Resounding Success

Motivated by the stability of the small Age I wrote in order to test the Remote Age Viewer, I have embarked on a more ambitious project - the writing of my second Age, Eh'ko. So far, I have mastered the describing of the atmosphere, landmass and even water and I believe that the fabric of the Age is robust enough now for me to make longer visits, with an eventual residence if all goes well.

  

Three Is The Magic Number

Shh, don't tell De La Soul... but they were *almost* correct. The magic number is actually 3.281. Don't believe me? Well, if you don't learn this 4 digit wonder by heart, your Plasma Ages could just look a little on the teeny side. Micro-Ages.

It Takes An Age

The Remote Age Viewer is now written into a small, but stable Age for visiting:

Age Written: Remote Age Viewer 1
Age Written: Remote Age Viewer 2
Age Written: Remote Age Viewer 3

All Dressed Up, But...

An update on the Remote Age Viewer. UV mapping, texturing and importing into Blender is now complete:

  

Next stage is to write a small Age to install the Viewer into. I'll be back when that's done with the results.

Down The Wire

I was thinking about computer networks the other day - token ring, ethernet etc. and how it seems that technology has gone full circle. With the advent of operating systems like Microsoft Windows, desktop computers took on the mantle of processing and storing data locally thus making a 'mainframe' type infrastructure almost obselete in favour of small workgroups. But in recent years, things seem to have very much reverted back, with desktop machines effectively becoming 'dumb' terminals again.

That led me to consider what, if any, type of data distribution the D'ni would have used. I'm inclined to believe it would have been based on a mainframe architecture and in line with that thinking I have come up with a concept for an terminal-style Age viewer. Along the sames lines as the Nexus, the master 'processor' would constantly monitor a library of linking books, outputting the window into each Age to a terminal such as this for remote viewing:

It's All In The Mix

As a 3D digital artist, I use a variety of both 2D and 3D applications in order to get a job done. Blender is still very much a new application to me though and learning it has only been necesssary in order to write Ages. I model and texture alot faster in other applications, specifically LightWave 3D. So finding an efficient workflow between other applications and Blender is a must if I am to write my Ages faster and last night I finally found one - the Wavefront .OBJ format.

I'm already familiar with the Wavefront .OBJ format and have used it on numerous occasions to import/export models in 3D design projects. However, with Age writing I wanted to be able to import fully UV textured models that immediately displayed correctly in Blender, making them completely ready for vertex shading and export via PyPRP. LightWave's native .OBJ export functionality was allowing me to import completed models, but UV texturing and texture mapping were still having to be done manually, a time-consuming and inefficient task.

But thanks to Mike Green's MTL Importer/Exporter, the task has become a doddle. LightWave doesn't export a companion material (.MTL) file when it exports in the .OBJ format, but the plugin above does the job nicely.

If you are going to try the same cross-application workflow, one thing that I did discover was that Blender was only happy to correctly import the .MTL file when it had been written in the Maya .MTL format. Worth checking to see if this format is supported by your 3D application's .OBJ/.MTL exporter.

Something I've Myst

I've been an avid fan of the Myst genre for a long time and thoroughly enjoyed each immersive game title and novel over the years. Back in December 2006, I was briefly involved with a comunity of Age Builders who were working hard at 'writing' their own Myst-inspired Ages using Blender 3D and a community designed export plugin. I also signed up a for an empty Shell (#205) in the amazing Ahra Pahts project and began learning to model and texture using Blender.

Real life and some other interests, as they often do, got in the way and a year on I am rekindling my interest for Age writing. Some things have changed in the community during my absence - a new, better PyPRP plugin, the disbanding of the Age Builders and amalgamation with the Guild of Writers, and of course the sad news of the closure of 'Myst Online: URU Live'. The Age writing community is continuing to flourish though and I feel that it is again time for me to brush up on my Blender skills and continue the writing of both my own Age and my Ahra Pahts Shell.

This journal is to be a record of the progress and discoveries I make during my writing.