Daub

An appropriate time to post a photo of a replica Galileo telescope made by my late father.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/2cc84vlxe9q8v6ppp6st9/tel.jpg...

And bonus, a replica he made of van Leeuwenhoek's microscope:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/gwdb2r71d49pf8m4a5243/micro.j...

As a software user and teacher, I think about software rot a lot. My concern is that it has a tendency to grow by addition rather than replacement. New features are added whilst the fundamental limits of the architecture are left unattended to.

The reason that Blender grew from being an inside joke to a real contender is the painful re-factoring it underwent between 2009 and 2011.

In contrast, I can feel the fact that the code in After Effects is now over 30 years old. Its native tracker is slow and ancient and not viable for anything but the most simple of tasks. Tracking was 'improved' by sub-contracting the task to a sub-licensed version of Mocha via a truly inelegant integration hack.

There is so much to be said for throwing everything away and starting again, like Apple successfully did with OSX (and Steve Job did to his own career when he left Apple to start Next). However, I also remember how Blackberry tried something similar and in the process lost most of their voodoo.

Yes… I have seen this before and played with it. This was a good attempt at emulating the behavior of an app like Substance Painter. However… the core problem is that in order to paint textures you need very complex and deep functionality. When using Substance, I have to variously consider: the texture channels (e.g. color, roughness etc), the many layers that may serve these channels, the baked texture channels (e.g. ambient occlusion, normals etc), the many blend modes, masks and adjustments that serve and interconnect all these.

I doubt that anything other than native blender functionality could serve all this with any elegance.

I teach substance painter and it does a good job and hiding all this complexity until you need it. It is very common for students to underestimate it as an app… to view it as just photoshop for 3D.

I teach digital painting, and Procreate is slowly becoming my enemy. I fully appreciate its ease of use, its fantastic union with Apple Pen and certainly my students love it. But doing design/creative work on a small screen is not healthy, especially for complex images. neither is it easy to maintain a complex workflow, such as that required by matt painting and multi-layer compositing. Also, any presence of tablets in a design teaching lab is never pretty... I can't easily review their files or integrate their output into a pro desktop app.

One thing Blender lacks is easy 3D texture painting. As far as I know, neither is there a decent 3D texture painting iPad app. Definitely a gap in the market.

I run the risk of being downvoted on this issue, but there is a personality type associated with downs syndrome. My experience of living in a community of down syndrome young people certainly supported this, but there has also been quite a bit of research on the matter... search Google Scholar and you will see a ton. In brief: very social, positive minded and very creative. Importantly, this seemed not to be effected by puberty, unlike the autistic kids I have known. The year I spent in there company was a gift.

Edit: user smeej has cited a few papers on this matter.

For a fun example of what the author describes as ‘boil’ in an animated line, check out the animation series ‘Baman and Piderman’. Lots of episodes on YouTube.

> I'm not fully sure of what you means. If we take the following example, are you talking about the neck and the collar of the girl?

Yes... that's exactly it. It is also described in our teaching material here, (half way down the page):

https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/87565/pages/structural-...

Rembrandt was an avid user of this technique. In his portraits, one little trick he almost always used was to ensure that there was no edge contrast whatsoever in at least one region, usually located near the bottom of the figure. This served to blend the figure into the background and avoid the flat effect that would have happened had he not used it. In class I call this 'edge loss'. An equivalent in drawing is the notion of 'open lines' whereby silhouette lines are deliberately left open at select points.

> I think the name of the concept is "edge control" (not really original). You can find some explanation here.

I am aware of the term 'edge control' though I have not heard it used in this context. I feel that the term is too general to describe what is happening in the (so-called) tone wrap.

To extend the principle, wrap is an important concept in spatial rendering (painting, photography, filmmaking etc) and is a cousin of overlap. Simply... both serve to enhance form.

> To keep it short, there's no line in reality.

True that. I learned a lot about lines from reading about non-photorealistic rendering in 3D. There are some great papers on this subject (below) though I feel there is still work to be done.

Cole, Forrester, et al. "How well do line drawings depict shape?." ACM SIGGRAPH 2009 papers. 2009. 1-9.

Cole, Forrester, et al. "Where do people draw lines?." ACM SIGGRAPH 2008 papers. 2008. 1-11.

I made a stab at summarizing their wisdoms here:

https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/87565/pages/drawing-lin...

> There's a book called "Color and Light" by James Gurney that goes in depth about all of these. There's a lot of parameters that goes inside a brush stroke in a specific area of a painting.

Looking at it now. Any writer who references the Hudson River School is a friend of mine.

I concur that there is, on some matters, a general agreement in art books. However, certainly it does not help that there is so much inconsistency of terminology. For example: the way that hue and color are so frequently used interchangeably, likewise lightness, brightness, tone and value.

What bothers me more is that so much truly important material is not being addressed as explicitly as it should be. For example: the exaggeration of contrast on which so much art relies exists in two dimensions: increase of difference and decrease of difference.

This application of contrast/affinity is a general principle that runs through the entirety of art. Indeed, I demonstrate it to my students by showing its application in Korean TV dramas. The only explicit mention I can find of this in art literature is in the work of Ruskin, nearly 200 years ago!

Even worse is that so much very important material is not being addressed at all. For example, a common device that painters employ is to configure the neighboring regional contrast of a form can be light against dark on one edge and dark against light on the opposing edge. In figurative paintings and in classic portrait photography this device is almost ubiquitous, yet as far as I am able to determine no one has named it or even written about it. We were obliged to name it ourselves (tone wrap).

> They are not difficult to explain, they are just difficult to master.

Completely agree that they can be difficult to master. However, a thing cannot be satisfactorily explained unless there is consistent (or even existent) terminology for that thing.

> So unless you can solve judgement (which styles derive from)

Nicely put.

For visual art I feel that the existing approaches in context engineering are very much lacking. An Ai understands well enough such simple things as content (bird, dog, owl etc), color (blue green etc) and has a fair understanding of foreground/background. However, the really important stuff is not addressed.

For example: in form, things like negative shape and overlap. In color contrast things like Ratio contrast and dynamic range contrast. Or how manipulating neighboring regional contrast produces tone wrap. I could go on.

One reason for this state of affairs is that artists and designers lack the consistent terminology to describe what they are doing (though this does not stop them from operating at a high level). Indeed, many of the terms I have used here we (my colleagues and I) had to invent ourselves. I would love to work with an AI guru to address this developing problem.

The thing that bothers me about this trend is that, for the most part, only details of paintings are used. To me, a cropped detail never looks complete. It is like a book missing half its chapters.

> especially since there’s no real science or theory behind it (that I know of).

The literature on hue harmony is fuzzy, but there are a few gems.

Check out Matsuda [1] who tracked the colors of what his female students were wearing, and tried to identify any principles informing their color choice. My criticism of him is that he plotted hue distribution on the RGB color wheel. The RYB wheel would have been a far better choice. His paper is in Japanese, but is summarized in multiple places. Below [2] is a link to 2 pages from a lecture I gave which summarizes his findings.

I'm sure you also know of Kuehni's classic tome on color spaces [3]. A fun and informative read.

There has been no research on hue antagonism (which is the idea that underpins complementary pairs). This is crazy, as it would be a very easy subject to investigate. To me it is obvious that there is a special relationship between antagonistic pairs above the fact that they mix to neutral. Supporting this is the fact that Leondro DaVinci documented this relationship even before hue circle was invented [4]!

As for the mystical dimension of color harmony... this has been assumed since the dawn of color science. Newton himself believed that there was seven colors in his hue circle for no other reason than this was a spiritually significant value [5]. Itten [6], Goethe [7] and Kandinsky [8] all absolutely believed in the spiritual dimension of color. Personally, I believe that their work has had nothing but a destructive impact on how artists and designers use color. It is wildly inconsistent, vague and often plain wrong.

[1] Matsuda: Color Design. Asakura Shoten (in Japanese). (1995)

[2] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/4ac93etjyg0z5y2ouq5ge/matsuda...

[3] Kuehni, R.: Color Space and its Divisions: Color Order from Antiquity to the Present. Wiley-Interscience, Hoboken (2003)

[4] Leonardo da Vinci, Trans. J. F. Rigaud, A Treatise on Painting (London: J.B. Nichols & Son, 1835).

[5] Matt Chamings “Why are there seven colours in a rainbow?” New Scientist, Last Word, 2021.

[6] Johannes Itten, The Art of Color: The Subjective Experience and Objective Rationale of Color (New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1961).

[7] J. W. v. Goethe, Goethe's Colour Theory, Trans. C. L. Eastlake (London: John Murray, 1840).

[8] Wassily Kandinsky, Trans. Michael Sadler, Concerning the spiritual in art (Penguin UK, 2024), p. 59.

A very funny video. Thanks. I will keep it as it beautifully demonstrates the waterfall of mistakes that often follow a minor change to a painting's composition.

Another anecdote: I was once photographing a painting in a museum gallery that did not encourage Phtography. Unfortunately, the light was causing excessive glare. Whilst the guards were not looking, we placed a cigarette package out of view under the frame to lift it away from the glare. Again... upon return many months later the cigarette package was still there.

I should state that this was a very provisional museum. It had recently been painted, and there were drops of paint of the frames showing that the paintings had not been removed during the painting.

Here you go:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/wseunftjggoiqekn43hr1/paintin...

The relevant slides are on pages 16 to 19. Though I don't explicitly state it, most of the key changes Michelangelo made to his fresco were to its neighboring regional contrast. This is defined here:

https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/87565/pages/structural-...

As you might guess, neighboring regional contrast acts upon neighboring regions. Artists manipulate this property to produce tone wrap, which heightens the impression of form. Tone wrap is also defined in the preceding link.

Additionally, all Michelangelo's glazes were also removed. These would have had a significant impact on the global unity of his composition. I can barely look at photos of the Cistine Chapel taken after the restoration.

True… what I said only applies to canvas paintings. I should have made that clear.

The longevity of murals is easy to account for: the paint is applied to wet plaster, in that way becoming part of the wall. That is why the murals of Pompeii survived.

> Canvas is almost always coated with gesso which at the time would use rabbitskin glue as binder, no flax there.

You are right about the rabbit skin glue, but wrong about the gesso. As I recal, traditional Gesso is a mix of glue plus titanium white powder and is very brittle, generally unsuited to a flexible support such as canvas. A canvas painter would more likely use something flexible like a mix of pigment and rabbit skin glue, or pigment and egg protein or pigment and oil.

I thank god for modern primers. Using modern primers, I can prime a canvas in two days. An oil based oil primer could take months to dry.

> I wonder whether it's still worthwhile to replaced a yellowed varnish varnish on old painting, just to be sure that it doesn't degrade further (with the assumption that historical varnish are somewhat lesser than modern one, which I really don't know if it's the case).

I would say that we should just live with the difference. There is a near guarantee that our experience of paintings as they exist today will always be significantly different to how they would have been experienced when they had been made, regardless of what we do. The factors are:

- Yellowing of oil/pigment/varnish. This is pretty much inevitable, even in modern paints.

- Fugitive colors. Most high-color pigments tended to fade significantly over time. Degas was once seen crying in front of a Delacroix, upset at how badly the colors had faded, even in his lifetime (It might have been Manet... can't locate the relevant anecdote online).

- Excessive varnishing. It used to be so that paintings received regular varnishing by their owners. Over time, the layers of varnish would build up to a ridiculous degree.

- Lighting. For me this is probably the most annoying factor. A general rule is that paintings should be lighted in the same light that they were painted. The values go to hell if a painting is lighted too brightly. There are many so-called hanging experts, who always light too strongly, even in respected national collections.

Semi-related anecdote: The first time I went to the Rodin museum I was struck by how badly one of the busts had been lighted. Whilst the guards were not looking, I moved it to a more agreeable position. I came back one year later to find it was still in that position.

As for using modern varnishes... I am not expert, but AFAIK one factor that accounts for the amazing longevity of old paintings was the compatibility between their many layers. The canvas, the primer, the paint and the medium were all derived from the same plant: flax. On top of that would sometimes be laid stand oil, again derived from flax. If this continuity is broken, all manner of problems might arise, most of which would be long term issues such as cracking and flaking.

I will reserve judgement on this for the simple fact is that att conservation has been responsible for a huge amount of Art vandalism.

The 'restoration' of the cistine chapel ceiling was funded by a Japanese tv company. The cheapest approach was chosen which assumed that michelangelo made absolutely no corrections to his fresco using applied paint. It is perfectly obvious that this was a mistaken assumption, in the process removing many of the artists original work. I can upload some slides later if anyone is interested.

In victorian times many classic sculptures were scrubbed of their original paint and their stonework bleached, just in order to serve the tastes of the time.

And let us not forget that modern conservators will add or remove elements according to the clients taste. Eg change the flag of a ship from British to American.

I having trouble activity listening to music, but I remember as a teen listening to it with a freind and laughing together at its musical wit. Both of us were deep into punk at the time (the Clash), and we had stumbled across this by accident. Rarely have I felt such empathy with a composer…. At once sad, funny and erudite.

Yes. It's simple. Establish peer review as the metric of tenure and make dam sure those peers know their stuff.

Maybe. But that is a generous reading. I used to attend many computational aesthetic conferences. The sheer volume of non photorealistic rendering cross hatch algorithms was almost laughable.

For a few years I worked closely with computer engineers in a S E Asian university. I got to know quite well the sort of stuff they published. Some of the dodgy stuff i saw:

Recycling. Some papers seemed to be near duplicates of prior work by the same academic, with minor modification.

Faddishnes. Papers featuring the latest buzz technologies regardless of whether they were appropriate.

Questionable authorship. Some senior academics would get their name included on publications regardless of whether they had been actively engaged with that project. I saw a few academics get involved in risky and potentially interesting subjects, but they all risked their careers in doing so.

But most of all, there was a dearth of true innovation. The university noticed this and established an Innovation Centre. It quickly became full of second hand projects all frustratingly similar to projects in the US from a few years ago.

Of course there were exceptions, and learning from them was a genuine growth experience fir which I am grateful.

> IMHO the single most important thing digital provides is new ways to see - I'll often direct students to use the threshold filter to discover new lighting shapes in references or indicate planning problems with their value structure.

Completely agree. The hidden structures of an artwork are pretty much invisible with access to some flavor or other of a digital tool.

I believe that Rembrandt would have killed to have the ability to photograph his work and apply a de-saturation in order to see its lightness map. In fact... he did something similar... view his paintings in candle light, which does indeed almost de-saturate his colors.

Likewise, any decent Impressionist would have loved to be able to create a Saturation map using Photoshop's Selective Color adjustment.

I am an artist who works with both digital and traditional media. When household computers were just making an appearance I remember talking with a family friend on the subject of art. They asked my if I had considered trying out this new technology, saying with stars in her eyes that ‘it can draw lines to a degree of accuracy of thousands of an inch’. I was at the time rightfully unconvinced.

This anecdote demonstrates how completely misunderstood new technologies can be. Such accuracy is completely irrelevant to an artist.

In the end the thing that ‘converted’ me was getting my hands on a copy of Photoshop. I was then, and remain, unimpressed by its painting tools. However, I was blown away by its ability to penetrate the surface of a photo - to change the facts of that photo. Effectively, this solved a creative problem I did not even know I had.

I honestly believe that tools are invented before tool users.

You make a very good point, and provide an excellent reference.

It is in human nature to classify, and that is doubly true for an academic. Simply put, without a classification system we can’t point at a thing and say it is different to another thing. Neither can we say that one of those things is greater than the other.

I use libraries a lot and I have been reasonably satisfied with how the Dewey system seems to support common sense differences between ‘things’. Every now and then this common sense fails, but that is the nature of any hermetic system.

FYI… before the railways it was quite common for one village to have a different agreed ‘time zone’ to villages just a few miles down the road. This time was defined by the clock of the village church. It was the railways which put an end to this.

This is a good question. As I understand it, the only material parameters a splat can recognize are color and transparency. Therefore the first of your two options would be the correct one.

> so a gaussian splat scene is not a pointcloud but rather a cloudcloud.

A good way of putting it.

Yes cheaper. Quads are subject to becoming non-planar leading to shading artifacts.

In fact, I belive that under the hood all 3d models are triangulated.

Practically, what differentiateS a splat from standard photogrammetry is that it can capture things like reflections, transparency and skies. A standard photogram of (for example) a mirror would confuse the reflection in the mirror for a space behind the mirror. A photogram of a sheet of glass would likewise suffer.

The problem is that any tool or process that converts splats into regular geometry produces plain old geometry and RGB textures, thus loosing its advantage. For this reason splats are (in my opinion) a tool in search of an application. Doubtless some here will disagree.

As an artist and designer (with admittedly limited AI experience), where I feel AI to be lacking is in its poverty of support for formal descriptors. Content descriptors such as 'dog wearing a hat' are a mostly solved problem. Support for simple formal descriptors such as basic color terms and background/foreground are ok, but things like 'global contrast' (as opposed to foreground background contrast), 'negative shape', 'overlap', 'saturation contrast' etc etc... all these leave the AI models I have played with scratching their heads.

I like how Veo supports camera moves, though I wonder if it clearly recognizes the difference between 'in-camera motion' and 'camera motion' and also things like 'global motion' (e.g. the motion of rain, snow etc).

Obligatory link to Every Frame a Painting, where he talks about motion in Kurosawa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doaQC-S8de8

The abiding issue is that artists (animators, filmmakers etc) have not done an effective job at formalising these attributes or even naming them consistently. Every Frame a Painting does a good job but even he has a tendency to hand wave these attributes.