John Wise

William Shakespeare once said, “All the world’s a stage. And all the men and women merely players.”

In his day, the majority of humanity experienced their stage from the perspective of the plot of land they farmed. A couple of hundred years later, the players found themselves in the cities where the stage was a factory floor. More recently, many of us found ourselves in some form of service industry performing for an audience of hungry and thirsty patrons who’d just come from a shopping spree at the mall.

The march of time, though, waits for no man or woman. Our stage is changing; it is transmogrifying.

With this change, our roles as players are going to once again be something quite different. This difference will be as significant to us as though Mr. Shakespeare had gone from witnessing his age to being teleported onto a jet flying from his merry-medieval England to 21st-century America from one day to the next.

Virtual Reality will be that disruptive. It is our new stage. And you are the player, the actor on that platform, an inhabitant of a new world. This alternative reality emerging from our imaginations is nothing less than a universe that will require our exploration. The difference with this age of discovery is that one need not be wealthy, an adventurer, or one of the lucky ones chosen to be an astronaut. All we must do is don a pair of VR glasses, have a powerful enough computer and download the app.

Some will say this will be an expensive proposition. Does anyone think it was cheap to go to the moon? Do you know that it typically costs more than $45,000 per person to go up Everest without a guarantee of reaching the top? Have you priced a penguin-watching trip in the Antarctic waters lately?

What is the value to us humans to see new things and have unimaginable experiences?

We are entering an age where almost anyone will be able to virtually participate in nearly any activity humans can dream of. The cost of entry is not free or cheap. But it’s never been free to enter the theater, eat a great meal, or travel the world. The difference is going to be that we are removing the barriers that have only allowed those of privilege to embark on humanity’s greatest adventures.

We recently had a question posed to us by @ExplorAVR in the Twitterverse regarding how we are tackling architecture theory for community building in Hypatia. Seems like a fair question that deserves more than a Tweet back, so here it is.

Before theory comes experience.

The founder of Timefire grew up in Los Angeles and Phoenix, Arizona, but went on to spend a decade in Europe before embarking on traveling the breadth of the United States. He pulls his inspiration from firsthand knowledge of the environments that define these lands. Forty years of observation and study formed the seed of what would be planted as the architectural cornerstone of Hypatia.

With life, we explore curiosity. From curiosity, knowledge can grow. Knowledge evolves until the wisps of wisdom alight our way.

From the historical decisions and serendipity that have built our most beloved cities to what is being written and talked about right now, these, too, are our architectural drivers. Hypatia is a reflection of what makes a city interesting and, hopefully, fun. We are taking heavy influence from the quaint corners that seem to universally delight travelers from around the world, such as Amsterdam, Barcelona, Venice, Zurich, and Osaka, to name but a few.

Next up are the ten design principles for Livable Communities as identified by the American Institute of Architects: 1. Design on a Human Scale, 2. Provide Choices, 3. Encourage Mixed-Use Development, 4. Preserve Urban Centers, 5. Vary Transportation Options, 6. Build Vibrant Public Spaces, 7. Create a Neighborhood Identity, 8. Protect Environmental Resources, 9. Conserve Landscapes, 10. Design Matters.

But we alone are not the ultimate voice and curator of what drives humanity’s architectural curiosity, and so while we will have a heavy hand in the development of the first phase of Hypatia, this city will evolve, as cities do, with the help of others who contribute to the design and building of a community. Over time, even the sacred halls that were the foundation of our city will be torn down and replaced by the crush of progress.

Until that moment comes, though, we will encourage others to take inspiration from their influences and dreams to join us on the virtual canvas to paint a new reality. So grab your sketchbook, brush up on your Frank Gehry, I.M. Pei, Moshe Safdie, Zaha Hadid, and Tom Wright, then join us to create our virtual city from the shared vision of artists from around the globe.

Over a year ago, we made the decision to use Blender as our primary 3D modeling and animation tool; you can read more about that here.

Today, I’ll go over some of the other factors that influenced this choice. First and foremost, the software is free. It also has the support of both Epic and Valve (important if you are a game/VR developer). Finally, it is very well-positioned for use in scientific visualization. And it is here that things can get into the weeds but are also very exciting for the scientifically inclined.

I have found over a dozen add-ons that extend and facilitate using Blender in some highly technical ways, as though 3D software wasn’t difficult enough. An “add-on” for Blender can also be seen as a plugin, a 3rd party application that hooks into the host software to deliver greater capability.

Three of these add-ons rise to the top of my list due to their ability to help Timefire build assets for our game Hypatia.

Sverchok is a procedural architecture tool that allows us to replicate forms where repetition would slow us down to a snail’s pace if we were forced to build every piece manually. Renowned architect Zaha Hadid is an expert in the field of this style of architecture, and while I have no idea what tools she uses, we can thank some programmers from Russia for giving the world this free add-on to allow all of us to explore and experiment with procedural architecture.

Animation Nodes is an add-on from Germany, with the generous support of others from around the globe, which is also free. This complex set of nodal-based tools gives the animator the power of procedural animation. An example use case for this is to animate 1000 similar on-screen objects. The artist controls the objects using node-based parameters and functions that are able to be assigned specific numeric and mathematical attributes. Repetitive tasks are thus reduced to understanding the flow of sequences that can be used to achieve the desired result of moving the objects along, say, a particular arc.

Tissue is more of an artist’s experimental friend as it relates to computational design. Originating from Italy, the add-on allows one to perform magic, or so it appears. Starting with a base mesh, the add-on “Tessellates” your objects into works of amazingly intricate works of art.

Now, on to the more esoteric add-ons. You’d better fasten your seat belt.

Whether you are studying brain sciences, atomic structures, biology, or computational fluid dynamics, there is an add-on for you. But let’s be serious: if you are a parent reading this, what is the likelihood you’ll up and decide to create some glycogen analysis visualizations? Your kids, though, should be encouraged to start learning some of these tools because multi-disciplinary education and broad knowledge are shaping up to be part of what is considered essential workplace skills. Plus, the tools are free.

To go into details about what the specific tools do would certainly weigh this blog entry down, maybe even sink it, but I will offer a hint of things.

There is BioBlender, another add-on from Italy. BioBlender provides the tools for exploring and visualizing biological molecules.

NeuroMorph is just the right gift for anyone interested in the morphometric analysis and visualization of 3D models created from electron microscopy image stacks – it, too is FREE!

Combine that with the add-on for creating dendritic structures with the aforementioned glycogen add-on, and your precocious 10-year-old will be performing Ph.D.-level brain analysis in no time.

There is also an Atomic clustering add-on, a protein data bank reader, and a tool for running building simulations so one can see how heat and air conditioning move through a structure. Maybe you are more interested in parametric anatomical modeling? There’s an add-on for that, too; it’s called PAM.

Finally, the folks at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are able to run Blender on a 300,000-core Jaguar Supercomputer. If you are thinking that $104 million for a computer is too rich for your wallet, you could always opt for the Nvidia Digits DevBox, but I’d wait for next year’s Pascal-based unit if I were you.

Oh, I almost forgot to tell you about the Gwyddion add-on for importing Scanning Probe Microscopy files.

Image courtesy of Computational Design Italy

A change of astonishing magnitude is coming our way in the form of Virtual Reality. Soon we will be communicating in vastly different circumstances than most anyone could possibly imagine at this time.

For millennia, we humans have scratched our thoughts into the dirt, upon cave walls, or carved our mark on trees. We used pigments to draw on our skin and then applied them to canvases, which became part of our body of art. Communication is obviously a large part of our social natures, but I already wrote about that in a previous blog entry; click here if you care to read it.

To move any part of our dialog to a new medium that not only communicates but envelops all of our senses is placing us literally into a “New World.”

History can show us the advancements that have come with the discovery of new territories. Look to the European “discovery” of the Americas. Yes, I acknowledge that Native Americans didn’t need to be discovered, but that doesn’t change the fact that profound advancements rose out of this with serious positive changes for the world.

Humanity continued on the tradition by taking us to the North Pole with Robert Peary, rafting the unknown Colorado River system with John Wesley Powell, or flying to the moon with Neil Armstrong. These efforts I believe, are part of an instinct of people to go out and discover what’s out there.

So what’s in Virtual Reality? A new world with new planets and exotic new life is what’s “out” there! It will be up to the intrepid adventurer to look into the magical device known as the HMD, a.k.a. Head Mounted Device, a.k.a. Virtual Reality Goggles, and discover what’s to be found. If your eyes and mind are closed to finding the new, it will certainly never find you. Look hard and watch out because something is about to happen in our journey of discovery.

We here at Timefire made a choice more than a year ago to use Blender as our primary 3D modeling tool, thanks in large part to Jonathan Williamson. Jonathan came to my mind yesterday because of an article he wrote on Medium titled “The Blender Community Would Benefit from More Business,” where he was calling for other creative professionals to bring Blender into their pipeline. I first met Jonathan at SIGGRAPH 2012 in Los Angeles, where he was supporting the Blender Foundation by demoing the software. The developers had recently integrated sculpting into the package, and I was amazed at just how solid Blender had become. I liked it so much that I went home and tried it out again for the first time in more than ten years.

Jonathan’s impact didn’t stop there as he had also given me his card that pointed out that he was the Education Director at his company BlenderCookie, a.k.a. CGCookie. Their website was loaded with the best Blender tutorials I’d ever come across. It wasn’t long after that when things got going for virtual reality. It was becoming apparent I was going to join the renewed push for VR and that it just might make it big this time.

When starting up a small company outside of the California epicenter of tech innovation, entrepreneurs are often held back by a severe restriction on resources, or they’re smart enough to know where to save money so they can better invest in human capital! Imagining I might grow to a dozen developers and thinking that the majority would have to have some familiarity with 3D software, I could either budget $38,500 for Autodesk tools or I could use Blender, which is FREE.

New hires groaned. They had learned Maya or 3DS Max in college. I gave them a choice: stay in your barista/tech support/call center job or watch some of these tutorials and see if you can learn Blender. I reassured them that Blender was the least of their worries since I’d also be asking them to learn Unreal Engine, 3D-Coat, Substance Designer and Painter, maybe some coding, a bit of acting, or whatever other work that would come along in order for us to build a virtual world.

So far our relationship with Blender has mostly worked out great, and usually, if we find something missing or not functioning just so, we can interact with the developers to see a solution in the next release or add-on. Speaking of, an international community of Blender volunteers cranks out some fantastic add-ons such as Jonathan’s own Retopoflow, Jacques Lucke with Animation Nodes, Nikitron with Sverchok, BoolTool from Vitorbalbio, and most recently, Tissue by Alessandro Zomparelli. From Russia to Brazil and Kansas to Italy, there are people from around the world who are helping to make Blender better every day.

We are one of the companies using this powerful tool known as Blender. It’s responsible for all the models in the image above. Sure, it was at times difficult to get our animations into Unreal, the implementation of FBX can make you curse like a pirate, and learning all the new shortcuts can initially hamper productivity, but through it all, we are building our virtual city of Hypatia with one of the greatest pieces of free software that can empower anyone to build VR. Special thanks to Ton Roosendaal because he’s the guy who saved Blender from disappearing to Campbell Barton, who is apparently a code magician, and to Bastien Montagne, Dalai Felinto, Joshua Leung, Antony Riakiotakis, Jonathan Williamson, Sergey Sharybin, and everyone else who are all helping to make Blender the professional tool it’s becoming.