Browsed by
Category: Art+Design

Survival Research Laboratories

Survival Research Laboratories

Comments 0 Comment

Before Battlebots, in the 80’s, there was a group called Survival Research Laboratories (wiki). I remember seeing a video clip of them back in the 80’s on an episode of Ripley’s Believe It or Not hosted by Jack Palance (long before YouTube kids). It showed clips of frightening, dangerous machines that destroyed and ambled around with the most disturbing movements.

The mechanical creations made horrendously loud noises, shot things, exploded, emitted huge flame plumes, electricity, and projectiles. They played disturbing music with screams and dialog from horror movies. The machines had huge metal arms, gears, and blades that smashed and sliced everything as they destroyed each other and everything in their paths.

It was kind of like watching the mechanical version of death metal – or Einstürzende Neubauten. None of it looked safe for the bystanders. Many onlookers appeared to be genuinely afraid. Injuries to the crew and bystanders did occur.

This group was (and is) called Survival Research Laboratories – a mechanical performance art group. They have a YouTube channel and still seem to be doing shows.

Here’s a pseudo-documentary about the group:

Turns out – they’re not gone. I just recently saw this video from Greg E. Leyh at Lightning on Demand who resurrected his old Plasma Cannon.

Volumetric display from Voxon

Volumetric display from Voxon

Comments 0 Comment

Voxon has been showing off it’s Voxon VX2 VLED technology to create interactive volumetric holograms. It costs $6,800 so it’s definitely not cheap.

It’s likely using a high rpm spinning panel to generate the image which means that dampening the sound of the spinning array, keeping the display carefully synced to avoid pixel drift, and are some of the primary engineering concerns. They do provide a Unity and Blender SDK which is interesting.

Here’s a version of Doom playing on the volumetric display

Reminds me of the fellow that re-created the projector from Riven using a similar method.

Links:

Loading Collada files for Maya and 3DSMax

Loading Collada files for Maya and 3DSMax

Comments 0 Comment

Collada was an interchange file format for 3D application that started around 2004 and largely died around 2016. I actually worked in a group with Remi Arnaud when it was being used for a project at Intel.

It was a sound idea. With lots of 3d packages and engines out there, getting files from one tool or engine to another was never easy. Since every authoring tool and game uses different structures for storing mesh, material, animation data, etc – the Collada format tried to define a open-standard format to store these relationships in an XML style text file. This allowed maximum flexibility to define relationships; but had the unfortunate side effect of generating sometimes gigantic files that were extremely slow to load.

While it was an extremely flexible format for exchanging data between packages or game engines, once you got there, it was dramatically faster to use a native binary format. Trying to load or save a XML based file format to load a block of content often took 10-100x longer than a binary version. The speed alone meant that it wasn’t practical for any realtime purposes.

Additionally, supporting the entire Collada spec would mean supporting every kind of data relationship – even if the tool or game didn’t need it. It meant that loaders often only implemented the desired features – which meant that you were almost back to where you started from. Custom loaders and savers with limited features. Except Collada files were gigantic and slow to load/save. A real problem when your primary costs are the speed of your content development.

Collada’s practical use was therefore primarily in one or two time transfers between tools. As time went on, and tools and engines consolidated on a few efficient binary formats, formats such as Collada became less and less useful. By the early 2010’s, development and work on it largely died. The last loaders were apparently updated in 2018 and the github site that hosts the binary versions is kind of broken.

At any rate, if you do need to load an old Collada file (.dae, etc) then you’ll need a copy of 3D Studio Max or Maya, and a plugin loader. You can download one of the last collada loaders here.

Install the plugin (make sure Maya is closed) and then start your tool (Maya in my case).

Ensure the Collada plugin is loaded. Go to the Windows-> Settings/Preferences -> Plug-in Manager in Maya and ensure the fbxmaya, FBX, or ColladaMaya pluings are loaded and/or set to auto load:

When you want to import a Collada file, go to File->Import and select the fbx/collada file you want to load and it should load it up.

Links:

New Mexican Christmas

New Mexican Christmas

Comments 0 Comment

The glowing brown paper bags that adorn Southwestern walkways, churches, and homes during the Christmas holiday season are called luminarias. They’re also sometimes called farolitos, or “little lanterns,” and date back more than 300 years. The New Mexican tradition began when Spanish villages along the Rio Grande displayed the unique and easy-to-make lanterns to welcome the Christ child into the world.

I loved seeing these when I lived in Albuquerque. They’re largely only found in the dry winters of the southwest as they would be buried in East coast snows, blow 100 miles away in Midwest winter winds and snow, or would be rained into a soggy mess in the Pacific Northwest.

Visit Albuquerque has a little write-up on them that’s pretty cool on how to make them yourself.