Work In Progress 2015/2016

[trilobyte]

I've been making progress on a few different projects lately. The recent changes on the board were years in the making, but took massive amounts of time over the last month or two, and with that finally launched I've had a little breathing room to get back into my own projects. Light in the power tools department, but heavy in the software tools department... In April I did a complete ground-up re-design of my camp's web site... which was both fun and fucktons more work than I had either anticipated or wanted to do. You can check that out here if you like. The main thing I wanted to do was make something that had a 'responsive design' so that it'd be able to detect whether you were on a phone, tablet, or computer and just serve up a version of the site that was formatted for that kind of thing. It took some doing, but dammit I got there. Along the way, my gf and I realized that we really didn't like how youtube handled our playa videos, so she made the call to have me start working on moving our original video content over to vimeo. That involved some digging up of original files and re-encoding of some stuff, but eventually I got that set up (and then updated the web site to link to the vimeo vids where possible). Our Eridu Society channel can be found here, it doesn't have any fancy formatting or theme yet, but as I get the time to work on that it's on the list. Continuing on in the software push, I set up a 'team' for our camp on a site (which also has an app) called Slack. Over the past few years we've been making do with a private Facebook group for planning, but at best Facebook is fairly annoying, and a few campmates who aren't techno-phobic just don't do FB anymore. Slack has been something of a darling site in the team collaboration software space lately, and while I don't think it's the best thing since sliced bread (as some tech folks do) the freebie level of account does everything we need it to do and then some. I'll finish getting that set up and roll it out to campmates after memorial day I think.

In the world of 3D modeling, I've been working on a much larger scale lately. Ever since using 3D software to render models of our camp, I've wished that I had something more than just a flat horizon line in the distance. There are basically a couple ways you can achieve that - you add a photo, or you build a model. I've done the photo trickery a few times and gotten some great results, but that tends to fall apart if you want to do any animation, or if you don't have photos that would work for everything you want to set up. Modeling terrain can be hard, especially if you're trying to model real-world terrain (since it has to look like something that people are familiar with). After having a separate conversation about technology with a friend several weeks back, I got the idea to try and find a way to first get my hands on USGS mapping data, and then figure out how the hell I could bring that into my 3D modeling software.

I found out there was a really simple and easy way to do that, but it required an expensive plugin. It also apparently is much easier if you're only looking to do a fairly small space. I didn't have that plugin, and the black rock desert is a great big space. And more to the point, the mountains surrounding the black rock desert (that make up that great surrounding landscape we see) is a massive space. I'm making some progress, but it has involved tons of trial and error. Here are a couple pics from an early pass I took...





The second pic makes use of a really low resolution satellite image... it wasn't even the right season (plenty of green in the map plus snow on the mountains), but it matched up with the chunk of the planet I'd gotten the elevation maps for. Even though BRC is just a tiny spec in a map that big, it posed a problem. It wasn't big enough! When I brought the camera in to the perspective of someone who was standing on the playa surface, there were great big voids in the horizon because some of the mountains we'd normally see were further off in the distance than that monstrous map could show. Dammit! It was already a massive project (20 million polygons), and something that I don't think a computer with less than 32GB of RAM could even manage.

Fortunately, my little space canister packs an enormous punch in terms of computing power and memory, so I kept working at it. More and more revisions, expanding to cover more area. Here's a pic showing the raw elevation maps as I'm loading and stitching them together. The pic on the left is partway through, and the pic on the right shows where I am now (7th major version)...



Rev 7 is massive, both in terms of scale (just over 100km wide and just under 100km tall) and complexity. The flat desert surfaces are easy, but all those craggy mountain bits add up. My initial load was over 120 million polygons (by comparison, models and scenes in fancy video games will usually be way under 100K polygons). I've been working on improving that quite a bit over the last couple days, and have finally gotten it to a much more manageable 3 million polygons while still having plenty of detail to create a believable landscape. Here's what it looks like now...



Hopefully later in the week I'll get the chance to start working on painting the textures. I had done a bit of looking around for better quality satellite imagery (and I have some pretty high resolution pics from several years ago), but nothing quite fits what I'm looking for.

[ygmir]

very cool, Trilo!! wow!!!

[Ratty]

Wow is right! The work is WAY over my head but I'm still impressed.

[motskyroonmatick]

It looks interesting, but I'm not sure I follow how it works. Is the big square tubing coming up the top the chimney, or the part you'd cook on? Or is it both? I like the hinged ash collector, huge bonus points for not having to scoop the ashes out or wait for it to cool and dump the thing out to empty.

The vertical square tube is the chimney and the tube at a 45 degree angle is the fuel feed. Most of the combustion air goes in to the stove through the fuel feed tube with the exception of the bit from the air gap at the top of the ash catch. Here is a picture of the stove with the chimney extension which makes it burn better. The stove has a harder time with the solid rounds but does well with split pieces. Not surprising since it is so small.

[trilobyte]

Thanks for the explanation. So to use it for cooking, you'd hold a pot or pan above the top of the chimney?

[motskyroonmatick]

Thanks for the explanation. So to use it for cooking, you'd hold a pot or pan above the top of the chimney?

I probably will make a pan holder or flat steel sheet cooking surface that would attach to the top of the square tube much like the chimney extension. I'd leave it raised off the chimney 3" or so to try to not stifle the draft. For the time being one would have to have to hold the pan over the top of the chimney which would be a tiring and tricky task. Hot dog roasting test has yet to be performed.

This was an experiment at making a fuel efficient people warmer. It is quite fuel efficient but that equals less dramatic warming of people. It does put off noticeable heat and warms the knees quite well. It's also incredibly fun for the recipient of the stove to mess with by poking and prodding it with a stainless steel rod. I'm already planning on making another one with some slight changes to bring to the burn and warm people with.

Your terrain modeling work is impressive!

[ygmir]

yes, very cool Motz!!! I wonder, if a person put a "vent" on the opposite side of the feed tube, and put the large "logs" in the feed, that would almost block the tube draft, if one could use the opposing (adjustable?) vent, to promote the combustion, with direct airflow? like blowing on the burning end of the log?

[ygmir]

Marty and I went up and set forms for the footing for the granite exterior bricks for the Hof.
6" wide, depth varying depending on ground topography.
2 #3 (or more) rebar , continuous wrap, 1/2" pins drilled into existing concrete footing/ wall of HOf, and into bedrock where applicable.
rocks and bricks to fill gaps under forms, so I didn't have to cut and waste a bunch of lumber.

[melodiousdirge]

This was an experiment at making a fuel efficient people warmer.

This is a cool idea - I hadn't heard of such a stove before; I'll have to add it to the list. For the sake of interest on people warmers, I was able to make an 4xAA battery powered forced draft pellet stove for last year that would burn for about an hour on a couple of pounds of pellets and produce a huge amount of heat. This year I want to add a damper to it to increase burn time.

Instructable: http://www.instructables.com/id/Large-p ... /?ALLSTEPS

Photo of mine during a test run, prior to installing the battery holder. You can see why I want a damper - it throws hazardous amounts of flameage:

[Oldguy]

I saw a vid a while back that had a kid setting up a leaf blower in front of a pottery chimera, an outdoor stove/ heater. That thing roared and whined like a jet engine. Thus the term...rocket stove. I have a small brick stove in the backyard that uses wood scraps very efficiently. Chimney effect creates its own draft.

[melodiousdirge]

I saw a vid a while back that had a kid setting up a leaf blower in front of a pottery chimera, an outdoor stove/ heater. That thing roared and whined like a jet engine. Thus the term...rocket stove. I have a small brick stove in the backyard that uses wood scraps very efficiently. Chimney effect creates its own draft.

I always wanted to set up a fire tornado in my backyard fire pit with 4 leaf blowers feeding air in. Not enough to go purchase 4 leaf blowers though.

[trilobyte]

Man, texturing the goddamned desert is turning out to be a more involved project than I expected. I had planned to swap out the out-of-season crappy satellite image and instead paint and airbrush the terrain, but after a rough pass it looks like that's not going to be possible. Even with a large resolution texture map, once everything is full scale each pixel represents a giant chunk of land.



The painting and airbrushing would have been fun (and easy), but not if the results are crappy. It's time to get cracking on creating some texture maps and take things in a different direction.

[melodiousdirge]

Would some kind of feathering filter work to smooth out the pixels a bit? I missed what you're doing this for Trilo - do you just want your camp renderings to be set on a realistic backdrop?

[trilobyte]

Feathering wouldn't do much, it's largely just a matter of once you're working with geometry that's roughly 100km squared, every damned pixel is massive and so pixel-mapped doesn't really cut it for what I want to do.

This is a long term project I've been tinkering with for years. I've been wanting to have a more realistic environment for my camp renders pretty much since we've been rendering models for it. I've also wanted a realistic environment for use in virtual worlds. The latter is an even trickier thing to solve, since then you have to factor in the logistics and mechanics of the virtual world's systems as well as the kinds of computers/equipment that people will use to connect. I might have something I can use for a camp render this year, but the virtual world I'm mainly building this for will probably not launch until 2016 or 2017.

[bigbluedoggy]

Wow, Trilo! You put my simple 3D stuff to shame with your desire to enhance the detail. I just do the ol' plunk a nice photo into the background trick... Very impressive!!

For those of you not following the progress on Facebook, I'll throw up a few more images from our camp project for this year. The Vortex of Destiny is getting larger....

[trilobyte]

I can't tell you how excited I am to see that in person BBD! And thanks for the kind words on the modeling. It's been something on the back burner (ha) for years, and I've done the plunking of photos in the background myself. Camp renders are fun, but the main reason is for virtual worlds. My gf and I have been spending time and making art in virtual worlds for 7-8 years now (and been involved in the virtual regional burn for just as long), I think that as the technology improves it will not only let more people connect but also let us create more immersive environments. And when you're "walking around" in a 3D environment like that, being able to get the horizon right helps to make it feel magical. Not the same as actually being on the playa of course, but the familiarity is nice.

[bigbluedoggy]

Been a busy day in Vortex land. A little video of the now assembled and operating framework! Moving right along...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/2c3wj6h03z79y ... 0.m4v?dl=0

[ygmir]

BBD! you are a busy beaver....wait.....well. wood and all.......

I may have gotten the opportunity to make a couple of tables for a new restaurant a friend (Burner) is opening, and it's a huge lodge type place. So, I cut some planks for table tops, and now drying them before finishing.
Learning this sawmill is challenging! but, is great to be able to make a thing to size. Tables are 10'x2'x3", Ponderosa pine. Like I made for the Black Hole bar at TTITD. Only bigger.

[Thecatman]

Dang! All these projects everybodys doing look nice. That wooden chair is something ygmir.

[Tin Halo]

I wonder what kind of and how many fans/blowers it would take to circle the Man... and how high the tornado would go...

[melodiousdirge]

I wonder what kind of and how many fans/blowers it would take to circle the Man... and how high the tornado would go...

IME the massive amount of heat from the man fire is plenty to generate its own draft and subsequently fire devils.

[Tin Halo]

Yeah....but that's not enough.

[melodiousdirge]

Yeah....but that's not enough.

Well in that case... the big problem would be containing the vortex from moving around despite the prevailing wind. Even if you created a giant rotating fire devil I think it would peel off like the naturally forming ones already do... so instead of fans, an enormous vertical tube, with openings at the bottom to let air in, would probably create an epic and incredible infernado that wouldn't wander off, even without fans to induce the rotating draft. Who wants to run the kickstarter campaign?

[trilobyte]

If you scale up the size of the fire from fires used for known fire tornado setups to the size of the man fire (probably several hundred times bigger)... look photos and videos to approximate diameter, radius, and flame height... then you get a number you can use to act as a multiplier. Now use the multiplier on the size of the fans used in the same working fire tornado setup. It's not a question of more small fans, it's increasing the size of the fan and pushing more air at similarly increased speeds. Even if that gear existed on the shelf, it's probably also going to have a ridiculous power requirement to go along with it. A fun idea for sure, but logistically probably not feasible even for billionaires.

Wanting to build a fire tornado machine reminds me of those kickass vortex cannon devices, the thing that somebody brought to the playa from time to time to make those big-ass smoke rings. I saw somebody at Maker Faire a few weeks back with a little baby one that was set up to work with a fog machine indoors, they were using it to poof 2-3 foot fog rings up into the air. I don't think they were selling anything, so much as showing off a cool thing that they'd built.

My black rock desert model progressed really nicely, and I was able to get it textured in a way that works for a couple projects for this year. I'll be able to use it in the camp model, and then as luck would have the piece wound up being perfect for one of the art posters I'm working on for this year's event. This one's been driving me mad for the last six months, but I think I finally cracked it this week. And heading in the direction it's currently going, the model works perfectly. I had hoped to be able to reveal all the poster art by now, but since we got delayed in finishing numbers 5, 6, 7 and 8 we're holding off on the big reveal.

[melodiousdirge]

ridiculous power requirement

Clearly this is an idea that belongs squarely in the hypothetical universe, but I actually think you could take advantage of the thermal winds from the fire to generate the swirling without the use of fans. A lot of fire vortex devices don't actually use fans, they just duct the air in with a bit of an angle to it, so the draft of the fire provides all the air movement. A couple of dozen huge vanes standing around the base of the man would probably generate a fairly stable vortex. One problem is that this would be an incredibly dangerous beast if the wind kicked up and started peeling off giant fire tornadoes that persisted long enough to reach the crowd. The smaller, naturally occuring fire devils seem to mostly peter out before they get too far, but even so they tend to keep hot gas and wind swept burning material close enough to ground level that you might regret encountering one.

[Tin Halo]

Unleashing curiosity about the train/bus/plane seats you have stacked in that back bedroom...

[motskyroonmatick]

Unleashing curiosity about the train/bus/plane seats you have stacked in that back bedroom...

Yeah.... Picked those up for a mutant vehicle idea years ago and never got around to using them. Luckily that is my shop. Not the back bedroom

[Tin Halo]

Like it would matter? You're amongst your own...

[trilobyte]

Man, don't let Captain Goddammit see those things, he's had a plane-tastic idea for a mutant vehicle on the proverbial back burner for some time now...

@melodiousdirge, if the wind from the fire were strong enough, then you wouldn't need the fans in the first place? I was reading it as being that the fire tornado art pieces you see are pretty fucking cool, what do you think it would take to scale that up to a size so that the burning of the man was the base fire? At least in my head, we're talking about a column of fire tornado going up hundreds if not thousands of feet. Crazy and awesome all at once.

[FIGJAM]

From all the pictures I've seen of the homemade fire tornados, there are 5 or six fans as big or bigger than the base.