Artsnova Digital Art and Space

Moon Base Art - David Robinson

Time for traditional artists to grab their brushes and digital artists to grab their digital brushes. The National Space Society is sponsoring its second space art contest. Like the first space art contest last year, the submitted art is to depict space settlements in our solar system and unlike so many other art contests, this one is free. Yep, there is no submission fee. Art is to be submitted in one of four categories: lunar settlements, Mars settlements, asteroid settlements, or orbital settlements. Twelve winning images will be chosen and used to illustrate the NSS 2009 Space Settlement Calendar. FYI, the NSS 2008 Space Settlement Art Calendar has been sold out since early last month.

In the interest of full disclosure, I chaired the NSS Space Settlement Calendar Committee and served as chief judge for the previous contest. This time around, I have limited my participation to serving as a contest judge. My fellow judges are Don Davis, Bart Leahy (this year’s chair and padawan apprentice), Loretta Hidalgo-Whitesides, and my pal David Robinson whose lunar base artwork adorns this post.

This year’s space art contest has a great line up of prizes. There will be twelve winning entries selected: one Grand Prize, four First Prizes, and seven winning entries. Full contest details are available at the NSS Space Settlement Art Contest site.

Here is a great chance for all space artists to create their visions of a spacefaring future - a future where humanity’s home is no longer just the Earth but wherever we choose to live in the expanse of the solar system. But hurry, the deadline for submissions is December 31, 2007.

Think Space!

Ad Astra, Jim

It’s time for Windycon

How quickly a year can pass. It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was posting my schedule for the 2006 Windycon Science Fiction convention. Once again I’ll be a participant in Windycon which opens Friday Nov 9 and continues through Sunday Nov 11. Following is what’s in store for me this year.

The Lunar Barrier Grand Ballroom North, Saturday 11:00:

From 1968 to 1972, eight manned missions reached the Moon. In the past 35 years, man has never risen above low Earth orbit. Will this be the state of manned space exploration for the rest of our lifetimes or will we actually once again rise above Earth’s gravity well? Will we be able to say “To Lunar orbit and beyond!” Panelists: T. Buckell, B. Higgins, J. Plaxco, F. Ruiz, H. Spencer

This should be an interesting panel especially since we have an election coming up in a year. Given that the return to the Moon program is a product of the Bush administration and widely derided by Democrats, I fear that plans for a return to the Moon may be short lived. I find it strange and disappointing that the party that gave us the Apollo missions to the Moon should be so non-supportive of a return visit.

The Vision for Space Exploration Grand Ballroom North, Saturday Noon:

Is NASA’s new preoccupation with a return to the Moon a massive mistake, a wonderful idea, or of no real importance? Where should we be going in space, and how? Panelists: B. Higgins, J. Liss, J. Plaxco, H. Spencer

Another excellent topic of discussion. The Vision for Space Exploration is the most strategic mission that NASA has been given since Apollo. What’s even more amazing is that this program has survived for three years in the current political environment. If the American voters want to see this project last beyond the end of George Bush’s term as President, then we had better do everything humanly possible to make sure that the next president continues to support this vision. One thing you can do to help is to join the National Space Society.

Prints and Originals Orly, Sunday Noon:

You look at the originals and crave them, but the prices seem so high. When should you consider buying a print rather than an original? What exactly does it mean to be a print (and how are they created)? Panelists: P. Charlifu, S.V. Johnson, J. Lee, J. Plaxco, D. Waltz

Looking around my office, I count 8 prints and 4 originals hanging on my walls. Interestingly, I bought three of the originals at a couple of different Windycon art auctions many years ago and they actually cost less than most of the prints I have.

The whole issue of originals vs prints has been further complicated by the advent of digital art and the giclee or giclée. Digital prints represent an entirely new arena. But there is precedent provided by the world of photography. For example, the film negative is analogous to the digital file in that both are the source of the final printed image.

The Windycon art show can be a great place to acquire art at a bargain price. I’ll have several of my own pieces in the show (haven’t decided which yet) so if you’re at the convention, take the time to look for my art in the show.

Politics in the Future Orly, Sunday 2:00:

No, we aren’t interested if you think Dennis Kucinich should run against John Cox in the general election (well, we might be interested, but not for the purposes of this panel). We’re more interested in thoughts of politics in the long term. Will democracy survive? What sort of political systems will exist after mankind colonizes the planets? D. Bingle, J. Lilly, J. Plaxco, W. Thomasson, L. Zeldes

Definitely the most open ended panel I’ll be on. Who knows where this one will go. Interplanetary Fascism in the 23rd century? Technological advances, smallish physically isolated communities, the nature of trade between different settlements, the legal regime of ownership - these will all be ingredients thrown into the mix. And of course the plight of the individual will be a factor as well. To quote Robert LeFevre: “To live is good. To live well is better. To live in abundance, security, and joy is the acme of living.”

See you at Windycon. Jim

There are times when I have my laptop disconnected from the network and I want to do some serious graphics work. Because graphics software is very CPU intensive, I want my graphics program to have as little CPU competition as possible. This is especially true when I am working on very large images in Photoshop or running a render using one of my 3D applications, be it Lightwave, Mojoworld, or Bryce.

Now I could use the Windows Task Manager to go in and one by one shut down processes that I know aren’t needed. Or I could use the Windows XP System Services tool services.msc to accomplish the same thing.

There are a few problems with this approach. First I need to remember what processes to shut down each time. Being disconnected from the network allows me to shut down quite a few additional processes like antivirus, firewall, and other internet-related processes. On a typical Windows PC, this can be a rather lengthy list. And once I know what I want to shut down, I have to find each process in the list of processes and manually shut them down one by one. What a pain.

My solution was to automate the process. I had previously created a directory on my laptop called a_Utils which contained a variety of DOS batch programs I had written. One thing I did when I created this directory was to make sure that it was in the Windows Path environment variable - a variable that tells Windows where to look for programs. This variable can be set on Windows XP as follows:

1. Right click the My Computer icon and select Properties
2. Click on the tab labeled Advanced
3. Click on the Environment Variables button
4. In the System variables window, locate the variable Path and select it by clicking it once.
5. With Path selected, click on the Edit button at the bottom of the window.
6. In the Variable value field, go to the end of the field, add a semicolon if one is not already there and type in the full path to the directory that contains your batch file.
7. Click the trail of OK buttons back to the System Properties window
8. Click the OK button

In my directory a_Utils I created a DOS batch program file named !KillTasks.bat. This file consists of a list of taskkill commands. Taskkill is a Windows command line program that is used to terminate one or more tasks or processes which are identified by either their process ID or image name. I use the command in the following form:

taskkill /f /im ImageName

The parameters I specify are:

• /f which tells Windows to “forcefully” terminate the process. In other words, don’t take no for an answer.
• /im tells Taskkill that I am specifying the image name of the process to be terminated.
• ImageName gives Taskkill the name of the process to terminate.

So far this has all been rather straight forward. Now the trick is in identifying what tasks or processes you can safely terminate. My method of doing this was to open Windows Task Manager and go to the Processes tab. Looking over the list of processes, the function of several was obvious and I knew whether or not it was a process that must run or a process I could kill. For others, I plugged the Image Name into a Google search in order to determine what the process does and whether or not I could kill it.

Following is an extract of what my !KillTasks.bat looks like. In this extract I am only including the commands for terminating my Nikon camera monitor and Copernic desktop search tool. The actual list is much longer.

I close my program with the PAUSE command. This prevents the DOS window from closing until I press the Enter key, giving me the opportunity to look over the command output. This is just a personal preference on my part.

Now whenever I want to disconnect from the network and do some serious graphics work all I have to do is run my batch program. To make it really easy I created a shortcut to the program on my desktop. One double-click and my laptop is ready for some heavy duty graphics work.

Ad Astra, Jim

Which Flag Do You Prefer? Before and After Using Serif PanoramaPlus 1

I was in a local bookstore last week going through the magazine section and pulled the current issue of the astronomy magazine BBC Sky at Night. I’m in the habit of going through all the astronomy magazines in search of interesting articles. Unfortunately for Sky at Night I’ve never came across an article in their magazine that would make it worth its price. Looking at the May 2007 issue, it wasn’t what was inside the magazine that grabbed my interest but what was on the CD that comes with the magazine.

The CD has a full version of Serif’s PanoramaPlus, version 1. This program automates the creation of panoramic images given a list of individual source images. Previously I had created my panoramas by using Adobe Photoshop’s Transform Tool and layer masks. Needless to say the Transform Tool is definitely suboptimal - especially when it comes to altering the geometry of the individual images. While I wasn’t thrilled that as a part of the software activation process I had to call the UK offices of Sky at Night, I figured that would be cheaper than going out and buying the software. What bugged me about this is that for all other magazines containing CDs with full versions of software being offered, I’ve never had to make a phone call to activate the product: either it was ready to go or all I had to do was point my browser at the specified web page to complete the registration.

Fortunately the software did have a one time use without registering so that I could fire it up and test it out. I fed the program a total of 11 images from an Apollo 16 EVA to merge. Their combined file size was 8.5 megabytes. PanoramaPlus quickly stitched them together and as far as I could tell from the software’s preview window, had done a good job of it.

The final step was to export the newly created panorama. Therein lies the source of my disappointment. The only export format available was to save as a jpeg. Not only that but there was no option to specify image quality and no documentation identifying what compression setting the software was using. The other shock was the size of my new panorama - just 3000 pixels wide. PanoramaPlus had taken 11 separate images with a combined width of 25,740 pixels and combined file size of 8.57 megabytes and created a panorama just 3000 pixels wide with a file size of 880K.

As a before and after comparison I took the American flag from the panorama and enlarged it to match the flag in one of the source images. The comparison of the two flags is shown at the top of this article. Note that the image shown is a scaled down version of the full size comparison. On the left is the original source flag image and on the right is the flag image from the PanoramaPlus panorama, upsized to match the size of the original flag. The qualitative difference is obvious.

Going to the Serif web site, I see that they are now on version 3 of the software so it is probably no longer the same product. Bottom line: if you’re thinking of buying the May 2007 issue of Sky at Night because of the PanoramaPlus version 1 software, don’t - big mistake. And the special upgrade offer they are running in the magazine: if you’re in the U.S. and paying in U.S. dollars, the standard price for the software is cheaper than the Sky at Night special “discount.”
Ad Astra, Jim

Desert Reality Inspired Bird House

Looking through my April issue of Rangefinder magazine I came across an interesting profile of photographer Ed Freeman. Titled Desert Reality, the article focuses on the composite images Freeman created and then used for his book Desert Reality. While the photographs appear totally realistic, they are fakes. For Freeman, Adobe Photoshop is as important as his camera because his “photographs” are actually very well done creative composites. The theme is that of unusual or dilapidated buildings, isolated, and placed into a California desert setting. Freeman photographs a building, removes it from its original setting, and then composites it with a desert landscape and an appropriate sky.

One fascinating aspect pointed out in the article is that the background mountain range in all but one image in the book actually came from the same source photograph. Freeman used various Photoshop techniques to alter the appearance of the mountains for each of the images in which it was used.

If you visit the book’s web site, www.desertrealty.org, there is a gallery displaying some of the images from the book. There is also a before and after feature whereby for two of the images from the book you can see the original photograph of the building and then the building as composited into the desert landscape. You may also want to visit Ed Freeman’s web site.

As I was writing this entry, it occurred to me that I would need an appropriate illustration. I went to Imageafter.com to grab a couple stock photos. One of the first pictures I found was of a bird house - that would be my structure. Next was to find an appropriate background. Seeing an image of a stately lawn, I knew that I had my picture. It was a simple task to use Photoshop’s Lasso Tool to isolate the bird house from its background and drag it in as a new layer on the lawn photo. Positioning the bird house slightly back from the central gravel path seemed natural. I then used a combination of the clone stamp and eraser tools and layer masks to blend the base of the house with the gravel path. The final step was to create a shadow layer for the bird house so that its lighting would match the shadows being cast by the trees to the left. One thing I thought of doing but didn’t was to enlarge the bird hole and add a sign “Beware of Bird.”

Just one more example of how Photoshop can be the digital photographer’s best friend.

Ad Astra, Jim

The Me Sphere Rendered Using Pandromeda Mojoworld

Last time I wrote about my first submission to The Sphere Project at CGSphere.com. My submission was titled Puzzle Sphere. I have since yanked that submission and replaced it with a new one more to my liking.

Titled The Me Sphere, this new submission uses as the sphere’s material a portrait of myself processed using Adobe Photoshop, a transparency map created in Photoshop, and finally rendered using Pandromeda’s Mojoworld.

The two most interesting aspects of this project were creating the texture and working with the scene lighting. For the texture I took a photograph of myself that I had handy on my hard drive and began to experiment using Photoshop. I went through several iterations to achieve the affect I desired. Next was working with the lighting in Mojoworld. In my original Puzzle Sphere submission, I used the Mojoworld Sun as the lighting source. For this submission I substituted a special effects light with a gel applied to get the multicolored lighting.

I must confess that I find The Me Sphere much more appealing than the Puzzle Sphere - I hope you do to. So go check out The Me Sphere - before I pull it and replace it with something else.

Ad Astra, Jim

The Puzzle Sphere Rendered Using Pandromeda Mojoworld

I have known about The Sphere Project at CGSphere.com for some time now and would occasionally check out their gallery of submitted spheres. According to CGSphere.com, “the Sphere Project is a website dedicated to the evolution of technical and creative 3D sphere design. The purpose is simple; to create the most captivating and visually appealing sphere from our provided scene using your 3D program and renderer of choice.” There are some basic rules that must be followed with regards to the scene and camera settings for submitted images in order to provide a degree of consistency for all submissions.

Last night after dinner I decided to create my own submission for the project. The 3D tools that I have are (alphabetically) Bryce, Lightwave, and Mojoworld. Since Mojoworld is all about creating those spherical bodies known as planets and moons, I opted to use Mojoworld. The inspiration for the design I submitted came from a work I recently submitted to the Fantastic Worlds Contest at 3DCommune. Titled Globalization, that work featured a world with a global city. For my sphere, I replaced the global city with a building-block-like sphere reminiscent of a Rubik’s cube. I titled my entry Puzzle Sphere in keeping with the Rubik’s cube concept.

I had fun creating my entry for The Sphere Project and plan to submit another entry in the near future. In the meantime, check out my Puzzle Sphere (Note: I have deleted this submission and replaced it with The Me Sphere) and if you are a 3D artist, consider adding your own sphere to the collection.

Ad Astra, Jim

I was looking through one of my recent issues of Art in America and came across an abstract artwork by Kathryn Refi titled Color Recordings, Day 3. Seeing the picture, I instantly thought of a Photoshop noise gradient. Googling, I found another piece by Refi - Color Recordings, Day 1 which appears to be the same as the Day 3 piece.

Curious, I challenged myself to come up with something similar. Experimenting with the Photoshop gradient tool I came to the conclusion that gradients were not the way to go. I manually created a piece similar to Refi’s. This piece is shown in Figure 1. The technique I used to create this gave me variations in saturation and value which I found pleasing.

Figure 1. The initial version of Color Recording in Motion

Not happy with a two dimensional look, I experimented with different methods of giving the picture depth. The “waterfall” version shown here is what I was looking for. Pleased with the composition, I felt that additional texture was needed to roughen up the image. While not visible in the small version, Figure 2 shows a small segment of the picture at full resolution.

Figure 2. Color Recording in Motion Full Resolution Extract

As I am still far behind on rolling out my Artsnova art gallery, I decided to add a larger version of this piece to a gallery I created on DeviantART a couple years ago. This will actually be my first addition to my gallery there since initially populating it with two images of Mars. So if you are interested in seeing a larger version of this image, then see my DeviantART Gallery entry Color Recording in Motion.

Ad Astra, Jim