Tutorial and scripts of saving Obj files from Matlab
OK, I allow other to see it. Not much more.
Well, it has some good points.
I'm even happy with the picture.
Gravity tangle. A spacetime diagram of particles moving in 2D with the 1/(r^2+epsilon) force and friction. The radius of the tubes denote speed (time goes from the top downward).
The small tree of life. A bit of hermetic kitch I just enjoyed doing. The greater tree of life is far more complex to visualise.
Earthquakes 2004/12/25-2005/1/1. A simple visualisation of the quakes along the Burma plate. A vertical worldwide view is also available.
Gott nytt år!. New Year's picture 2004-2005. Just a quick game with geometry.
Abalone Fractals. A family of fractals based on rational functions.
Hydration and Van der Waals Forces.
Dropping Dead Weight. Sometimes you have to clean your wardrobes.
Bee's Bed. How would intelligent bees build codominiums?
Wild Threefoil Knot. A wild knot
(i.e. a knot that cannot be smoothly transformed into a polygon)
generated by using Maskit's idea of placing spheres tangent to each other along a
knot and finding the invariant set under inversion in the
spheres. Each sphere creates an internal image of the rest of the
knot, producing a fractal wild knot where big knots have smaller knots
on them. A 2d image shows a
projection of the point density when the set is found using random
iteration.
Divide by zero. Dividing by zero is hazardous both for you and your surroundings!
Autumn Chaos. During autumn chaos turns into gorgeous colours, more muted than the summertime ultraviolets or spring cobalts.
Stone Trees. The flame reefs of Dikaskalon are an unusual case of convergent evolution. But while terrestrial corals thrive in seawater, the stone trees thrive in the volatile petrochemical smog.
Solar Fish. Fractal generated by summing the arguments of the iterates of zn+1=exp(i*5/20)/(zn2-1).
Variation on Chua's Attractor. A close relative to Chua's attractor, colored by speed.
Art Deco Attractor and Coral Attractor. One quasiperiodic and one strange attractor.
Pink Virus. Some 3D doodling resulted in this virus capsule. Viruses are marvellous things, showing that the category 'life' has no natural border to the category 'unliving'.
Meeting in the Park. Encountering the alien is always an exhilarating experience.
Horned Sphere. A variant of the
famous counterexample of the Jordan-Schönflies theorem in 3
dimensions found in 1924 by J.W. Alexander. The object is homeomorphic
to a sphere, but the outside is not simply connected (a so-called wild
embedding). The structure can be animated, producing a horned whisk.
Behold the enemy. The SARS genome,
visualized as a vector sum (each pair of bases correspond to a move in
3D). When SARS was sequenced I felt I simply had to do a rendering
based on the sequence.
Twisted threefoil surface. A surface made by rotating a flat threefoil shape around one axis, while twisting it. It can also be used as a new age pointillist bridge.
Capri. An attempt at recreating a photograph from Capri.
Engineering Remnant. Many of the
structures that dot the deserts of Lunae Planum remain enigmatic. Was
this intended as part of a larger construction, or is it just the top
of something buried? As the martian winds howl through the metal,
eerie keening sounds can be heard.
Permanence. Isn't it wonderful
that something in the world is permanent? Thanks to constant
extension of copyrights intellectual property will never vanish, never
be subjected to the creative destruction of the market or
re-interpretation. It will remain forever, and when the sun becomes a
red giant it will light up the face of the Immortal Mouse towering
above the dust of humanity.
Dragon Cave. Inside their warm cave
the Klein dragons coil, waiting for the right moment to unfold their
cusps and inversions.
Green Interaction.
The image and spheres were placed according to a Kleinian group using Curtis T McMullen's program "Lim".
Rational Sphere. The argument (on the sphere) and magnitude (on the plane) of the rational
function (z8+3z5-iz2+2)/((5+2i)z5+3-i). For visibility the Riemann
sphere has been turned upside down.
Singularity Wing. The amplitude of the
iterated function i(z+1/z). The blue points are poles, the bright
orange points zeros. If the function is instead c(z+1/z), where c is
an arbitrary complex number, a spider-like structure can emerge which gradually extends as it is iterated.
Riemann sphere with the twice
iterated modified Bessel function of the first kind (nu=-2.3). The name
says it all.
Complex plane with Riemann spheres.
Goldenworms. Within the lattices of
the dense crust of Nema-IX a vital biosphere based on dislocation
patterns exist. While it may take millennia for a goldenworm to travel
even a centimeter, these fierce predators are the kings of the ion jungle.
Pink reflection. A pleasant background.
Rainy day. A background for rainy days.
Woodscape. The early afternoon sun
burns as hot as the midday sun through the dry, still air. The only
thing that can be heard is the creaking of wood drying in the heat,
and the call of the occasional shavingfrog. Silently the spheres
ripen.
Foyer manifestation at the ABB offices
north of Stockholm. Some think that these manifestations are unstable
boundaries to another world, a world composed of the interlinked
subconscious of all office architecture.
The Invincible. Landscape on Regis
III, with metal bushes and the fly crystals swarming. Based on
Stanislaw Lem's novel The Invincible, which has some amazingly
modern ideas despite that it was written in Poland in 1964.
Ecological bomb. If you don't use
child labour when making your bombs, and they are eco-friendly
fuel-air explosives rather than nuclear, why not get them certified to
increase sales?
Flowerspace. Restful spring flowers.
Pink filigree. Some abstract pleasantness.
City Nightmare. Cities dream, but
what are their nightmares about? This picture was largely made as an
exercise in angst (which doesn't come naturally to me), somewhat
inspired by the images of Man Ray and the early surrealists.
Orthoxantho. The Orthoxantho evolved
on a terrestrial planet with a thick hothouse atmosphere in a galaxy
in the Capricornus supercluster. They are large (2-3 meters) creatures
with soft blubbery bodies. They have twelve limbs and a long-necked
head with sensory tentacles. They do not have very acute vision, but
navigate using sonar and smell. Psychologically they appear sluggish
but possessed of remarkable mathematical and engineering
abilities. Humans have little to do with the Orthoxantho, although
both species study each other from a distance.
The Berthelot Arcology, a major
biotech city grown north of Sardinia. The grass-like covering provides
photosynthetic energy and climate control, while the many shafts and
canyons provide both air and sunlight to the apartments. Deeper inside
lies the geothermal generators, internal parks and immune nodes.
Magellanica, the first interstellar
colony ship from the Federated South America Space Alliance (Gran
Colombia, Federation of Brazil and the Argentinian States). The model
was based on pieces from Michael Stetson's Omega Class Destroyer mesh
and Manfred Thaller's dropship carrier.
A Tree of Pain in the atmosphere of
Beta Comae Berenices V. The trees of pain are found hanging in the
atmospheres of gas giants scattered across the galaxy, enormous
constructions of metal and fullerfoam apparently stable despite their
tempestous surroundings. Their sharp points and conductivity make them
very electrically active and prevent any approach - they are nearly
always sending and receiving lightening. Their origin and purpose remain enigmatic.
Coolant Behemoth. A Coolant Behemoth of the
16th Scyllae clan in the second lateral connecting commissure of lower
Namaqua. The Scyllae have taken up transporting and exploring through
the extensive cooling fluid networks over the last centuries, after
their ignomious defeat by the Mainliners. Their Behemoth crafts enable
a wide variety of species travel in relative comfort across Ex,
although humans and other air-breathers are advised to stay out of
trips through the high gravity regions near the cores.
Kaivole and Larvole in the jungle of Insula
Draconis. These delightful creatures are composed of ultra light
shells with hydrogen floatation bladders. Sometimes Kaivoles flick an
exoskeletal limb to change direction or push away from a hinder, but
mostly they just drift in small flocks. Larvoles on the other hand fly
with sinous strokes. Both species are very sensitive to fire, and will
easily catch fire if they come too close.
Bakhali Ship. The Bakhali construct
their ships out of flexible superconducting threads, sheated in
iridiscent nanomusculature. This enables them to use planetary and
stellar magetic fields for acceleration and braking, as well as easy
damage repair and reconfiguration.
Ishdubar Idol. One of the pagan idols
depicting Ishdubar in its strider form, found in the remnants of the
Loquare district after the July 130 riots. Hostility to Ishdubar worshippers
still run high among some Aquincorians after its involvement in the
unification conflict became evident.
Trilo Translator Biocomputer. A
specimen of Trilo biotechnology, a heavy translation unit encasing
over a cubic meter of artificial neural tissue equipped for
inter-species translation. The specimen appears to be identical to the
"paleocoral trunk" depicted in Eduard T. Yates' Biological Marvels
of the Indian Ocean (London 1867). According to Yates the trunk
was worshipped by the Maldivians as a minor deity before the arrival of Islam,
suggesting an early Trilo incursion in the region.
Badlands. It started out as a test of some textures, skies and objects I had downloaded from Renderosity, and then took on a life on its own.
Geospace. A little game with reflections, light and the vertices of a geodesic dome.
Robot Lake. Fishing is particularly good in the reefs surrounding the downed macrobots.
Temple of the Mayor Globe. One of
the more seldom visited attractions in Xeibon is the Temple of the
Mayor Globe on top of the lakeside arcology. Here one of the nodes of
the mayor is suspended in the air inside the dome, visible to
visitors.
Autumn Wreath. Sometimes he took
autumn and looped it into a wreath he then carried around his head
like a heavy laurel. People usually commented about how the mist and
trees complemented his clothing.
Autumn Glory. According to one
theory, trees show their autumn colors in order to demonstrate how
strong they are for aphids and other parasites looking for suitable
egg-laying grounds. A colorful tree demonstrates that it can produce
much chemical protection, so they better lay their eggs somewhere
else.
White Spring. In the spring the spatiotemporal discontinuities often show up in the apple orchards. As long as they do not approach the trees too closely the farmers do not object, but they immediately reach for their tensor bundles if they drift towards the flowers - superstring apples cause indigestion.
Goldspace. The introduction of a sphere into a polyhedral space introduces chaos.
Green Room. There is always room for one more.
Scherk Surface. What sounds
would the wind make if it flowed through a membrane shaped like a
minimal surface?
Costa Rica. Costa's minimal surface
in a park setting. The sculptures are 3D representations of Conway's
game of life.
The Dimension of Violence. The
Dimension of Violence was a virtual environment theme especially
popular among young radicals of the middle information era. In its
rich iconology resided beings such as the creation parodies, the
turnip humans and the feared dictator RatHitler.
Her Sacredness Chairwoman Adriana Yue Oncehuman
receiving a Kandefinizione diplomator in her representational
apartment on Pardes. Her body and outfit are one-of-a-kind creations
from Tiosro based on traditionally cloned human, cotton and Purpura
lapillus. The plasmic furniture was designed by Elmiaz Kom-nett and
the Kermes. The diplomator is wearing the traditional goldleaf
dragonburst of its clan when in individual form.
Yuancheng, one of the famous chimney
cities on Twilight sunside. To cool the city it contains hundreds of
vertical airshafts, where the air is heated by the city and rushes
upwards. This not only powers many cooling systems, but it also
enables the popular airdiving sports that has made the "chimeys"
popular vacation spots for people with an active lifestyle.
Posthuman Meeting
"There is something frightening about being seen by a posthuman. Their
black eyes drink in all wavelengths, and literally see right through
you. They understand you to a level a fellow human can never do, seeing
all your potential, your flaws and your weaknesses. AIs and droids can
of course do the same, but a posthuman has once been like you, and hence
know and react to your dirty little secrets with a more human
perspective. I am scared of the human, not the post."
-- Eznarza the Traveler, mentioning an encounter in Barbul-el-Sharnak
Negentropist Priest-Administrator from Gegton X. The relationship between the priest-administrators and the legal hierarchy in the inner system is a fragile balance between the strict interpretation of the Axioms afforded by the priests and the necessities of interstellar government.
The Culture of Night.
"There's a room inside of me
A thousand light-years wide" - Vacuum, The Culture of Night.
Balance. We are the shapers of the universe, so we better shape up.
Modern Art. The exhibition was a great success, although there are always those viewers that think that this newfangled stuff is incomprehensible.
Curse you, Eric Drexler!. A picture inspired
by Eliezer Yudkowski's filk with the same name. Although I am somewhat cautious in my thinking of what nanotechnology might be able to achieve, I certainly think it is going to give trouble to the grim reaper.
Tech surface. Even in the age of nanotechnology construction is going to take time and supervision. And repair involves both deconstruction and reconstruction of damaged parts - if you can't simply replace something then the repair is going to take some effort. Closeup of the two engineers, both Poser characters downloaded from Renderosity.
Kepleria. The greatest and most
outrageous of the megaengineering feats of the MPA. Begun in 6996 and
finished in 9998, it has nearly doubled the living area of the known
galaxy. Critics question whether it was worth it, but among the MPA public
it is regarded as the pride of the Alliance.
Dyson Tree. Freeman Dyson suggested that using genetic modifications trees could be adapted for space. A Dyson tree would grow from a comet core or carbonaceous asteroid, with hollow trunks containing breathable atmosphere for habitation. Without gravity and in constant sunlight the main limiting factor of their size would be the amount of mass they could absorb.
Four ended minimal surface. Derived by
D. Hoffman and M. Callahan (MSRI).
Minimal surface city. When matter becomes software, functionalism becomes surrealism.
Temple of
Chen-Gackstatter-Thayer. Mediterranean scene with a genus 3
Chen-Gackstatter-Thayer surface (mesh from MSRI).
Mizrah Outpost. Technorapture Hypernation outpost in the Perseus Gap. The ISO is built around a submillimeter communications wormhole at the core, surrounded by computing and sensing matrices.
Synaptic Cleft. The neurotransmittors
diffuse across the synaptic cleft, binding to postsynaptic receptors
that open ion channels or activates second-messenger systems inside
the cell. This microscopic jump and subsequent reaction is a key
operation of thought, memory and emotion.
Phoenix Rising "My wings are made of
tungsten, my flesh of glass and steel. I am the joy of Terra for the
power that I wield..." -- Phoenix, Julia Ecklar
Hyperbolic Space. A simple picture of
a sphere on a 7-triangle Poincare tiling. The tiling is due to Bernie Freidin.
Twisted Scherk Tower. A twisted
Scherk tower in a hyperbolic tiling of heptagons and hexagons. The
tiling is due to Bernie Freidin.
Air of Earth. Skyscape of Strevarld,
among the pillars of Mospor. The pillars were constructed by the
Mosporti partly as monuments to the cosmological constant (symbolised
by the constant negative curvature of the Dini surfaces), partly as
habitation megastructures. One of the local bubble-trees is drifting
in the foreground; the blue color of the pillars was partially
selected to discourage them from adhering and nesting.
Mathematics Garden. A small
plantation of mathematical surfaces. A Richmond surface (n=3) grows in
the upper left corner. Below it stands three Dini surfaces, with a
Steiner roman surface between them. In the upper right corner there is
a Boy's surface, with three helicoids to the left. Below them a
sphere, a catenoid and a minimal surface with a threefoil knot
edge. In the middle a Catalan surface stands.
Boy's Surface, an immersion of the projective plane RP2 in R3. Invented by Werner Boy in 1901.
Horn Gate. The traditional entrance to the Sea of Cybele.
Schoen's I-6 surface on mirror.
Steve Lareau's snow also works as cardboard. Another take on the same surface, this time at sea.
Minimal Surfaces. A mathematical
workbench with Schwarz' CLP surface (middle), Fischer-Koch S surface
(upper right) and a minimal oriented nonsingular surface with the
threefoil knot as edge (upper right). To the lower right a Klein
bottle, and to the middle left a knot from Rob Scharein's knotplot
website. The minimal surfaces were made by Surface Evolver and then converted by hand into a Bryce-importable format.
Nano-ecology on Bothyga M'Vau.
The planet was seeded by the Makrimche
Polyst clade of AIs in the 6840's as an experiment in open-ended
eco-art. The nanosphere is based on 548 basic "celltypes", which can be
recruited into various forms. Most structures grow simply by persuading
the components of other structures to join them according to the complex
microsocial rules laid down in the initial cells, making biology and
memetics identical. Most structures are very light, and can easily drift
away in the methane-laden atmosphere. None of the structures exhibits
traditional intelligence, although fierce competition favors structures
able to deduce complex consequences of the microsocial rules.
Hanging buildings in the Magellan
range, Nova (Tau Ceti II). The massive nanofeedstock pipelines
into the Upback Massif have been active for almost 7000 years,
accumulating a sizeable symbolic meaning to Nova inhabitants. In 5300
the government began to use hanging prisons suspended from the
pipelines in the many canyons for certain antisocial crimes (with or
without constant online public monitoring). After a few years, the
idea of living in such hanging buildings began to catch on; by 5324
the voluntary inhabitants outnumbered the prisoners by 10:1, and
eventually the prisons were sold as apartments at an immense
profit. Since then the popularity of hanging pipeline homes have waxed
and vaned, but there are always people wishing to live a digital
hermit life with as little physical contact with the rest of society
as possible, not to mention the status of owning one of the rare
hanging homes.
Vore Abergist Structures near Bill and Bull
(Delta Eridani IV-V). (Different
view). The Abergist culture and especially its disbandment remains
one of the enigmas of the Inner Sphere. The megastructures surrounding
Bill and Bull appear to be largely for energy production, but many of
the baroque structures in more remote orbits appear to be neither
habitats, computing nodes, storage units or industrial systems. Few
have been penetrated, as various microdefenses and cognitive traps
hide in the baroque architecture.
Solarist Empire Ship Light of
Truth. One of the smaller empire ships of the Solar Dominion,
merely 8 kilometers long and with 400,000 permanent inhabitants. It is
mainly a diplomatic vessel, facilitating cultural exchange and trade
in the Perseus Rift and Cygexba border. The biosphere has two
different climate zones regulated using advanced chaos control and a
subtle utility fog. Beneath the sea the ship holds 345 bays containing
extra housing, smaller crafts, museums, diplomatic mergers and
nanofactories.
Kenehan-LeRiche Complex 8437003 in Jupiter orbit,
late federation era.
The Kenehan-LeRiche complexes were at first communications and data
storage units with some nanoimmune duties, but became prime real estate
for federation AIs during the 3500's. More than ten million such
complexes were built and placed in orbit around Jupiter, making it a
dense computing nexus. The traditional modular design had cooling grids
that tended to be encrusted by sulphur dust from the Io stream, giving
them the nickname goldenwings.
Caretaker colonisation "seed" with
drive sail near the Triangulum Expanse. The seed, housed in a
protective housing, is approximately 4 meters long, the sail 20 meters
in diameter. The Penrose rhomboid patterning is a common identifier
among Caretakers, with different Caretakers using subtly different
patterns. This form of identification has spread to the Zoeific
Biopolity and other bioist clades.
The Golden Stirner, keterist
"representation of force" created at Aleph Absolute in 9669 to patrol
the Keter border. The ship is merely five kilometres long, but
contains a core of stabilised neutronium able to house a major AI. It
carries to 1014 millimeter-sized fighters and can use the
entire hull surfaces as a phased array gamma ray laser. It is
currently exploring the Serpens Region for evidence of the Ships of
the Law. Due to its allegiance to keterist hyperevolutionism it has
been claimed that it is allied with the Immanentization Crusaders, but
so far no evidence has been found. Its sister ships the Silver and
Palladium Stirner are currently trade-force envoys to the NoCoZo.
Hatching biowar eggs in the asteroid
belts of the Triumphant Fate system, 7985. The standard Biovirate
template involved a plant-like growth on carbonaceous asteroids,
feeding a spherical "egg" that eventually detaches and frees itself
from the cocooning growth. Eggs hatch after 10-20 months, birthing a
biowar. The shell contains secondary seeds, which will drift to other
asteroids to plant the growth.
The SZ Crater VII ISO "Goldilocks".
The ISO is 150 kilometres across and
consists of tangles of fullerite threads with superconductor cores and
irregular diamondoid computational cores. The threads enable it to
interact with the magnetic field of SZ Crater VII, including setting up
intense resonance modes and changing orbit. There are three other ISOs
in the system, called the Three Beers (relating to an old bioid tale)
orbiting the second planet. The ISO main intellect is a Solarist
theoestheticist multimind that constructed the object in 5400. At
present it is a monastic retreat for ais, uploads and alifes of the
Fredermann sect of Solarism.
Habitat building in Morkraimu-style on Eden. Although the architect
herself did not create more than seven buildings on the planet and two
habitats in orbit, she inspired generations of Edenite architects when
designing arcologies for the equatorial jungles. This one, Kutebati, was
constructed in 5950 by Clearminda of Lattir and restored in 6848, 7344
and 9599.
Hider habitats during one of the rare instances of contact with inner
sphere powers. In 9694 a delegation from the Greylag Arts Court met with
representatives of the Aswadu clan of backgrounders at Ross 128 for
negotiations in handling art smuggling. This unique meeting allowed the
delegation a rare glimpse of hider habitats, although it is not unlikely
they were decoys.
Wormhole. View through a traversable artificial wormhole. The white lines are struts of exotic matter threading the wormhole throat, keeping it from pinching off.
Crash. Something breaking up during re-entry.
Asherah, Artemis Lunar's first base in
high moon orbit. Although intended mainly as a transit-point and
microgravity industrial park, the permanent settlers eventually
outcrowded the industrial section and turned Asherah into a
residential habitat. The design became the blueprint for a large
number of low-gravity orbital cities across the solar system. Asherah
itself remained in function up until the nanoswarm disaster.
Battle of Erson, 42 Tauri IV. One of the
most bitter battles of the Second Consolidation War. As Metasoft
dropped four million Orbit-Ground Occupation Units onto the
continent Erson, the Geminga Orthodoxy used their remaining stockpiles
of antimatter to open magma chambers in the Lense range. The resulting
massive eruption flooded easter Erson with lava, halting the OGOU
advance, killing 120,000 civilians who could not be evacuated and
permanently unbalancing the planetary climate. In the end it merely
brought the Orthodox a few days of time.
Imhotep. Imhotep, despite a common
background, rose to become vizier during the reign of pharaoh Djoser
through his enormous talent and dedication. He designed and led the
building of the Step Pyramid at Sakkara, initiating the use of stone
on a large scale in Egyptian architecture. He combined the roles of
administrator, poet, architect and priest-physician, eventually
becoming deified as the patron of medicine, writing and
knowledge. People who deride interdisciplinary interests should
consider this.
Seshat, Great Lady of the House of
Books. Also known as Sefkhet-abwy, the Silicon Goddess, the Glass Cat
and Our Lady of Mathematics. Among the Inner Sphere superintelligences there exist an archetypal attractor or perhaps office as Seshat, providing a shared interface to trans-singularity mathematical and notational understanding.
Chuan Tsu's Scorpion. An illustration I did for my short story with the same name.
Servant Robot. Neo-Victorian lightweight servant robot. Although spare parts are hard to come by (especially the cloned mahoganny wood for casings), connaisseurs claim the Valet Prime is unsurpassed in its ability to discreetly blend in, perform menial chores and carry messages.
Word Brain. Writing is the oldest, most powerful form of intelligence amplification.
Wooden Antiprism. Abstract
game with wood-colored reflections and lights inside a structure made of
metaballs located at the vertices of an antiprism.
Vegetable Thing. Sometimes the tide washes up strange seeds and fruits on the shore. You never know what will sprout if you plant them...
Thingie. A find for the alien beachcomber.
Squadd. Who knows?
Sphere fantasy. Lattices of spheres produce wonderful interference patterns, hinting at the underlying symmetries of space. In this picture the shading of the spheres produces a bright, a dark and a neutral set of concentric circles.
Soddy. A series of explorations of spheres tangent to each other in various ways. Named after Sir Fredrick Soddy, who famously stated the formula relating the radii of mutually tangent circles (which had been discovered by Rene Descartes long before) as a poem, as well as the properties of tangent spheres.
Soddy 2D
Soddy 1D
Soddy 3D
Soddy 3
Grey Sphere
Grandspace
Gigeresque
Snakes and Ladders. They like to fly in the sunset.
Singularity. The worlds are accelerating up the exponential incline towards the singularity. Where will they end? The only way of knowing is to follow them into the skies.
Junsanpa ships ascending. The Junsanpa have always favored form over function, regarding streamlining as selling out to the dreary entropy of matter. Instead they favor deliberately baroque and brighly colored ships, powered by powerful fusion drives and dynamic chaos control to overcome the crass demands of air and space.
Rock. Holiday picture from Bay of Sculptures, Zarathustra (Gamma Pavonis II).
Reality's Twin. A relative to the wooden antiprism picture, intended as cover for E. Shaun Russel's CD "Reality's Twin".
Posthuman Buddha. How do you tell whether a posthuman is friendly? From the filename.
English park with ginko and alien. It is a little known fact that most alien incursions occur in English landscape parks rather than French baroque or Italian renaissance parks.
Paulan. Aquatic inhabitant of Paula. The Paulans are Nautilus-like floating/swimming beings, approximately one meter long and protected by a light but strong shell. The move using two specialised paddle feet, gathering nutrients and making tools using their four main arms. Among terragens their pottery is widely regarded as outstanding, making many unscrupulous traders try to break the Metasoft-imposed cultural protection embargo.
Miracle City tower. Miracle City is
one of the most famous marvels of the Serpens region, a planet
encrusted with fractal buildings extending far into orbit. They are
maintained using self-regulating nanotechnology and femtotech, keeping
the billions of inhabitants free to pursue their manifold goals. (Sometimes the building texture changes
).
Hell - High Energy Laser Launch site at the Baykonur Republic. Owned and operated by Phoenix Space Development, the Baykonur HELL is the most controversial and currently (2045) cheapest way into orbit. It is powered by 5 10 gigawatt nuclear reactors, able to launch one "porcelain bell" vehicle each hour.
Heaven Habitat (view close to reactor end). Heaven is
Phoenix Space Development Corporation's orbital station, largely
manufactured using asteroid material. The 36 modules are connected
using polycarbon cables and rotate together in order to simulate 0.5 G
gravity. It has been called the most expensive office space in the
solar system, although the price is only marginally larger than the
top prices of Hong Kong in 2037.
Genome. Bacterial genome escapting
into the third dimension. Many species will survive longer on the Net
and in databases than they ever did in nature.
Dragon towers in the winter.
Dandelions. One day human clades will scatter like dandelion seeds from Earth, floating on the solar wind to other fertile places where they can grow into billions of new humanities.
Purple stairs. It is said that if you can climb the purple stairs despite their ferocious twisting and uncertain topology, you will find a place where destiny can be reprogrammed and infinity stored in small green bottles. Most people discount such tales, suggesting that the stairs never end.
Red Stairs doesn't lead anywhere, but constant use still makes the paint flake.
Picotech manipulation chamber. A typical picotech workshop, approximately one millimeter large. Such workshops, manipulating macroscopic amounts of exotic matter, strange matter or antimatter carry huge insurance premiums unless located at very remote orbits.
Enrastered Link Connection Inner, the
famous Metasoft poet, diplomat and memeticist. This picture was taken
shortly before the 6739 meeting at Sacred Heart, in a NeoCog-style
frondling room at Olmarest Ashram.
Armageddon. Moody landscape inspired by a painting by Hieronymus Bosch and a dream I had about meteor impacts.
The Meeting. After achieving individuality
the xeroclast meets the significant times. At the meeting the meaning
of the universe is decided. Hencefar local structures are amplified
and the location established, unless equal knowledge intercedes.
Desktop Sea. A small whimsy. What do you use interfaces for? The source code beneath the desktop is of course DeCSS.
Flowering near the Aden castle. During
the early phase of their lifecycle, the dragon castles bud "flowers"
to transmit and receive plasmid messages. The castle proper can be
seen to the left, as well as two fragments of seedhives to the right,
earlier destroyed by NERD sterilisation grenades.
Eurydice: Phoenix Space Development's
first manned asteroid mining craft shortly before departure to 3361
Orpheus. The ship employed a nuclear thermal engine, heating liquid
hydrogen in a graphite-uranium reactor. An older version of the picture had fewer bumpmaps
and a different architecture of the fuel tanks.
Macrostats above Mt. Hara (April, Beta Hydri II).
Merry Newtonmas. A wintery Newtonmas
celebration in the far north. Surrounding the tree are the platonic,
archimedian and Kepler-Poinsot polytopes.
Stairs of Freedom. The DeCSS source has
been used as raw material for this picture (it forms the stairs), as
can be seen in the gzipped pov source for
the picture. Incidentally, it would be possible to extract the DeCSS
source from the povray code, but then again, it could be extracted
from (say) any sufficiently large textbook in computer science just by
removing the right text. An example, as well as an
animated version of the picture are available.
Images from Orion's Arm:
The Sagittarius Sphere long distance colonisation ship Mur in the
middle of the War and Peace Nebula (NGC 6357), sometime in the
7500's. The Mur is generally believed to be the origin of the clade
that would eventually become the core of the Laughter Hegemony.
Padang Harbour
arcology, 2516. The nanoswarms became especially fierce in the
tropics thanks to the larger amount of available biomass and solar
energy, although during the Gray Spring the amount of ash and grey
dust in the atmosphere slowed them. Being located in the South Chinese
Sea, Pedang avoided most of the silicovores, but the struggle between
the Madura replicator and the Sharp Orchid 3.2 bluebot consumed all
transition metals and organic matter in the vicinity.
Ion drive ship of the Kandefinizione AI
clan in the vicinity of S106 IRS4 in the Cygnus region. Like most
Kandefinizione ships it is elaborately sculpted, in this case in bioid
gothic. This type of ships are used for deeptime exploration,
especially in dense interstellar media. Length: one meter. Mass: 870
kg. Crew: one intellect. Passengers: up to 170,000 fully active
singularity 2 sentients in nanostorage. Note: in order to image both
the ship and nebula the image was overexposed, and the ion engine
output appears very bright. In reality the engines do not produce more
than a few watts of visible output. (The gorgeous nebula picture is
from the Subaru Telescope)
Silent One City. A typical city of the
Silent Ones, housing a few thousand individuals within a 14 kilometer
high megastructure.
The Seat of
Judgement. The main tower of Seat of Judgement, capital of the
Negentropy Alliance.
Terraforming macrostructures at
Kirch, a former venusian world in the outer Solar Dominion is in the
final stages of terraforming by the Disciples of St. Fogg. A solar
shade is located outside the picture several million kilometres to the
left, keeping the planet in the shadow-cone. Above the planet the main
soletta orbits, reflecting sunlight onto the planet. It is surrounded
by control solar sails and maintenance stations. Around the moon Frial
the local garden can be seen, currently in the process of growing the
seed biosphere of the planet. Frial was used as a source of reducing
material to reduce the atmosphere of Kirch; the structure currently
acting as garden produced energy to drive several thousand mass
drivers launching iron, calcium and magnesium dust at the planet.
Comet impact 21600123-5 striking Hellas Planita, the designated main
target area on the southern hemisphere of Mars. The constant stream of
ice packages from the outer system striking Mars at regular intervals
did not cause much problems for near-planet traffic control and did in
fact keep the Mars alliances well supplied with volatiles for their
orbital habitats. Only a handful of accidents did occur, the most
serious when 22070712-1 hit a settlement in the Terra Tyrrhena after
an unexpected very strong outgassing a few minutes before impact.
Cold beach.
Psi Serpentis V in the middle stages of being terraformed by Lander
Geotech (approximately 4049). The formerly hot greenhouse world has
been cooled using solar shades and the atmosphere thinned by Sagan
algae. A relative simple terraforming target, although the high level
of nitrogen in the geosphere and the occasional flares of the star
made it somewhat hard to balance ecologically.
Peregrinate adornments confiscated at
the 8210 Temple Klartau incident. The adornments are diamondoid held
in metal frames, housing what appears to be a sophisticated picotech
system of unknown intelligence and capabilities. Investigations proved
inconclusive as the adornments did not cooperate with the authorities.
The ruins of Admntop on Grudat a few
years after being reached by the first supernova blasts from the
Gehenna cluster in 9493. Although the initial blasts did not directly
wipe out surface life on Grudat, they destroyed the ozone layer and
nearly doubled the total energy input. The inhabitants retreated to
underground habitats as the surface was seared, eventually abandoning
it altogether.
The Wassily Kandinsky and the Piet
Mondrian during boarding in Cytherea orbit, First Federation
period. Why paint starships boring grey?
Branches of Victory, bias drive
patrol ship belonging to the Rikendra 43 clade of the Orion
Federation. The ship is equipped with advanced nano stealth systems
(deactivated in the picture) and mainly intended to patrol the outer
regions of the Rikenda 43 controlled systems on the lookout for
ferals. Length 400 meters, total mass 54 million kilograms. Crew: one
drive AI, two tactics caste, one engineering caste. Another background, from the Cygnus
region.
Fractal GUT-ship of unidentified
origin observed near the Keyhole Nebula in 9942 by Linelayer 3 of
the Fellowship of Carina. The form is noticeable similar to the
Efficiency Maximization Paradigm biosphere upgrader ships, involving
reconfigurable smart matter bulk that can detach into fighters or
infiltration devices. Estimated length 1455 meters.
Soft Cathedral carrier ship Allosaurus,
escaping from the Taung Offensive in 6522. The Allosaurus was
transporting a complement of Offensive Terraforming Beings to Taung
when the system came under picotech attack from the Sagittarius
Sphere. The ship managed to escape using the OTBs as makeshift
sacrifical defense drones, and eventually reached Utte Vais in the
Negentropy Alliance after a 340 lightyear journey.
Tullock Hauma, pitch drive passenger
ship (Murmolyss Translation of Gordica, Metasoft). Length 350
meters, mass 94 million tons. The spacetime distortion is clearly
visible. Since the tidal forces in most of the ship are in excess of
500 G, it is only used for solid state passengers. The advertisement
patterns offer random prognistic extelopedias.
Flash. The destruction of the
Danab-Gantor Stargate Plex seen from the surface of Pico Danab II
during the Version War.
Historical site maintenance droid Kazuo
Sakamura 45 in the garden of the Inacio Uplift Sanctuary, Duino,
Earth. The gathering of Earth rainwater is a traditional duty for the
highest ranking site maintenance droids before the pilgrimage season.
Biorec of Invart Caue Ti during a
recitation in the woods above Legas Arch on Klarus. His
reinterpretations of Klarus history in the light of the Harvest
fragments and the myths of his relativist upbringing in the Eta Carina
Rush have been a source of major controversy and amusement during the
last five Recitation/Recreation Weeks. (The filiaments and membranes
act as both auditory, olfactory and electrical sensing organs, as well
as pheromone communicators. The background is a frame from the film Panspermia by
Karl Sims; when I get the computer power I will evolve my own forest.)
Unidentified genemod or replicant
beauty. (The background is part of an image from Artificial
Evolution for Computer Graphics, Karl Sims, Computer Graphics,
25(4), July 1991, pp. 319-328).
Interstellar catapult at Duktig of the
Chronos Cluster, delivering a train of diamondoid unfolders to Ikaros
for the terraforming of Ikaros III. The cargo is accelerated using
local spacetime manipulation, producing an intense gravitational
gradient that accelerates it with minimal force. The packages will be
received after 164 years at Duktig, with a maximal deviation of 10
meters.
Truth Lake. A small experiment with
Bryce and a tiny bit of postprocessing.
Self-contained. Small self-contained worlds.
Babel Completed. Despite huge cost
overruns and environmental protests, the tower of Babel is now
completed. And even the harshest critics have grudgingly accepted that
the benefits outweighs the costs.
Angel. A slightly manichean picture,
dedicated to all space and future enthusiasts. Is gravity or will
stronger? And how strong are the chains?
Pointer. Upward. Outward. Forward.
Solarians. Portrait of some solarians from my game setting.
Energy landscape. Energy landscape of a neural network, with states crawling around looking for energy minima.
Daisyspace. The mathematical space of
cow permutations. Rendered in Bryce as a submission to the Bryce Cow
Gallery of Steven Lareau. I think there are too few reflections to
create a good infinity feeling.
Generator of Diversity. What is the true source of diversity? Is it just chaos, chaos with selection or is true randomness needed?
Geological Stability. A Magritte-like play in Bryce.
The Ethics of Creation, series of pictures in PovRay and Bryce featured during TransVision 99.
Ethics of Creation
Infinite Fun Space (source)
Norrland Forest
Standard Interface
Starship in a Field
Puppet
A Squid on the Chessboard
The Afterlife (source)
Gödel Tree
The Stele of Immortality
A Stranger Attractor
Grey Goo. Wild nanomachines running amok
- a disaster I am sceptical of, but that might make some fun
pictures. These nanites are furiously building and rebuilding whatever
they were made for, but evolution and competition have made them
forgot the original design, except for some basics. (source)
CMYK Rosette. The CMYK rosette, depicted using blobs. A nice pattern, hidden inside most printed matter.
The Transhuman Condition. An art
exhibition featured on Transhumanist Art Centre
Domino Effect
Ars Steganographia
Air Castle
Dance of the Replicators
Quaenos' Pillar
Blood Music (source)
Kindergarten (source)
Refreshment Center
Metastep
Mondrian
The Grid
Hieros Gamos (source)
Unity (source)
Portrait
Chateau (source)
Night of the Broken Dolls. Based on a
holiday in David Zindell's The Broken God where the spirits of
erased artificial life patterns and AI programs are honored. The table
depicts a game of life pattern building ever more glider guns. The
sphere on the table is of course Hanuman li Tosh's first Universal
Computer.
Collection. A new hobby:
collecting fractals?
Unbounding the
Future. Nanomachines attacking the chains that hold us back. I
used a "reverse" DLA model to create the damage to the link, with
randomly diffusing nanites eating away spheres of metal. This picture
took almost a year to implement from the initial idea I got in
September 1996 until I was happy with the result; the hardest part was
making the stream of nanites bend in a nice way, not the DLA model.
Megascale Engineering. A megascale structure in orbit around the Earth. The truss-structure is a catenoid.
Voxel Manifestation. An experiment in
volume rendering. The voxels are colored depending on their position
in the cube, and their opacity is determined by a twisted planar
gaussian function.
Escaton II. A 3D-version of the old escaton picture using real texture mapping and satelite data.
Ede the God. Based on an idea I
had in a dream and the jupiter
brain gods in David Zindell's books. Ede consists of myriads of
planet-sized nanocomputer conglomerate, orbiting a
bright sun and in permanent communication with each other.
Alien Tunnel. An illustration for
a science fiction scenario I'm working with. The tunnels were made
using cylindrical blobs, and the texture is a normal map. The result
is nicely alien.
Alpha et Omega. A kind of hermetic chaosphere
(a babelsphere?). I especially like the lens flare effect, created
with Chris Colefax's lensflare include file.
Pentagons. This picture was created
as a part of my experimentation with tiling regular pentagons (what is
the densest possible tiling?). It is not a dense tiling, but it has a
nice recursive symmetry.
Metastep. This evolved from reading
Douglas Hofstadter's essays about typography, creativity and Gödel's
theorem. How large is the space of possible 'A's? And how to break out of
it? The letters were grabbed from the Monotype Sample Page.
Clone Labyrinth. A celebration of the
cloning of Dolly, and a suggestion that the ethical dilemmas people talk about
actually are just a mirror labyrinth - the way out is closer than you think.
Breakthrough. For this picture I used
a computer object somebody created (I don't know who, unfortunately. Thanks!)
and various other images and objects I had lying around. Making the wallpaper
was the hardest part. The documents are
about quantum gravity and intersections of multidimensional polyhedra.
Dawn. I wanted to play with the new
halo objects in v3.0, but ended up with a dawn scene.
Emergence. I tried to symbolize how
life can grow out of information; the floor is a game of life pattern (with
a glider gun in the foreground) while the plant is an L-system.
Transcend! I just knew I had to
create this one. At first I tried real DNA data, but the helices didn't
look clear enough, so I settled for a simpler model.
The Hermetic Truth of Hadrons. Very
simple and clean picture, contains several obscure in-jokes about the
quark structure of hadrons, geometry, gnosticism and Escher. Or not.
Nanocluster over Stockholm. I have always
wondered how densely you can pack dodecahedra; this pattern was the result
of one (failed) scheme. The ground below is from an actual satelite photo,
the water reflected in the facet in the foreground to the right
is Brunnsviken, and in the right facet below it you can see Norrtull
and the northern parts of Vasastan.
Early Stage and
Late Stage of
the construction of a Dyson Sphere. Not entirely realistic, but gives an
impression of the structure of the sphere. What I really would like to
do is to create a picture that trule shows the scale of the project,
but that is very hard (Earth would be an invisible pinprick in these
pictures).
The Elements. The five elements, the
five platonic solids and how they fit together in the standard pentagram.
Ego0, Ego16, Ego64. A series of small pictures that could (and
should) form an animation. Started out as an essay about identity and
exoselves.
Reversible Mind. A stellated
dodecahedron framework surrounding a sphere.
Helix. I tried to depict the upward
spiral of evolution using a small c program to generate a helix of spheres.
Note the spiral reflections on the upper winding.
Escaton. Very simple but successful
picture.
Pattern Web. A play with recursive
declarations in PoVRay. It started as an attempt to create a spider...
City. I had the vision of a posthuman
city built around the edge of a black hole. Not quite what I intended, but
nicely alien.
My Web. I tried making an imagemap-based main page, but it was useless. But making the picture
was fun.
Island. For my weird page. Not that good,
but sufficiently playful.
Mage: the Ascension. For my Mage page.
Magick. For my magick page. Crude, but
I like the interplay between the two-dimensional symbols of order and
the three dimensional symbol of chaos.
Ascension. One of my earliest. Not very
refined, but dramatic.
The Raytracing Home Page. Links to various raytracing resources.
PoVRay Home Page
PoV Utilities
Konsty's RayTracing Hub. Raytracings especially of planetary images.
Mathematical Surfaces
Texture Library
The Silent Universe. Magnificent presentation!
Le Livre des Commencements
Lauren Lapré. Lparser, polyhedra and rendering.
Anders Main Page
