August 2004 Archives

Well, I got a response from Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison on H.R. 4323, the bill for rapid acquisition authority.

Short version: A thank you for expressing an opinion, a blurb detailing exactly what the bill entails (which was nice of her staff to provide) a statement of belief (strong military, national security issues, etc) and another thank you, with a "please, express your opinion again sometime"...but no substantial stance on the bill.

Which is fair, I guess. Try and pin down a Senator on something specific, I guess you get something bland back. There's nothing in here that says "This is something I will vote for", but instead I get:«BLOCKQUOTE»«TT»I believe having a string and prepared military is one of the most important national security issues facing our country today, and I will consider any legislation to provide our men and women in uniform the supplies required to complete their mission. HR 4323 has been referred to the Senate Committee on Armed Services, on which I do not serve. Should this legislation come before the full Senate, you may be certain I will keep your views in mind.«/TT»«/BLOCKQUOTE»I'm still waiting on a response from Senator Coryn, and I doubt The Right Honorable Sheila Bitch Lee will respond at all to what I wrote her, unless it's a hearty "two more years of my dumb ass, chump!" with a one finger salute.

My education in the workings of the modern republic continue unabated.

Seen on a banner:

Smarter bombs, or smarter kids? Where do you stand?

Can you say «I»false dichotomy«/I» and «i»non sequitur«/I»? I knew you could!

Why do so many people attempt to insult my intelligence this way in order to get me to nod my head in agreement with nonsense positions? "Why, who could be against educating children? Are you some sort of warmongering fascist that would prefer blowing people up instead of insuring the future of our children?"

Would it be so palatable if I reversed the question? How about..."Dead citizens in the streets, or tenure for cold fusion physicists? Where do you stand?"

Speaking of cold fusion...way back when I wasn't paying attention, a couple of smart guys thought they had something, a very neat something that would have changed the world as we know it, literally, and that was tabletop fusion.

A serious thing, that. The technology as described was limited only by the availability of palladium and heavy water. Anyone could build it. Heck, wrap some U-238 around it and you could breed plutonium with it, cheap and easy and nobody could do anything about it.

Fortunately, cold fusion turned out to be utter bunk, despite the myriad varieties of pseudointellectual publications that still "report" on cold fusion's progress. They do make for amusing reading, such as reporting thermal and neutron fluxes that would kill an unshielded observer, yet these experiments are conducted in a garage. But back in the early nineties, there was some doubt.

These two scientists decided that they wouldn't publish in a peer reviewed journal. The normal process for someone in the sciences is to write up a paper or present some lecture (if it is sufficiently theoretical) and allow others in the scientific community a shot to see if the concept is of any worth. Sometimes mistakes are made in science, and peer review acts as a brake, preventing crap from passing into the bpody of accepted knowledge.

Instead of peer review, they eschewed the normal course of investigation by others and made a press release. The press ate it up. They then went to the state government, told them their tale, and requested action from the legislature. almost got it too!

It didn't last very long, however, because folks could easily replicate what was being described by the two scientists and try to get similar results. Nobody was able to replicate the experiment. Excuses were given for the lack of heat, the lack of helium, the lack of any neutrons from the supposed fusion reaction. Eventually and collectively, the mainstream scientists realized that there was no cold fusion after all. Time to put it aside.

But some cranks exist who still believe.

I was thinking of that the other day when I was watching Kerry in his 1971 testimony to Congress. Here's a guy in the Navy, a lieutenant, and officer of the armed forces, carrying credibility with his uniform, medals and his service. (Pons and Flieshmann, the two scientists who flaked on cold fusion, were also very good chemists, with credibility for their own accomplishments.) He gets in front of a bunch of cameras and talks about things, horrible things. Pushes Congress to do something about it.

But he never submitted anything to peer review. As I understand it, not a single "Winter Soldier" ever reported anything to the Navy for investigation, and when investigatede anyway, everything was mostly bunk and exaggeration.

Pons and Fleischmann would stand in front of cameras and tell you all about how their magical God water could revolutionize the power industry. Kerry sat in front of Congress and intoned "free fire zones" as if they were a bad thing. Did anyone check it? few did, but the ball was already rolling anyway, and people had made up their minds on a very subjective issue.

In the case of cold fusion, it is objective fact that there is nothing to it. Build the cell. Charge it with deuterium. You get nothing. No heat, no neutrons, no helium, no fusion, just regular old electrolysis. Peer review holds up.

According to some, however, Kerry's peer review is nothing more than slime from Karl Rove. Pons and Flieshmann tried that too, claiming that they couldn't peer review because of vendettas others would have, especially among the hot fusion cabal. What matters here is what actually happened, and we may not know exactly what that is, and its for sure we can't replicate Vietnam in the lab. But we can take an honest look at the data that is out there and try to draw conclusions that may not cater to our cherished preconceptions.

Of course, the reason so many think the Swiftvets are malign puppets of Rove is simply because the Democrats do the same with their 527 groups. It never occurs to anyone that people can join together for their own purposes. I can't say for certain if there are connections or not between the SBVT 527 and the Republicans, but it isn't outside the realm of probability that's several citizens acting on their lonesome. And its also telling that those that spout the loudest on this subject fail to consider the possibility they are wrong.

Lots of people still push for cold fusion subsidies. Without peer review, of course. Dare we play just as ignorant with the office of the president?

UPDATE: Sarah linked to me when I wasn't expecting it, and after reading over my late night incoherence, I realized I omitted the entire point, which is this:

When people try to go outside the system to make their case, be more skeptical of their claims than you otherwise would be. Yes, the system can be corrupted, be it science and academia or the Office of Naval Investigations, but even then, there is reason to pause.

Such things are direct appeals to outside the system, and while that can garner broad public support (Ooo! We're commiting atrocities in Vietnam!/Oh look, dirt cheap energy!) it's easier to mislead the public with gradiose but unverifiable claims...after all, the vast majority of the public are not scientists, and can be misled by authoritative statements from the media. The same thing applies to Vietnam, or anything political, for that matter.

Watching Kerry's 1971 testimony on C-SPAN. Well, I was watching it. Not anymore, now he disgusts me.

Maybe I wouldn't feel tha way if I hadn't had prior military experience. But I do, and he makes my skin crawl. I can't imagine what that must have felt like, to hear those words parroted back while sitting in a small cell, courtesy of North Vietnam.

I will not vote for this man. I'm not fan of George Bush, I don't like some of his policies and I think he could have handled the war on terror in a different manner. Specifically, I think we compromise too much in our Middle East dealings. But I'm not the man on the scene, and at least I know there are boots on the ground there killing our enemies by the bucketload, and I am proud of them. Kerry strikes me as someone who is not.I feel that by denigrating my old profession in the past but not repudiating it in the present, he does all veterans a misservice.

Maybe it makes me superficial. Maybe it makes me a single issue voter. Nonetheless, he has not earned my respect. I would not have him as commander in chief of people I know, who are still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, indeed, all over the globe.

Anyone who doesn't like my reasoning, I hereby give you the finger.

Good morning. The correct spelling of the word «i»weasel«/i» is:

«B»W
E
A
S
E
L«/B»

Not weasle, weasil, wesele, or any other such variant. «B»WEASEL«/B».

Your cooperation in this matter is not voluntary.

So I made this.

«img alt="baronkerry.jpg" src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/baronkerry.jpg" width="350" height="480" border="0" /»

I pull the string, and «a href="http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Politics/ap20040819_790.html"»John Kerry says«/a»:
«BLOCKQUOTE»In his speech, Kerry employed a wartime metaphor. "More than 30 years ago I learned an important lesson. When you're under attack the best thing to do is turn your boat into the attack. That's what I intend to do today."«/BLOCKQUOTE»Is it the best thing to turn your boat into the attack?

In an infantry squad, you charge the ambush. You don't muck about running into cover, that's not the best of ideas, especially if the ambush has been planned. (Two kinds of ambush, the hasty ambush and the prepared ambush. Hasty just means they saw you first and got down to shoot at you with minimal set up. You know, like that "ambush" in G.I. Jane. A prepared ambush is one where you set claymores/punji sticks and grenades in the trees.) If you duck into that ditch, you might find some suprises there, because that was exactly what they wanted you to do, run for cover. So charging the ambush lets you close with the enemy and most importantly gets you out of the kill zone.

Does that apply with Swift boats? I have to admit that turning into gunfire doesn't seem like the proper thing to do. First off, while it might reduce your aspect, the size of the target you present to your attackers, it also reduces your relative...hell, there's a word for it, but if I were shooting at a boat heading towards me, it's only growing bigger in my sights and not moving laterally. In a sense, it becomes stationary. To me, a target that is not moving is a dead target.

Also, turning into the attack masks half the armament. The forward mount had twin .50 M2 Brownings (useful things, the .50 cal) while the rear mount held an 81mm mortar and I think another .50 cal. And then you had all the other small arms that the crew, M16s and M60s I would suppose. (Hey, here's a «a href="http://swiftboats.net/extras/boat_specifications.htm"»page about 'em«/a») So turning head on allows only the forward mount to fire.

Also, if you turn into the attack, you run out of maneuvering room in a hurry. As I understand it, Swift boats are river and coastal patrol units, so if you are trolling along in the middle of the river, and the attack come from the bank, why kick it to flank speed and head for the beach? Isn't that...dumb?

I'm just a grunt, but I am also curious. I'm under the impression that speed is your friend, and taking a course of action that doesn't make you faster and harder to hit isn't too bright. Then again, the rules for patrol boats sure aren't the ones for line grunts on a muddy trail.

«b»{{{ Guest Blogging by NotDeskmerc }}}«/b»

I officially toss in my vote that «a href="http://www.hedgefundmistress.com/JohnKerryScrapbook.html"»this is bullshit«/a».

«blockquote»«font size="2" face="Courier New,Courier,Monaco"»Hi! I'm Lee Roystone.

I wanted to share with you my John Kerry memorabilia. I can't
believe I still have it! It was all in a box in the attic. It's been a very
long time.

I began dating him when I was a Harvard graduate student and
he was a first term senator. I worked part-time at Earth Day and
he was the Senate sponsor. I met him at the Earth Day press
conference with the American Lung Association. I was in his
world for 20 months. We were both single. For me it was
interesting and significant. «/font»«/blockquote»

There's the nice stinky fat bait, so go ahead and click on the link and give the website a perusal.

Go ahead. I'll wait.

«a href="http://bbspot.com/News/2004/04/nigerian_quiz.php"»«img src="http://www.bbspot.com/Images/News_Features/2004/04/scammer/lawrence_obi.jpg" width="300" height="90" border="0" alt="You are LAWRENCE OBI. You are Bank Manager of Zenith Bank Lagos, Nigeria. You will share with me 30% of the $26.5 million that BARRY KELLY who died with a WILL left in your bank. You put the money in two trunks and want me to claim the money."»«br»Which Nigerian spammer are You?«/a»

Okay, sure, you leased a server four years ago. Back then it was top notch, the bee's knees, high speed low drag and you made money hand over fist with cheap webhosting and obnoxious data storage fees.

And it was fun! You had a nice little "web interface", as you like to call it, that allowed you to manage your 200 accounts. But now the joy has faded. You don't have PHP. Sendmail is woefully out of date. Your kernel hasn't been updated since you got the thing.

Is it my fault Sun Microsystems no longer supports your puny machine? Is it my task to write for you a series of kernel updates, so that you are no longer the victim of script kiddies and security holes that have not been patched for you?

No, I'm sorry. I cannot do these things for you. The cheap server you leased so long ago has not aged well, and your feeble attempts to upgrade the beast have failed miserably, and in fact has broken the webserver.

Am I your servers keeper? I do not know what you have done. You have installed things that have powers beyond your control, and they have brought the wrath of the Four Horsemen of the Upgrade: Misconfiguration, Version Mismatch, Database Corruption, and Death. You have broken the seal and allowed these fell riders to corrupt your system, all because you think you know what your are doing, and you felt the cold grip of age's tendrils caressing your server, flipping the bits one by one into nothingness, and you were desperate.

Entropy increases. Avoid.

So now you come to me for wisdom and guidance. And I say to you these dread words that will chill your bones to their very core, and you will froth and rant and tell me that I am stupid. You will tell me that you are smarter than I am, but am I not the System Administrator? Are you not calling me? I did not call you for sage advice, you called me in a panic, fretting about the massive hemmorage of residual income that you feel entitled to perpetuity.

I must now speak the words. Doom shall be upon you.

«B»«I»Unsupported.«/I»«/B»

Now GO, and trouble me no more.

Incoming support call...
«TT»09:04:41] liqua : hello?
[09:04:46] Jason M : Good morning
[09:05:29] liqua : quick question, my sites are coming up real slow, when i ssh in and run top, thats running slow, any ideas?
«/TT»
Why, yes. I have many ideas.

It could be a bad hard drive. Bad memory. Damaged network cable. Frayed wiring to the IDE controller. Processor overheat. Dust shorting contacts on the motherboard. Swap is full. Load is too high. Apache has gone berzerk and is leaving zombies. A fork bomb. Someone is running an IRC server with attack scripts. Perhaps the switch is going bad. Maybe you don't know how to code proper Perl and PHP, and your sites just suck. Maybe you've loaded a fifty megabyte media file at the top of your HTML layout and you have a 120 baud line driver for a modem. Something could be miscompiled. You could be an idiot, or high, or clueless, or out of phase and have lost the ability to monitor the flow of time. The switch could be set to "less magic". The fat electrons are caught in a kink of the cable. MySQL might be running a thousand processes. The disk could be full or mangled. /tmp might be mounted on a nonexistant filesystem. The PCI slots could have peanut butter smeared on them. An rm -fr * could be in progress. Sendmail may have a full queue. Incoming Godzilla and Christmas packets. Phase of the moon. Cosmic rays. Nuclear fallout. A swift boat has crashed nearby, and fragments thereof have lodged themselves on the video controller. A passing tech dropped a magnet into the ventilation slots.

Wait, where are you going? I HAVE MORE IDEAS! COME BACK!

I pull the string, and the «a href="http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/MCGREEVEY_POLL?SITE=PAPHQ&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT" target="_blank"»Associated Press says«/a»:«BLOCKQUOTE»TRENTON, N.J. (AP) -- Gov. James E. McGreevey's approval rating has not suffered since he announced that he had an affair with a man and will resign in November, a new poll showed Sunday.

The governor's approval rating was 45 percent, 2 points higher than in a similar poll conducted two weeks earlier, according to the Star-Ledger/Eagleton-Rutgers poll.«/BLOCKQUOTE»Perhaps the Kerry campaign should take note. Leave no stone unturned!

«b»{{{ Guest blogging by NotDeskmerc }}}«/b»

«i»(By the way, would all the freaks who keep stalking me - and you know who you are - please go away and quit reading Deskmerc's blog. You should be ashamed of yourselves. I'm a mother!)«/i»

I really respect Deskmerc's effort at rendering organics. They are a bitch-and-a-half to do believably. It's taken me a few years to get it down.

«a href="http://deskmerc.com/archives/Kyoto.jpg"»«img alt="Kyoto.jpg" src="http://deskmerc.com/archives/Kyoto-thumb.jpg" width="200" height="189" border="0" /»«/a»
This was my first attempt. Sucks, huh?

Then there was this one.

«img alt="Deliverance2.GIF" src="http://deskmerc.com/archives/Deliverance2.GIF" width="150" height="167" border="0" /»

Slightly better, but still very bad.

The problem that I had was just a basic misunderstanding of how the software works. So, if you are truly interested in learning how to make realistic 3D people, first and foremost: RTFM.

Second. Do not use the Poser rendering engine for your final image render. It's gay. Grab your stones and hack, crack or buy a decent 3D suite. I use Cinema 4D. 3DStudioMax, Lightwave and Maya are acceptable alternatives. Poser rendering is for fags and amateurs.

Third. There is no such thing as a 3D suite available for use on regular PC's that can render hair and such so well that you won't need to do any postwork. Think about it. How many hairs do you have on your head? Kind of like counting jellybeans in the jar, isn't it? The computer feels the same way. So, give that aspiration up for now. Consumer-affordable technology isn't there yet.

So, this means that you will need an appropriate piece of software for doing your postwork. I will always be a Photoshop apologist. There is, in my opinion, no other image-editing suite that can out-perform. Again, hack, crack, buy, whatever. You'll want the latest version, which is, I think 7.0, but it might be CS or something like that. I use 7.0.

If you're reading this thinking that this is already way more work than you wanna do, having to get all this software, then go get your jammies on and have mommy read you a bedtime story, because this is just the beginning. Every piece of artwork I do, from start to finish takes me at least 12 hours to complete. And that's now that I know what I'm doing. It will probably take you a few days your first time.

And it will still look crappy.

But, if you have the nads to pony up to the task, 3D art is some of the most satisfying art you can do.

I will explain a little bit of what goes into the average piece of artwork that I do.

First thing's first. Assuming you have messed around with the software enough to have some idea of how it works, the next step is understanding your subject. In this case, I'm going to assume that you want to render a woman.

So, go look at chicks. I know, I know... what a chore. But seriously...

«a href="http://deskmerc.com/archives/bettiepaige4.jpg"»Click here, because this isn't safe for work.«/a» Bettie Page inspired a whole generation of pin-up art, including that of my favorite artist Olivia deBerardinis.

«a href="http://deskmerc.com/archives/25nobath.jpg"»«img alt="25nobath.jpg" src="http://deskmerc.com/archives/25nobath-thumb.jpg" width="150" height="353" border="0" /»«/a» Painting of Diane du Poitiers, the famous mistress of Louis the Somethingth, who ushered The Renaissance into France.

«a href="http://deskmerc.com/archives/matisse_blueNude.jpg"»«img alt="matisse_blueNude.jpg" src="http://deskmerc.com/archives/matisse_blueNude-thumb.jpg" width="150" height="95" border="0" /»«/a» Matisse, who understood that perfection isn't the point of the beauty in the female form.

«a href="http://deskmerc.com/archives/grable13.jpg"»«img alt="grable13.jpg" src="http://deskmerc.com/archives/grable13-thumb.jpg" width="150" height="190" border="0" /»«/a» Betty Grable. A biscuit in her day.

Now, you may wonder why I didn't post a bunch of pictures of Cindy Crawford or J-Lo or whoever. Well, it's simple, really. They don't look like this in real life, either:

«a href="http://deskmerc.com/archives/112ask.jpg"»«img alt="112ask.jpg" src="http://deskmerc.com/archives/112ask-thumb.jpg" width="100" height="136" border="0" /»«/a»

You get that result only after «i»hours«/i» of careful retouching with the software I mentioned above. So it is not an accurate representation of what women really look like, or for that matter, how gravity works, and it will therefore not suit your purposes. You are going to edit your woman «i»after«/i» you render her, not before, so save your fantasy boobies for post-production in Photoshop.

In the mean time, take a cue from the likes of Degas or Renoir, and think of a beautiful woman that you know. If you don't know any beautiful women, then go find some amateur porn with an attractive woman in it.

Your brain normally probably overlooks a lot of the imperfections in a real woman. The way her breasts sag a bit, even if they're nice, or maybe one is bigger than the other. Or maybe she gets that tummy roll thing when she sits forward. Or maybe the fat under her arms wiggles a little when she waves at you. Maybe her nose isn't quite straight, or her teeth. Or one eye tends to open more than the other. Her armpits have a dark spot where she shaves and the hair has grown back a little over the course of a day. Etc, etc.

But she's still beautiful, because your eye doesn't seek out all those things. You take in the whole picture and interpret her as an attractive female. Unless you are actively looking for imperfections, most of the time, you don't see it. She is an animated, alive creature who has personality and sex appeal.

However, in a still image, you have captured a woman in a moment in time, and because she isn't moving around, it's a lot easier to spot the imperfections, hence the need for retouching.

But first, you have to create a living woman. Then you "take a picture" of her by rendering a single frame of your model. Then you retouch. It's just like photography, except you get to play god and make your own Eve. Or Lillith, as the case may be.

A company called DAZ3D makes a popular model for use in Poser called Victoria. There are a few generations of her. I still use Vicki 2, because I'm attached to her. Now, the brilliance of the Vicki model is that there are so many ways you can tweak her. There's a setting for everything from the crook in her nose to the droop of her breasts. You can make her fat or thin or anything else. You can create nearly any expression you can think of. So, don't be afraid to mess with those settings.

I have found that the "natural breast" setting, combined with adding a little weight to her to soften her hips and her belly goes a long way toward making her seem less "polygonal" and more believable. Maybe you prefer the more emaciated look, but I don't.

«a href="http://deskmerc.com/archives/lovers3.jpg"»«img alt="lovers3-thumb2.jpg" src="http://deskmerc.com/archives/lovers3-thumb2-thumb.jpg" width="150" height="150" border="0" /»«/a»
(Click to see the whole thing. Not safe for work.)

As you can see, the woman's breasts have a certain sag to them. One is slightly larger than the other. Her stomach is not six-packed and she's overall more soft and rounded.

This is the same woman, different position:

«a href="http://deskmerc.com/archives/loversb.jpg"»«img alt="loversb-thumb.jpg" src="http://deskmerc.com/archives/loversb-thumb-thumb.jpg" width="150" height="150" border="0" /»«/a»
(Again, click to see the whole thing. Not safe for work.)

The point of these examples is to illustrate that 9/10ths of the believability of a given image is in the plausibility of your premise. Is it really plausible that a woman would «a href="http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=740994&Start=1&Artist=ShiningStar&ByArtist=Yes"»
look like this? Ever?«/a»

Even though that artist did a good job with the lighting and the inorganics, the body is just not believable. Neither is the pose, which brings us to the next topic...

Human Bodies Don't Exist In A Vacuum.

This means that gravity does not just apply to breasts, but also to joints and muscles. Thus, if you have in mind to create a reclining woman, you would do well to study an actual photo of a woman in repose. Really look at how her shoulders rest, the way her arms sort of squish into whatever she's leaning on... she has weight. She doesn't float on top of the couch or floor or what-have-you.

I find that in this case, it is best to over-compensate a little when you are making a limb come into contact with a surface. Actually drive the limb partway through the surface, then use your joint-control dials to pull it back slowly. You will need to get up very close to your subject to be sure that the fingers/arm/butt/head is touching the surface. This is especially tricky with fingers and hair.

The secret to hair, by the way, is to remember that there is a head underneath it. Your surface contact point on the body should be the actual head, not the hair. You can retouch wayward hairs out of your picture later, but you can't make the image look right if your model's hair seems to be made out of a material reslient enough to support the model's weight. So go ahead and push that head down until it touches the couch/floor/bed/wall.

You must also take into account the matter of balance. When you sit, you automatically balance yourself on your center of gravity. Unless you're drunk, then you fall over. But finding your model's center of gravity can be a real bitch, since there is no reference point for it in Poser. The result of an unbalanced model is that she looks unnatural, contorting herself to hold a position that gravity seems to dictate she shouldn't. Sometimes it is a very subtle thing, but it's that subtlety that ruins the image.

Really, truly, the very best way to find the center of gravity for your model is to assume the position yourself. If you can't do it, then chances are, neither can she. Of course, if your model is not supposed to be holding still in your image (say, this is an action shot, and she's running or walking) you will need to take into account the shifting of her center of gravity. This is called motion-control, and it is so hard that not even Industrial Light Magic can do it well all the time. And they have piles of funding to block out the sun. All you have is a PC and some GUI software.

So, if you're dead set on making an action shot with your model, then you will need to study. Watch movies with people doing whatever it is you want your model to do, and pause the frame during the "ideal shot". Or, you might be able to find a still image of an action shot on the web. Try your best to mimic the joint positions, like thus:

«a href="http://deskmerc.com/archives/Marieta.jpg"»«img alt="Marieta.jpg" src="http://deskmerc.com/archives/Marieta-thumb.jpg" width="150" height="171" border="0" /»«/a»

But, in the end, no matter how perfect your positioning, lighting and modeling, you will have to resign yourself to post-render image editing. There are inevitable "artifacts" of your posing and the render process that will need to be retouched. You may want to make color and contrast adjustments. Perhaps you will want to add a little film-grain effect to make it look more convincing as a photograph. But above all, you will need to «b»paint your hair«/b».

Regardless of how cool and detailed your hair prop might be, you'll still never be able to make hair look real on a fresh render, unless it's really short. The best way to paint hair is by using the old-fashioned smear tool in Photoshop. This is the tool that looks like a little finger ready to pick a nose. The settings for this tool allow you to adjust the "pressure" and size of your "finger". I set my pressure to 90% or higher and the size at one pixel.

The pressure setting is very important. You will want to vary this setting as you paint according to how long you want the hair to be. The higher the pressure, the more of the hair color you will push/pull into the rest of your picture, and the longer the resulting strand of hair. Thus, if you have it set to 100% pressure, you will continue to pull hair color all around your picture and it will never taper off. Anything less than 100% will slowly transition as you paint from the original color of the pixel you began with to blend with the pixels you are pulling the color into until you get a nicely tapered hair-like effect.

Just keep doing that over and over, using different shades of hair color until you achieve the desired effect. Go ahead and study real photographs of hair to get a feel for how light filters through individual strands and clumps, curly and straight, thick and thin. The end result should look like this:

«a href="http://deskmerc.com/archives/kiss2.jpg"»«img alt="kiss2.jpg" src="http://deskmerc.com/archives/kiss2-thumb.jpg" width="150" height="135" border="0" /»«/a»

Notice how the hair slips through his fingers. All that was painted using a mouse in Photoshop, so there's no excuse for bitching because you don't have a stylus. Squint and be patient. And use the zoom tool. And the "history" feature, so you can go back and undo any screwups you make.

Well, that's enough for now. It's late. I'll make a more illustrated tutorial next time I'm rendering.

Problems have been manyfold with texturing. Creating an organic model is a lot harder than slapping paint on a car or spacecraft. Things like specular reflection, which can look like tinny colored white spots you see on glass, crystal, ice or water, or glossy like the light reflecting off a magazine, are constant over most inorganic shapes, and are easy to detail. A person, however, is a different story. Skin can reflect light differently in one area of the body than another, because of skin oils, age, wrinkles, and what have you. Examine the difference bweteen the front and back of your hands, and try to bounce the light off to get the highlights. You can get them on your palm, but it's almost impossible to do so on the backs of your hands. Its normal, the constant variation of an organic surface. Hair is even worse.

Which is why I find it to be so challenging. And that's also why I prefer to render women...they tend to remove most of their body hair, so it is not inconsistent to have me render a woman who appears to have a very expensive Brazilian wax. Its fair and believable.

I had hoped to make progress on a particular idea, that of a beer ad, because it is in my head and I must get it out, but it involves a rendered female and that takes time to get right, and I want to get it right. The beer is rather easy, having alreayd made th ebottle and will make a logo for it as soon as I make a woman. (Which sounds odd.)

So. the first problem I've bene having is one of texture. Texturing a body outside of Poser has to be done by hand, but I couldn't tell if I was having texture problems or was my lighting bad? Eventually I found that I was having texture problems. Here's what I came up with:

«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-07.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-07.php','popup','width=1000,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-07-thumb.jpg" width="300" height="144" border="0" /»«/a»

From left to right, we have 1) Untextured model with default lighting. 2) Textured model with default lighting. 3) Textured with spotlight 4) Textured with all aspect radiosity 5) Textured with advanced light tracing with diffuse light and one directional light.

Oh yeah, that last one works out GREAT. Okayh, so I'm not having lighting problems. I've having texture problems, mostly around the head, hair, and neck. But I can make pictures anyway without showing that!

«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/fri0813-06.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/fri0813-06.php','popup','width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/fri0813-06-thumb.jpg" width="150" height="112" border="0" /»«/a»«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/fri0813-07.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/fri0813-07.php','popup','width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/fri0813-07-thumb.jpg" width="150" height="112" border="0" /»«/a»«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/fri0813-08.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/fri0813-08.php','popup','width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/fri0813-08-thumb.jpg" width="150" height="112" border="0" /»«/a»

Oh yeah. Still, there are model errors and texture problems, mostly because of how Poser exports Wavefront OBJ files and how 3DS will import them. This means I have to do a lot of fine tuning to get some of the textures to look right. In the following test renders, where I fixed some of the problems, you can see where some still remain...but they sure do look good.

«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-03.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-03.php','popup','width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-03-thumb.jpg" width="250" height="187" border="0" /»«/a»

Detail of neck and upper torso. If you look very closely, you can see that the texture is sort of stretched and doesn't mesh quite well with the torso. That's one of the errors I'm ironing out. From a distance, you can't tell, but for closeups it's right there laughing at me, so I gotta fix it.

«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-04.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-04.php','popup','width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-04-thumb.jpg" width="250" height="187" border="0" /»«/a»

Closeup of face. See the black shadow at the top? That's the eyelashes, a solid annoying block with no transparency. Since it's a pain in the posterior to make individual eyelashes all the time, the trick is to make a solick block, but put in a transparency texture to fake the eyelashes. The bitmap looks just like regular lashes, and where there is no color, the block is transparent and cannot be seen. A lot of things are rendered like that, and hair is the most notable among them. Who wants to model and render several thousand strands of hair?

«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-05.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-05.php','popup','width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-05-thumb.jpg" width="250" height="187" border="0" /»«/a»

Closeup of face. While this looks okay, the specular, the area where the light reflecting off the skin washes out everything else, looks wrong, as if her skin is too oily or something. Also the skin texture looks pretty good, but it's smooth, not irregular and somewhat bumpy like real skin would be. At this range you could make out individual facial pores, and while many women probably aspire to this level of skin, it's not realistic. I'll have to use a displacement map here, but one thing at a time....

«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-06.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-06.php','popup','width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-06-thumb.jpg" width="250" height="187" border="0" /»«/a»

Another torso and neck shot. Here you can see polygon flaws along the shoulders...real people aren't so angular. You can also see the neck texture problems as well. The shirt is colored the way it is because I didn't bother assigning it a color or texture from the imported OBJ file, and those were the default colors. Still looks kinda cool, huh? It's two colors because those are actually two sub-objects making up the entire shirt. The rest of the body model is the same way, small sub objects like fingers, toes, arms and legs welded together to make a whole, and I gotta texture them all. Most of the time I can just group them all together and apply only one texture for the whole thing, but even then I have to iron out the details, as I've just shown.

Anyway, that's what I've been doing. Mote political and army stuff this week, I promise...I was busy last week with personal odds and ends that left little room for more structured thought.

Eh, it's been a while since I've posted any Star Trek renders. Here's a Nebula class starship, siting in spacedock.

A lot of my ships are always docked. They never go anywhere.

«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-01.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-01.php','popup','width=1000,height=455,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-01-thumb.jpg" width="250" height="113" border="0" /»«/a»

«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-02.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-02.php','popup','width=1000,height=455,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-02-thumb.jpg" width="250" height="113" border="0" /»«/a»

I've never liked the Nebula. I think later I'll have it blown up.

«img alt="churchsign.jpg" src="http://deskmerc.com/archives/churchsign.jpg" width="313" height="232" border="0" /»

I'd go to this service.

«div align="center"» «table style="color: black; background: #BACABC" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="2" width="270"» «tr» «td style="color: black; background: #eeeeee"» «div align="center"»Freudian Inventory Results«/div» «/td» «/tr» «tr» «td»«b»Genital«/b» (36%) you appear to have a pessimistic and regressive outlook on life.«br» «b»Latency«/b» (60%) you appear to have a good balance of knowledge seeking and practicality.«br» «b»Phallic«/b» (66%) you appear to have issues with controlling your sexual desires and possibly fidelity.«br» «b»Anal«/b» (33%) you appear to be overly lacking in self control and organization, and have a compulsive need to defy authority.«br» «b»Oral«/b» (46%) you appear to have a good balance of independence and interdependence.«br» «/td» «/tr» «/table» «a href="http://similarminds.com/freud.html"»Take Free Freudian Inventory Test«/a»«br»«font size="1"»«a href="http://similarminds.com"»personality tests by similarminds.com«/a»«/font»«/div»

Some folks have asked, "how do you do all this graphics stuff?" Well, here's a short demonstration on how an image ends up on a tshirt. (as always, click to enlarge)

First, I'll select a model that needs texturing. Here is ASMyShirt, something I downloaded from «A HREF="http://www.awfulsoul.com/"»AwfulSoul«/A» this morning. This is what the shirt looks like, with the polygons that make up the object visible:

«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/demo1.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/demo1.php','popup','width=569,height=521,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/demo1-thumb.jpg" width="150" height="137" border="0" /»«/a»

Now, as anyone who owns a globe and a map of the earth knows, taking the spherical coordinates of the globe map make a distorted 2D map, and the inverse is also true. This means I just can't paste an image onto the object, it will come out all funny and stretched out. What I do instead is load up the object into a program that produces a UV map, and that looks like this:

«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/demo2.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/demo2.php','popup','width=350,height=350,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/demo2-thumb.jpg" width="150" height="150" border="0" /»«/a»

This is a cyndrilical UV map of the shirt object. All the polygons are represented here, but flattened out in such a way as to allow me to color and texture without distortion. Each vertex, or where the lines cross each other, is congruent with it's point on the 3D surface.

So now I'll fill in the lines, and add an old graphic of mine I have sitting on the hard drive...and that gives us something like this:

«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/demo4.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/demo4.php','popup','width=350,height=350,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/demo4-thumb.jpg" width="150" height="150" border="0" /»«/a»

I then take the final graphic and drop it into the rendering software, in this case, Poser, which maps everything automatically for me, and I end up with this:

«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/demo5.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/demo5.php','popup','width=340,height=532,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/demo5-thumb.jpg" width="150" height="234" border="0" /»«/a»

Of course, there are errors. Even a simple mesh as the shirt was complex enough to cause some distortion in the UV mapping. It's not a perfect solution, and I would have to tweak the UV mesh, or try a different projection, to even things out and get right of all the white.

What is usually done is that more complex models are broken down into parts, then each part can be textured individually, making for smaller textures and less mapping errors, but this increases memory use. It's a tradeoff.

This texturing process can be used for any object. The tattoos of the female model are added in a much similar fashion. Without the texture mapping, each individual bump and body feature would have to be added into the mesh itself, and as meshes increase in complexity, memory requirements for storing the object increase as well.

Here's another example for texturing, this is my head, UV mapped:

«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/myheadmap.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/myheadmap.php','popup','width=512,height=512,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/myheadmap-thumb.jpg" width="150" height="150" border="0" /»«/a»

...which looks like this, when wrapped around the proper mesh.

«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/myself.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/myself.php','popup','width=571,height=562,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/myself-thumb.jpg" width="150" height="147" border="0" /»«/a»

Yeah, it looks dorky, I just haven't worked on it in a long time. You can appreciate nonetheless the trickiness of detailed texturing. Sticking a logo on a tshirt is simple compared to creating a human face, even when I already have pictures of myself to work with.

Anyway, that's how it's done on the amateur side.

This was found in a Red Hat Enterprise server:

«TT» -rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nobody 14046765 Jul 21 09:39 W2Ksp3.exe«/tt»

I just don't know anymore. I just don't.

«b»{{{ Guest blogging by NotDeskmerc }}}«/b»

Well, I've been inspired.

«a href="http://deskmerc.com/archives/elf040.jpg"»«img alt="elf040.jpg" src="http://deskmerc.com/archives/elf040-thumb.jpg" width="200" height="166" border="0" /»«/a» As usual, click to enlarge.

This is an experiment in weird lighting, particle systems and metaballs. Oh yeah, and Lillith, too.

So I'm reading my blogs earlier today and I come across at INDC Journal «A HREF="http://www.indcjournal.com/archives/000704.php"»this particular entry«/A» and thought "Hmm...make a nice tshirt if it were in color."

Lo and behold, later I see that someone has colorized it with a nice high resolution image...and I've been messing around with a UV coordinate generator for 3D objects tonight and thought...what the hell? Let's make a tshirt.

Click to enlarge.

«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/mon-802-01.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/mon-802-01.php','popup','width=390,height=525,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/mon-802-01-thumb.jpg" width="150" height="201" border="0" /»«/a»

«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/mon-802-02.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/mon-802-02.php','popup','width=461,height=540,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/mon-802-02-thumb.jpg" width="150" height="175" border="0" /»«/a»

Original black and white image by «A HREF="http://www.indcjournal.com/"»Bill @ INDC«/A». Colorized Little Edwards by «A HREF="http://bluemerle.blogspot.com/"»SarahW«/A». Base V3 model with V3 Irish textures, Daz GelHair, V3 tshirt. background by mistake, screwed something up, liked the effect so I left it. Generic Poser renderer used this time, didn't care about raytracing, just wanted the textures to come out good, which, for once, they did.

den Beste uses Poser...I wonder what he does with it.

Another horror story from the Tales of Genius Technical Support:

«TT»[08:59:43] donk : i entered cd /etc/opcenter/webhost but it just said i have new mail in var/spool/mail/root«/TT»

Hand holding can be so tedious at times.

Obscure, isn't it?

People that whistle tunelessly need to be sequestered on some small volcanic isle and then nuked, repeatedly. Few things raise my hackles faster than some tard LIKE NOW, LIKE RIGHT NOW, SOME ASSHOLE IS WHISTLING...«I»weeweeWHEEwurrweee«/I» and it is DRIVING ME INSANE.

It is distracting. It's almost as bad as farting in a crowded elevator. It excites a bundle of neutrons in my brain related to epilepsy and uncontrolled violent behavior. THERE HE GOES AGAIN! WHO IS IT WHO IS ABOUT TO DIE

That would be amusing. I don't think it has a change in hell of coming about, but still, amusing. The sheer level of uncertainty would be paralyzing.

It would also drive KerryEdwards into a tailspin. Everything the Republicans suggest is evil incarnate, so the speeches of how the IRS is a force for good will be worth the price of admission.

I could use the extra bucks from not having taxes withheld, but how much more expensive will everything be? A few cents? A couple of bucks? I don't relish the thought of having a two dollar can of Pepsi and an eight dollar value menu at Burger King. but we do make millions of tiny transactions a day, and that's a lot of pennies to be flowing into federal coffers.

Who will enforce it? This IRS?

One thing will be obvious, and that will be the rate of taxes coming in will be more directly attuned to the economy than ever. When people spend less, the government gets less money, period. Taxing things further to increase revenue will fail in poor economic times, but in that respect it can act as a more dynamic brake on the economy.

What the hell am I talking about? I'm no economist. I'm a sleepy tech. Sleepy. The orbital mind control lasers are making me sleepy...must not comment on taxation...

But wait! A VAT or a sales tax is considered by many to be a "regressive tax", and our current "progressive" taxation is the only fair one. What bullshit is this?

Look, everybody in these United States buys stuff. We can't get around it. We can't do anything about that at all. If you want something, it must be bought. You cannot insulate yourself in such a fashon where gods and services are not bought and provided, unless you are a homeless bum or you live in some Federal parkland as a peasant. Repeat after me:«BLOCKQUOTE»«I»Rich people must buy things too. Some of these things are expensive, and they too will be taxed like everyone else.«/I»«/BLOCKQUOTE»See? Isn't that a simple concept?

Why is it that so many people wander though life thinking that rich people acquire money and goods and services via magical means? Does food just appear from the Rich Persons Nanofactory all successful capitalists own? No, they have shell out a couple of bucks for a pound of ground Angus just like the rest of us...only they pay a person to go to the store and buy groceries. The tax is paid, one way or the other. The wealthy are not exempt.

The rich would pay their fair share...and more of it. Imagine the taxes to be pid on a Gulfstream business jet, or a catamaran, or a palatial house, or cars...