Symbolic Momentum
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There was a strange alignment of events last weekend. The website isn’t even out yet so no one will see this for a while, but I just had to get this down somewhere. Maybe its fitting something like this would be our first real news story…
With a new contract in my day-job coming up, one more focused on heavy 3D graphics than my career in product design has been thus far, I took the opportunity to purchase a new desktop computer.
I’ve been bouncing between my Mac and five-year-old gaming laptop to produce the type of graphics for some of the CG pieces splattered across this website and the Instagram pages. It was so much easier to justify the five thousand dollar purchase when I told myself it was for the good of my career and the series going forward and that's why I now have a system with dual Nvidia RTX 2080's. You know, so I can be rendering for a work project and The Amaranth Chronicles at the same time WHILE I play video games. What? I can't leave the computer while it renders. What if it crashes? Someone's gotta be here to fix it.
Playing with my new toy *cough* I mean perfectly reasonable investment into my future, I started reviewing some of the old models I have for the series. With all this extra computer power I can do things a little differently now. Put simply, I have fewer limitations and can produce animations faster and at higher resolutions.
A single frame of 1080p HD video, like the Storm Chaser animation, use to take seven hours to render...
... A single frame, you know, like a picture...
There are thirty frames, or pictures, in one second of video so you figure out how long it would take to produce a twenty-four-second video and get back to me.
Are you finished doing the math? Yes, my old computer took that long to render the Storm Chaser... With 3DS max's Default Scanline renderer. And by the way, that's not a subtle reflection in the Storm Chaser hull... That is totally a cheat.
On my new system, I can produce an ultra high definition 4K frame in about two minutes but this time without having to resort to little tricks. Once again you do the math.
The end goal of a lot of these graphics is to build a library of models so that I can "film" a short movie or trailer in hopes of one day getting the funding necessary to turn the novels into a CG Netflix series. That being said I started playing with a very VERY high-resolution model of the Storm Chaser. The version in that video is actually a video game level model designed to look like a high-resolution model. Here you can see them side by side.
(Game resolution on the LEFT, high resolution on the RIGHT.)
Fun fact: Those two screenshots are 4.2Mb together. Had to use Photoshop's legacy web tools to dithered them down to 40% quality just so they'd load in time for you to see them by now if you're on mobile. I realize I sound eccentric here, but im just trying to paint a picture of what this all looks like on my end.
So far so good but the high poly version wasn't UV mapped. Am I putting you to sleep yet? Either because this all sounds like technobabble or you work in the industry and are tired of reading another watered down article for people who would consider this technobabble? Either way, bare with me, I'm going somewhere with this.
*writes a long technological description of UV mapping before deleting it*
The point was the model needed some work I'm just not patient enough to do myself so I hired a friend in my extended network to do it for me. She had a brilliant idea and asked if she could Twitch.tv stream her work on the model. I never even considered streaming and letting people see the type of work that goes into this type of stuff. Heres a link if you're so inclined: Heather Elroy UVmaps the Storm Chaser.
(Fun fact: The music she plays in the background was actually the exact style I’d want in the animated series.)
I watched for the first hour or so while she worked and interacted with her audience before I had to leave. It was my neighbor's four-year-old son's birthday party down at the beach. What a Californian thing to say...
Hanyways, I didn't know what to get a four-year-old for his birthday but had a few 3D prints of the Storm Chaser left over from 2017's launch party. I wrapped one up and brought it down with me. It's just over a half mile down to the surf so I brought my headphones with me. Our narrator, Emily Smith had emailed me a short story she has written for Lithia's backstory and I finally had time to let my screen reader tell me a tale while I walked. A little trick my co-author Chris taught me. Emily's short story was beautiful while teasing certain darkness I've known about the character forever but was never brave enough to write myself.
The point I’m trying to get to was that there was this strange moment I had when I handed the Storm Chaser 3D print to my friend's son, Max. I was just finishing the story Emily had written, nearly with tears in my eyes, while Heather streamed her work on the high-resolution model. This was what Sky Nelson refers to his book "Living in Flow: The Science of Synchronicity" as "symbolic momentum" and now, well, then, at that moment, the path forward revealed itself to me with a little extra resolution. This little synchronicity of events was a milestone. It was actual tangible, meaningful, progress. A far cry from twelve years ago, when I moved to the neighborhood and used to pace that beach back and forth with this story idea in my head with literally no idea how to get it out. It's taken a long time to get here. To this moment, the first book out and in audiobook form, the website just around the corner and new renders and animations on the way. And I haven't even started talked about the prequel or the sequel yet. Don't worry, they're coming along spectacularly. I just wanted to share this little anecdote with you guys and Heather’s brilliant idea to start streaming some of the work that goes on in the long progress forward.
Thanks for taking the time to indulging me.
