Daub

I have had time to browse through the app. Regarding the nodes, it would be good if the node parameters had too tips, as it is they are labeled very mysteriously. The keyboard-powered brush picker is very useful. I wish Photoshop had one. The lighting feature I don't see as very useful. Its basically no more than a temperature adjust. The color picker had a few cool features, but I admit I did not explore it too deeply.

Overall I enjoyed it but nonetheless see it as being in the same family as every other painting app.

I would love to see painting apps stop trying to emulate real media and instead try to do things that are uniquely digital. My dream digi-daub app would feature...

- 16 bit as standard. Do a gradient in an 8 bit Photoshop document and you will see how limited 8 bit info is. (OUR PAINT supports this).

- A brush that can paint both behind and in front of previous strokes. Of course, this would need to be supported by a depth channel.

- Supporting this, I want an adjustment parameter that can adjust based on depth. Depth-based contrast is a uniquely powerful force in image-making.

- Also a brush that increases/decreases neighboring regional contrasts.

- Almost all digital brushes are simply repeated stamps. This is now ancient technology. I would love to see a brush that can paint entire objects or the textured components of those objects. For example, with one stroke I would love to be able to paint a tree, or hair and fur. Of course, such a tool would likely be AI.

- An AI powered style randomizer.

As a traditional and digital painter, there is one unique feature that is easy to overlook: the colors are selectable as true pigments.

Painters don't categorize colors using standard terms: red, blue, green etc. Rather they categorize according to pigment. Different pigments (i.e. chemical base to the paint) have different properties.

For example, a Prussian blue appears almost black when applied thickly, but is very chromatic when applied thinly. In contrast, a cobalt blue is pretty much the same however it is applied.

ASAIK, this is the only app that supports this feature out the box.

The digital painting toolset has been pretty much in stasis for years, but this app offers node based brushes! I am very intrigued. Downloading it now.

If you haven't already, I encourage you to subscribe this guys channel - Asianometry. How he finds the time to reserach in such detail such a wide range of tek-related subjects is beyond me.

I have identified at least 4 potential sci-fi novels from the preceeding posts.

It depends on what your best hopes for yourself are.

You don’t need a lot of creative skill to model something geometric such as furniture or mechanisms. Having modeled it you would need to texture, light and render it. That can required good visual judgement, but god knows there are lots of examples to learn from.

Making organic forms is another matter and would require some sculpting skills, which are not easy to acquire.

Finally, there is the procedural environment of geometry nodes. With a good mind for maths, you could make some super cool abstract animations.

I have worked in the capacity of an artists technical assistance. I am an artist myself but am also good with fabrication. Working for someone who knows what they want and can clearly express it can be rewarding. Less rewarding is working for someone who doesn't. One young artist i worked for asked me to cut a sheet of board to a set of dimensions she was to supply. She got these dimensions wrong at least four times. Worst still was that she seemed to think her ineptitude was charming... laughing at my increasing desperation. I could fill a book with such stories.

I'm not entirely sure what op means by good taste in this context.

If we can seperate good taste from best practice, it's that good taste is commonly associated with restraint and economy. Hence, no one can say that Liberace or Elvis had good taste. On the other hand best practice is primarily governed by efficiency and is driven by commonly practiced principles.

I think that the non-profits you are referring to are likely not-for-profits.

The most significant reason that Blender is in its current position is because of the significant refactoring it undertook starting in version 2.5 I believe. 7 years brewing in the pot! It cant have been easy... but the outcome (Blender 2.8) is when we sersiolsy starting thinking about using it in our uni.

I have always found it odd how in VFX we spend a lot of time degrading our perfect 3D renders: motion blur, film grain, sensor noise and lens blur, which I would call a defocus. I am interested in the application of this research, and imagine a library of typical cameras and their associated blurs. We have similar libraries of film grain and sensor noises.

The use of Prussian blue is rampant in most painting programs. The reason is that you are essentially getting two paints for the price of one. When applied thinly, it is light and saturated. When applied thickly it is almost black. Contrast that with cobalt blue, which looks the same pretty much however you apply it.

Alizarin crimson behaves similarly.

Painting with either of these pigments it is relatively easy to get superficially impressive effects.

As a painter and also a digital artist, I am always amazed by such physical dimensions of oil paint. Another example is the huge difference between zinc white (low in coverage, good for transparency, slightly cold), and titanium white (high in coverage, good with mixing with other pigments, more neutral).

I used to do a bit of work at Madame Tussaud’s. There they preferred glass eyes to plastic ones for the quality of their shine. It was fun watching them being installed… they were pushed in from the back of the head.

I can imagine a glass eye being very heavy. I have two fake eyes, both plastic. Neither was cheap, but both have been excellently made. A real craft. The thing that required most attention was fitting them… shaving them down to fit my interior prosthetic. That took the best part of two hours.

The infection was fungal, not bacterial or viral. Not uncommon in this part of the world S E Asia). Fungal infections spreading to the entire head are no joke.

The upside is that i get to choose the color of one of my eyes. Also I rock a cool eye patch.

Well... the accident that led to my eye being removed was in my workshop. Specifically, it was caused by my bench saw and its poor maintenance. The initial damage seemed slight but over time, my eye 'felt wrong'- tight and a bit achy, so I went to a local private hospital. There a young optician who did not seem bothered, prescribed eye drops. These had no impact at all, so I went to two other opticians, one of who said I had a detached retina. Finally I went to a state hospital and saw an ophthalmologist. She said the eye was infected and I needed to act fast if I wanted to save my sight. I tried to get it operated upon in that hospital, but they were keen to keep me 'under observation' far a few days. As I could still see out of that eye, they were reluctant to remove it. By this time, I was in quite a bit of pain and knew the only option was complete enucleation. So I discharged myself and went back to the private hospital. Even they were reluctant to operate until I had three second opinions, one of which I had to get from a specialist in Thailand. All of them seemed very worried that I had not yet had surgery to remove the dam thing.

My first mistake was in seeing a optometrists rather than ophthalmologists. However, all of them failed to recognize my case as one where I needed to be referred. To an optometrist, even a broken leg would be treated with eye drops.

The other thing that went wrong is that the surgeons I saw were nervous about proceeding with enucleation even when my condition became very advanced. I think that this nervousness came from the fact that I could still see out of that eye, and as a matter of insurance they wanted me to be blind before they would operate. But by then the infection might have spread to outside my eyeball.

Following surgery was a bit of a trip. For a few days I hallucinated in my missing eye... strange worm-like things, very Giger. Even now, in response to sudden movement or loud noises, I 'see' bright lights in that eye.

Funny story. I have only one eye, and when in public I signify this by wearing a very obvious eye path. Even without the eye patch, my prosthetic eye looks nothing like my functioning eye (by choice).

I went to the optician a few weeks ago in order to get a new pair of glasses who performed the usual tests. She knew full well that I have only one eye, but when testing my functioning eye she handed me the eye occluder to place over my non-functioning eye. I asked her why she was doing this as it served no function but she clearly did not understand the question. It took nearly a full minute for me to explain to her how pointless using this occluder was. It was rewarding to see the veils of habit lift when she finally grokked my point.

As for the article... it seems like a valid application of technology. Relevant to my anecdote, some doctors/diagnosticians/scientists/scholars are too entrenched in habits... they only see what they expect to see. The accident that led to my loss of vision was impossible to miss, but its seriousness was initially overlooked by at least two professionals.

Good question. I'm no expert, but I guess that the key issue is one of categorization. Without language, it is impossible to effectively categorize our perceptual domain.

It is also true that among mammals, chromatic vision is pretty much restricted to primates. The ability to perceive difference of light is a must if you don't want to become someone else's food. In contrast, chromatic vision is an 'extra' that in many ways serves as a (literally) florid extension to our lives. To me it is no surprise that range of emotion and range of hue are so often associated with each other. Interestingly enough, they are similarly mapped: as a set of differences, rather than as a degree of intensity.

> up there with "Eskimos have a thousand words for snow".

Bad example. It seems that there is still a lot of disagreement on this matter, much of it rooted in what constitutes a word.

A well-balanced article on the subject here:

https://linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/inuit-words-for-snow/

Edit…

Also, from that article, a fascinating study: ‘Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination’

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0701644104

The association of specific wavelengths to hue exists only in our perception, nowhere else.

On the other hand, we perceive temperature yet its impact on the physical world is universal.

Add to that the idea that some cultures have fewer color terms than others. This actually impacts upon their perception of color.

Check out "Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution" by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay.

A very clear article, written in very accessible language. One potentially relevant thing not covered is the existence of super blacks and super whites, values which (as a budding vfx artist) I often need to consider. These are values which exist in the abstract sence, but not in the perceptual sence. Specifically, values darker than black and lighter than white.

They are as good a demonstration as any of the notional nature of color spaces.

Does anyone know how this is different to the Munsell color space, which is also perceptually uniform?

Edit: I would imagine that the only way to definine a perceptually uniform color space is by tons of user testing. This is how Munsell developed his color space… specifically presenting test subjects with pairs of identical and near-identical color swatches and asking if they could tell the difference.

In this way, pairwise comparisom of similararity became the bedrock of color perception science.

Hawkins was very adamant on holding back feature creep. Prior to developing the Palm Pilot he worked on the GridPad. One of the reasons that did not achieve its potential was that too many people wanted a say in defining its capabilities, leading to massive feature creep.

One of the genius decisions of Jeffrey Hawkins was in being laser-focused on the price point of the Palm Pilot. He designed it to be just cheap enough to buy on impulse, which is exactly how I bought mine.

Edit: Hawkins = inventor of the Palm Pilot

Very cool. Go from 30 to 31 to see this ‘pattern’ twist in on itself.

Some titles I upvote without first following the link.

FYI… artists of this generation would often paint their illustration the same size as it was printed. No easy task! Medium was likely gauche on board.

Edit: I meant gouach. This is a very non reflective paint hence ideal for photographing. A few artists still work like this. Check out the work of Glenn Fabry

I believe that Kodak’s missed opportunity was in not realizing the social sharing potential of digital photography. They had all the ingredients: the first digital camera, the almost first online sharing of photos… but didn’t grok it. Instead they clung to existing outdated models. A camera nowadays is a different animal to what it was when there were such things as height street photographers.

Compare that to the increadidble lateral thinking they employed when they re-packaged their movie film stock into short rolls, made a cheap-ass camera to accommodate it (the box brownie) and established a printing service to process the results. Pure genius.

He was a physicist and author with an interest in old technologies. I believe that most of van Leeuwenhoek's microscopes are replicas, but their basic form is well documented. As I recall, the most difficult thing to replicate was the lens, which he made using the same method van Leeuwenhoek's used: dropping molten glass through air.

The telescope was relatively easy in comparison. He used two lens from his stock of lenses and simply mounted them in a tube. I recall him having fun with the decorations, which are quite detailed.

He was so good at making/repairing ancient technology that the Science museum trusted him to repair some of their most precious items from their old wireless collection. He used vintage brass (modern brass looks wrong), vintage ebonite and authenticity old mahogany. Wish I could remember more. I have a few more of his things: a set of Napier's Bones (an old calculation device) made from chop sticks, an reproduction crystal set, a number of orreries.

generally, I agree with you on this matter. However, I can see a real user case for this when texturing an object. In fact I believe that the Blender Foundation would be better of dedicating the entire app to this purpose. Currently, texture painting in Blender is a royal PITA. A dedicated iPad texturing app that seamlessly integrates to Blender would be a very exciting prospect.