The Ruins

 

            All to often I see people reacting to technology as if it is sinister or evil in some way. The extreme version of this line of thinking is when I perceive people as vilifying anything just because it came from man. My opinion is that things such as technology, being inanimate objects, are incapable of caring the quality good or bad.  Rather I believe that actions and only actions are capable of caring any kind of moral qualities. Keeping these ideas in mind I start to wonder how would people react coming up to an installation similar to the one I created. There is clearly going to be the element of the unknown to put the observer on their guard, but after such an emotion what kind of perceptions would begin to frame themselves in there mind. Would it be the lines of the numinous, or would be more akin to terror and foreboding. So hope that my creating will be able to elicit such a response even if it is fleeting.

 

            I would say that V’ger from the first Star Trek movie was an excellent example of a piece of technology that could elicit a numinous response. The Internet could also be considered in the same light if presented to those who have never conceived of even a computer.

 

Now about the model it’s self.

 

I constructed my instillation based on radial summitry with objects mirrored every 90 degrees, and the walking path offset by 45 degrees. To create a smooth looking form for the ground and the roof I used a nurbs surface obtained by revolving a line that had the shape I wanted. I then would move the vertices of the polygons, plane in the grounds case and half a sphere in the roofs case, until they touched the nurbs surface. This technique proved to be both reliable and efficient.

 

The central core was produce by means of smoothed cube and a single torus. The beams, I call partial emitters in my model, were cylinders that were unified with an altered sphere to create the shape I wanted. The glow effect was an option under effects in the attribute editor. As a not if turn of receive shadows if a light casting shadows is to be used. The glow effect may not work if this is not done.

 

To make the grass and border on the roof of my instillation were renders from separate Maya files that I created. I simply used the paint effect brush to created a grass plot that I brought into Photoshop and from then used off set and clone tool to smooth out the grass. The boarder was more complicated in that I made a full model implementing normal maps and glow effects.  In both cases I used an orthographic view port to render form. Doing so prevented Lansing issues that came from using the perspective port.

 

The gravel path, rock on the beginning of the invisible walkway, and the floor and roof material were images taken from the hyper building stonework and the hyper track.