybe, there is a value in making prop pistols with high-end fabrication techniques; something showing real metals, real woods, moving parts.

All things, in short, not readily achievable in sculpting, carving, casting, 3d printing...in clay and MDF and craft foam and found objects...in short in any of the materials and methods that are fun and easy to do.

I could probably whip out a nifty-looking laser gun prop in a week using the kinds of traditional materials and methods I have lying around the apartment. But I can't think of any good reason to do so.

How to Poser: Textures

Assuming this series continues, I will be getting to advanced rigging for mechanical props and figures; ERC, magnet morphs, Point At, dynamic cores, injection code, etc.  And more about cleaning and dial-hiding. 

This is a rambling set of essays, all right.  B.L. Render does a much better job of introducing the concepts of figure creation in small, logical steps in her book "Secrets of Figure Creation with Poser 5."  And Doctor Geep has his lovely series of humorously illustrated basic lectures as well.

Be that as it may.  Today I'm going to touch lightly on the subject of creating materials -- a subject close to my mind at the moment because I just last night submitted my new prop set for testing at Renderosity.

(As an aside, I'm not happy with them.  Oh, they look decent.  But I was hoping for a lot more florid detail and random piping and rust and grunge and other deep textures.  On the former, I'm just too unimaginative to stick on random gears that don't do anything, and too practical to have spiky bits and wires and glass tubes going everywhere.  So they have the solidity of things with an actual design and function...but look a lot less playful and baroque.)

Lecture begins below the fold.

Mad Science

I didn't get the gig.  Dangit.  I was rather looking forward to mixing a show again, and in a new space.  I've worked with the director, the music director, the producer, and in that building as well (used to design lights over there, plus helped set up sound a time or two).

This leaves me without any real work this month.  Pity the bills don't go away so easily.



But it does mean I can finish this dratted Poser project and see if anyone will purchase it.  I'm getting faster -- more efficient -- at Poser content, but I have a long way to go before I can knock out the kinds of things that interest me at the kind of pace that lets me finish them before my interest flags.

Doing a little research on materials as I go.  And of course thinking about the science -- mostly optics -- involved.  And there's the old stage experience (also prop-building, and even model-railroading) of learning how to weather properly; how to look for the spots that get the paint rubbed off, the crevasses that grime collects in, the places where rust might streak or oil drip.

These are always good things to think about to get a realistic look to 3d, but even more, Steampunk is nothing if not about the materials.  Plus there's a tendency towards very heavy weathering on Steampunk that I have some aesthetic disagreement with.  Just because we find it today with all kinds of wear and rust doesn't mean that's how they kept it when it was new!

Wanted some pictures of Bakelite, it of course is slightly out of period but that led me to reading up on period substitutes and the history of plastics.  And I ended up with a Bakelite look anyhow, but on the next prop that research was there for me and I swapped out a material that wasn't working for a handle of gutta-percha instead.  And looking for how brass corrodes, I read up on the history of brass and bronze, of latten and Admiralty Bras...and realized along the way just how wide a variety of colors and looks brass comes in.

Optically, most of the materials I'm using are compound materials.  Brass with a high polish returns some light diffusely, but it also has distinct reflections -- which are colored by the base material.  The specular highlights (which are actually just the reflections of local light sources) are also colored, but in some brasses there is an additional protective lacquer or similar.  This separation is more obvious in varnished wood, where the wood is one optical layer, but above it is a transparent layer of extremely high gloss.  Of course there is French Finish, a favorite of the Victorians, that returns light from deeper in the wood and in a more complex way.

A great many of these effects are anisotropic.  Lacquer coatings are nearly transparent when looking straight down into them, but become more and more strongly reflective when seen off-axis.  Some materials are the obverse; velvet is the casebook of a material that looks different depending on the angle (when you look straight down, you are looking between the fibers to the base fabric.  When you look at it sideways, the color -- and shinyness -- of the fibers dominates.)

Our own Moon has some of these same optical properties; something I learned about while "debating" online the ludicrous idea that the Apollo Missions were faked in a studio.  The lunar soil shares some of the cats eye effect of crosswalk paint and the swooshes on Nike shoes in that it returns light preferentially towards its source.  The effect is striking in some photographs taken from the surface.  This is compounded by what is called shadow hiding; a rough surface, like the velvet example above, if viewed from the direction light is coming from will become significantly brighter as the shadows are hidden on the non-visible side.  Due to these effects, the full Moon is several times brighter than the increase in illuminated area alone would account for.

(There's a LOT more to be said on retroflection, including the tapeta lucidum and the unfortunate genetic change back about when we split off from the tapir, and moving forward a few million years, the corner-cube reflectors left by Apollo astronauts that allow measurement via laser of millimeter changes in the distance to the Moon.  But I've digressed enough!)

Of course, not all render engines are sophisticated enough to simulate these properly.  Fortunately Poser, as primitive as it is, has a few fresnel functions (Edge Blend the most useful) that can help an effect fall off on edges facing away from the viewer.  If you get clever with the nodes, you can simulate some pretty complex lighting (unfortunately, anisotropic maps are not one of these; there is no adequate way in Poser to re-create the look of brushed metal).

As in the gaming industry, as in -- oddly enough -- even the actual painting of scenery for the stage -- many effects are "baked in" to the texture maps.  We paint in edge darkening and even simulated specular reflections.  And that makes it a little more compatible with even more primitive render engines, such as the base engine included in the freebie version of DAZStudio (there is a better render plug-in available for purchase, but I can't count on the end-users having it).

I'm split, as always.  The materials simply do not look very good if I don't use a few of the more advanced functions.  But every one I include on my textures, is one more place things won't work correctly in DAZ.

Plus, I'm really hoping to have the texturing done before the weekend is out.




Oh, another bit of weird science.  It's probably not a new insight, but I was listening to a show tune today and had the thought that evolutionarily, the only time we hear long continuous vocal production is when someone is screaming or perhaps yelling.  So a nice long held "C" in a song grabs us with a "A human is either in pain or is trying to warn me about something or is really, really excited."

Of course, given the knock-back of so many human milestones (and discovering more and more things we thought were uniquely ours are in fact not), it is plausible that our ancestors have been doing something a lot like singing for tens of millions of years.

And, no, this isn't the space for my rant against (pop) evolutionary psychology.*  I'm going to save that for the novel.



*Oops.  I typed too fast when I first wrote this post.