Nodes and Web 3.0 October 21, 2007
Posted by mwj as 3d, art, crowd sourcing, virtual worlds, web3.0. trackback.Last week at the Masters of Digital Media we were paid a visit by the creators of Houdini, a high end 3d animation suite. I haven’t used much in the way of 3d tools (like Maya, 3D Studio Max or Blender), but I am getting more interested in the subject. This is mostly because I believe that Web 3.0 will consist of traversable 3d space, like the Metaverse from Snow Crash.
Houdini is the most expensive 3d animation software out there, but the big selling point is that it allows users to solve visual problems in a procedural way. This sort of proceduralism works like so: first, you take a standard primitive object, like a basic pyramid or a sphere. Then you select an effect, say the colour red, and apply it to the sphere. After this, perhaps you take a certain bumpy texture and apply it, or a certain set of commands that morph the sphere into a different shape.
Each of these effects are called nodes, and the beauty of them is that they can be re-applied to a different shape to generate a different object. Or we can follow the advice of one of the crew from Houdini, and think of proceduralism as cooking. If we think of this style of creation as making a soup, the object that you apply everything to is like the stock or base, and each node you add is a different ingredient.
This is a video of Reactable, a musical instrument of sorts that uses proceduralism to generate very interesting sounds. Each individual sphere is acting as a node, which alters some aspect of the sound, such as its pitch or frequency, to create a wide array of sounds.
This idea of using proceduralism to generate visual and audio creations is a very powerful one, and I think we will see more of it as crowd-sourcing and user-generated content becomes more popular. As one of the Houdini guys pointed out, re-arranging nodes is a form of programming, a visual way to design complex code.
One last example of the power of proceduralism can be seen in an advertisement for Guinness, designed with Houdini. The ad, which can be found here, depicts the de-evolution of three Guinness drinkers, from their current frat boy selves back to baby reptiles in the primordial ooze. About a quarter of the way in, we see the British countryside go from fully populated to an empty green as we traverse back through thousands of years in about four seconds. The challenge here was how to recreate history, so that the population seemed to occur according to some plan.
The solution described to us by the Houdini representatives was elegant and simple. First, the creators of the ad established all of the old church sites that were formed when humans began living in the particular area used for the ad. The churches were drawn into the picture. Then, using proceduralism, the areas around these churches were populated in a semi-random way with only a few different buildings (nodes), with the properties of each varied only slightly to create a number of different looking buildings. Finally, the entire process was played in reverse, and the effect is a believable recreation of how civilization may have formed.
These techniques no doubt will be used to generate all sorts of believable landscapes, from individual blades of grass right up to buildings and mountains and rivers. But more than that, proceduralism and nodes makes powerful tools available to people who have little background in programming, by representing the coding process in a bite-sized, visual way, and take us one step closer to the 3D, user-generated web.
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