Which Future?

A bit of fun with robots over the weekend.  Looking towards the referendum, and beyond.

Also including a version without text - if anyone wants this image for further editing or adding your own text,  help yourself.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

Ministry of Truth

From George Orwell's book 1984.

Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth in London, chief city of Airstrip One.  Big Brother stares out from every poster, the Thought Police uncover every act of betrayal.  When Winston finds love with Julia, he discovers that life does not have to be dull and deadening, and awakens to new possibilities.  Despite the police helicopters that hover and circle overhead, Winston and Julia begin to question the Party;  they are drawn towards conspiracy.  Yet Big Brother will not tollerate dissent - even in the mind.  For those with original thoughts they invented Room 101 ...

"More relevant to today than almost any other book that you can think of." Jo Brand

Ministry of Truth

This image has been trying to get out for a while,  here's why:  The amount of misinformation being pushed about the Scottish independence referendum at the moment is quite breathtaking.  Just take a look.   The behaviour of the state in deploying propaganda is reminicent of  1984,  Distracting the public by demonising foreigners, disabled, and the unemployed ,  to provide a common enemy - all too evident in real life.

Airbrushing out inconvienient facts and ignoring or rewriting history to suit a political agenda have real-life parallels that I recognise all around me.

1984 was written in 1949 when states could still control the message.  That is less true now.  It is not as easy to rewrite the story or hide the facts as Orwell imagined in his book. He didn't have Google, Twitter and the internet.


Don't believe what you are told - the information is out there - go find out, and while you are looking, think.  Learn how to seperate fact from deceit.  Check their sources, look for agendas, think for yourself.  

 
The film version of 1984 used Senate House in London as the Ministry of Truth.  A good choice given it's imposing and bleak form.

Wireframe of the model and some alternative shots below...

And finally...

click

Old Aberdeen

Getting away from my keyboard for a bit and some long-overdue practise with watercolours.  This is a view of Old Aberdeen about 15 minutes walk from my house.

Amazing how much I have been leaning on software to handle straight lines and perspective.  More old-school practise definately needed. 

Architecture Academy - Amsterdam Building

Completing module 7 in the Architecture Academy.  Putting my columns to good work.

Lots of arrays in use,  especially on the roof. Good practice at UV unwrapping too.  New techniquie learned this module was using a temporary cylinder to snap vertices to a curve,  this was used to curve the balcony railing.

Edit:  Adding the wireframe view (before rendered as above).

Columns

Some columns,  this one a composite of Ionic and Corinthian styles,  complete with acanthus leaves.  The range of styles is actually quite interesting,  I can now tell my Doric order from Corinthians.  I am creating a Blender file with a model of each so I can link/append then to future models.

Composite Corinthian / Ionic Column

Edit:  So I got a bit carried away,  and modelled a full set of classical columns:

Acanthus

Pool Deck

This module from the Architecture Academy, introduces EIS lighting.  I had not used this before and it is a really powerful way of creating realistic light patterns from lamps in a scene.  Blender has an add-on to import EIS files from lighting manufacturers,  detailed in this Blender Artists thread.

 Another painful lesson is the amount of additional rendering time needed in dark scenes to get rid of noise.  The image below is still noticably noisy in areas,  yet was rendering for a whopping 3,000 cycles over 10 hours to get this far.  The long render time partially due to despite turning down all the subsurf levels on the furniture to zero,  the scene was still too heavy to fit within my GPU memory and  needed to be rendered using CPU.

On composition,  I tried to use lines within the wall art on each side of the upper floor to bring the eye to the middle bottom and then a defocussed fern in the foreground to guide over to the lillies.

Guggenheim

Back from vacation,  in catch-up mode now.  This is my render of the foyer of the Guggenheim museum in New York.