Qwertyuiopia

Presenting the creation of the internet god’s concept artwork.

In this post I will cover the creation process of the artwork of the internetisgod.org website, on the technical and design side of which I have been working on the last few months.

The internetisgod is a pretty complex website we set up using drupal, created to accommodate the development a community-written book, to be published when “critical mass” has been reached. The starting point for this pursuit is a 9-chapter essay written by Frank Den, on how the internet in our age covers the same human needs that religion once did. Anyone may create a chapter and invite others to contribute in its writing, and a voting as well as a user points system ensure that both popularity and involvement with the project can be taken into account when chapters are picked. A separate, idea rating system exists to give the community the ability to steer the general direction of the project.

I think I first came across the concept of Indra’s net on the preface of a Greek translation of Samuel Delaney’s Empire Star. It is a metaphor developed by the Mahayana Buddhist school in the 3rd century and later by the Chinese Huayan school between the 6th and 8th century, and it goes like this:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out indefinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel at the net’s every node, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that the process of reflection is infinite.

The Avatamsaka sutra
Francis H. Cook: Hua-Yen Buddhism: The jewel net of Indra, 1977

So, it might have been the importance of reflections on our symbol that led me down this medium, as there’s probably no better way to get those calculated for you , or maybe I just got psyched by the Yo Frankie! demo showcasing blender’s abilities (albeit in the completely different field of real time 3d), but I was sure I wanted to take this on with blender from pretty early on in the project.

What follows is a quick and not too technical overview of how the net was made.

Modeling

Initially, the parts of the net had to be modeled. That is the net, and a few different kinds of beads. The beads are quite simple to make by spinning a slice of bead 360 degrees around a point on the side of it, where the hole is going to be, and then adding a bit of variation with proportional editing.

The net, of course, isn’t really infinite, but big enough to be able to take shots of without seeing the edges. Infiniteness is hinted at by the use of unbroken patterns anyway.

In the picture above you can see a piece of the net in its early modeling, with one complete link highlighted. After one link is ready, it is copied to create the net. Precision is kind of important at this point, since the links must fit together with their egde vertices at exactly the same points. Once everything is in place, the double vertices are removed and the net is a big unified mesh.

Physics

Next is the cloth modifier, which will give this geometric construct a more organic look. The cloth modifier is actually meant for open meshes, and will calculate the net model as a hollow tube, but this is enough for still image purposes. When applied to the net (setting two handles at the top) it does something like this:

On the final model, I have actually hanged the net first from the two top points just long enough for it to fall to an approximately square shape, and then turned it flat and hanged it from three corners so it curves. Then the beads had to be placed. One by one.

Materials and lights

The materials both of the net and the beads are all created procedurally through blender. The beads have raytraced reflections and transparency, and generally this is the phase where the computer does the heavy work.

The lights I have used are a Sun and a Hemi opposite to each other and at something like a 45 degree angle to the net, to create the effect of a powerful light that fills the surrounding space from far away – Since on an infinite net the spot you’re looking at is much more likely to be far away from the light source.

And now we just move the camera around and take pictures with different render options. Below is a an image with slightly different materials.

And this is it! What I really like about having a complex 3d model as a source for images for this website is the potential for derivative images, which I believe to be really good for concept-building (or branding, to put it more bluntly).

In terms of symbolism, I can easily see the internet as the ultimate manifestation of Indra’s net. In fact, I can even go as far as imagine 6th century Hua-Yen Buddhists flocking to the indranet god.

Oh, make sure to check out the larger version of the images, as a lot of detail cannot really be seen in these smaller versions.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 14:02 and is filed under Creations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.