Terragen: Part II

My third attempt at playing with terrain generating software has apparently worked out pretty well. This time around I experimented with a few different things, but I tried to focus on shadows and textures. (The video is forthcoming, I just can't get it to upload for some reason).



Notes:
I used 9 layers of texture to hopefully make something that looked vaguely realistic (i.e. several greens, browns, and shades of gray). The shadows were automatically generated of course, but it was interesting trying to get them to interact with the plane throughout the flight. I ended up doing this manually by tweaking the levels of white and black of the cockpit through out the flight.

I didn't actually render a plane for this video. There was no way I would consider investing that amount of time. I just found a picture of a cockpit, got rid of the extraneous background, and dropped it in on top of the video.

However, I did draw a set of propellers... which took about five minutes. I used a radial blur to simulate higher velocities, because the rotation effect maxed out at 90 revolutions.

Fortunately, I had the necessary sound effects in my collection (a random disc of 6000 different sounds). My only complaint is that at two points there's a distinct amount of static which wasn't in any of the original WAV files.

Last year I bought a particle generation program called Particle Illusion (I highly recommend it, but it does take some learning). I purchased it primarily for fun, but it is extremely useful for generating a wide variety of effects, including the one at the end of the film.

UPDATE:

I've finally uploaded the video here.

Terragen

3D Animation has resurfaced in my life. I have the feeling that this is a distinctly bad thing, what with finals looming o’re the horizon. However, in the meantime it’s entirely too cool.

This was my second attempt playing with it at 2 am this morning:

Click here to see the video (requires the Divx codec found here).

I made this using four pieces of software in combination:
Terragen – actual rendering
CamPath – designing the flight
BMPSeq – turning the exported BMP sequence into an uncompressed AVI
Virtual Dub – compressing the uncompressed AVI into something that is reasonably sized

The interface for Terragen and CamPath are amazing intuitive and easy to figure out (at least it made sense to me). The above video took less than 45 minutes to design (but 3 hours to render). I’ve just been playing with it on my laptop thus far, we’ll see how my desktop can handle it.

In other news, Terragen 2 is coming out soon and it looks amazing.

A History of Toilets

There is one aspect of college that I fundamentally despise: living with other individuals that find flushing the toilet too taxing. I often utter "what the crap" when entering the bathroom and seeing that a sizeable fraction of the toilets have not been flushed.

The history of the human race demonstrates a complete and total loathing of feces, probably because they smell. However, anyone that has had the experience of living with 40 other men can appreciate the fact that sometimes there is often entirely too much pride in the accomplishment of successfully “taking a dump.” I digress; the historical sequence of events is one that I wish to peruse for the next few minutes:

2500 BC– The world is your toilet and fig leaves the first toilet paper.

2500 BC (if you’re in India) - The toilet is invented. Water born toilets flowed into a central sewer system. It only takes 4200 years for Europe to catch up. However, after the decline of the Indus valley civilization, India went to crap.

500 BC - 500 AD – Rome - slaves provide urine pots made of silver at dinner parties.

500 – 1500 – The Middle Ages – This was the era of cesspools and a generally unbearable odor. The wealthy simply have toilets that overhang their walls so that they can deposit their bowel movement outside. Hence the phrase “getting s**t on by The Man.”

However, this era also has another affectation that distinguishes it in the history of crap: throwing feces out the window into the street. This was widely regarded as a bad idea after it was realized that the spread of Black Death directly correlated with poor sanitation.

1501 – 1738 – Chamber pots. These devices allowed people to relieve themselves in the comfort of their bedroom. They were also often accompanied by chamber maids, which explains why the pots were used.

1596 - John Harrington invents the water closet if you happen to be in England. It wasn’t really used for the next 182 years. Stink.

1738 – Flush toilets are introduced!

1778 – Toilets are regarded as perfected when the slide valve is replaced by a crank valve. At the point in time, “pour” toilets were still the primary method of excrement deposit. On the other hand “poor” toilets are still wherever they want.

1890 – The cantilever toilet is invented. It involves a tank that is hung on the wall above the bowl to use gravity to flush.

1928 - Charmin is introduced. America utters a collective sigh of delight.

20th Century – Indoor plumbing, flush toilets and other forms of hygiene finally come into style and the modern bathroom is born.

21st Century – Heated seats. Automatic flushing. You know.. the bare essentials. Enough said.

25th Century – Lasers vaporize your poop.

Man has gone to great lengths to dispose of his excreta. However, I have a lurking suspicion that it has nothing to do with men and a whole lot to do with women. OK, it isn’t a suspicion. If it wasn’t for women we would all still be outside with fig leaves.

Oh… and this was written while perched on a toilet.

Monitor Art

I want to build this. Does anyone have any spare monitors lying around they might wish to donate? I wouldn't mind building an aquarium either.

This is my 200th post by the way. Not bad for a year and a bit. Long live Randomness!

End of Semester Syndrome (ESS)

Mathematical explanation by yours truly of why it's so hard to be productive at the end of the semester.

Craziness

I wish I could do half of these stunts (or even just a simple back flip). It's good to know how to jump off buildings and such... I think.

Where in the World?

The war of the search engines rages on[line]. The differences between the engines aren’t quite so blindingly apparent in text based World Wide Web. However, these differences are more visible when searching the actual world.

Each major engine, Google, Microsoft’s Live, and Yahoo, have different source data, styles, and interfaces for both mapping and satellite imagery. They seem to vary in levels of quality, but for my purposes, I selected an obscure corner of Pennsylvania: Grove City College and the White House.

Satellite Imagery:
Google:




Microsoft Live:


(White House is Censored)

Yahoo:



Grove City:
As you can't see (click the pics to actually be able to see), Google is a miserable failure. Live provides a sharp monochrome, but is distinctly out of date (two buildings built in 2002 are missing). Yahoo’s version is a recently updated and in color. While it may not be as crisp as Live, its other attributes make it the winner of this round.

White House:
Google is by far the best. Live is tragically censored. Yahoo is rather standoffish on this particular location.

Conclusion? There is no single "best" engine for aerial shots especially since they're all horribly out of date. However, I'm terrified of the day when these sites offer real time imagery.

Zoom:
While both Google and Yahoo redraw the entire view each time the zoom level is changed, Live makes a smoother transition in and out. Furthermore, Live actually utilizes your scroll wheel / touch pad to decrease random clicking.

Pan:
Meh. They’re all about the equal in terms of panning. Subjectively, Live appears to be smoother, whereas both Google and Yahoo render in “chunks.” Google smoothes out after you’ve been to a particular part of the map, but Yahoo stays choppy all the way through (relatively speaking). Yet, both Google and Yahoo offer a bonus feature: a mini map. For anyone that has played a Real Time Strategy game you know the value of the mini-map for finding things.

Search:
Google uses one bar, just type the address or business followed by the city and state or zip. You can also ask for directions from this one simple bar.


Yahoo functions much the same way, except it has a secondary bar for the destination.



Live has two bars, one for the “business name or category” and another for the location. Note: if you want to search for a particular address, you need to put all the information in the second bar. Furthermore, it does not copy your initial position into its “directions” box. However, it was unable to pinpoint the address “100 Campus Drive Grove City, PA.” In its favor, Live does store your most recent searches right on the map though.



Pizza:
This is by far one of the most important functions of any mapping service. For Google you search the map with another search (and you get 3,120 results for “pizza” with the map centered on Grove City). Live and Yahoo both give fewer, closer, results.

Yahoo has a handy little sidebar called “Find on the Map” which allows you to browse by category for community service (banks, doctors, etc), entertainment & shopping, restaurants (pizza is an option), and travel & transit (airports, parking, etc). All while leaving your original search location flagged.



Live also requires a second search, but because of their dual search bars, it’s easy just to type pizza in the first “business” bar. The detail is that it initially returned only three results, and worse yet my favorite option was missing. This is because when searching for a business without updating your location the default is to use the “current map view.” As you zoom outwards, more and more results appear.

Directions:
This is a look at the interface for searching, not accuracy or ease thereof. Google is wonderful and allows you to enter your sojourn in a "POINT A to POINT B" fashion in the single box. Furthermore, it provides the directions in a nice table with the key points in bold.

Yahoo provides both start and end on the main page. Keeps on using Flash, but looks similar to Google. No copy and paste for you, well, unless you use the printable view.

Live wants you to copy and paste or retype your original location. However, it lets you pick any point on the map as your start / destination with a quick right click. Also, it does not trace the route on the map; it merely provides the points where you need to turn.

Note: Apparently, both Google and Yahoo use the same source for directions.

Maps:
Google and Yahoo are the same. Live has less contrast and is thus harder to read. Also, it has really tiny road names.

Right Click:
Google: Does squat.
Yahoo: Tells you that you’re using Macromedia Flash 8.
Live: Gives you a handy drop down menu.


Address:
Google: http://maps.google.com/
Yahoo: http://maps.yahoo.com/beta/index.php
Live: http://local.live.com/

Cool Tidbits:
Google: It’s Google.
Yahoo: Nothing of note.
Live: Has a semi-transparent search bar that lets you see a bit of the map through it. Also, it remembers the last place you were looking at and starts your questing from that location. And it has a button that says "Locate Me" and it can find you by your current IP address. AND it has a "birds-eye view" feature for selected regions. Check out the White House.

The Results:

Aspect	Google	Yahoo	Live
Satellite Imagery Grove City College	1	3	2
Satellite Imagery White House	3	2	1
Zoom	1	1	3
Pan	2	1	3
Search	3	2	1
Pizza	2	3	1
Directions	3	2	1
Maps	3	3	1
Right Click	1	1	3
Address	2	1	3
Cool Tidbits	1	1	3
Total:	22	20	22

The Breakdown:
We have a tie. This isn't especially conclusive, especially if you look at the components of the score, you’ll see that Live gleens the majority of its points via nice flashy elements that push it to the eye-candy end of the spectrum. However, it really seems to be lacking under the hood (despite a nice Web 2.0 interface). So if I’m looking for directions from Point A to Point B, I’ll use Google. If I’m looking for a local business or restaurant Yahoo is looking pretty good, especially if I'm looking for it from orbit.

Each search engine has distinct inovations that continue to perpetuate the battle of the searches. This is an idea of the free market, multiple companies attempting to move their products closer to perfection through improvement, not price slashing (you can't beat free anyway).

Somebody other than me should take broad sampling for an in-depth comparison of the three in terms of Satellite Imagery. However, as of now, Yahoo seems to have the best images.

Product Branding

Branding - technical term - a process by which a metal brand is heated to extreme temperatures and then applied to a previously pure surface. See also disfigurement, grafiti, abomination.

If Microsoft made the ipod box, [product] branding, would be used.