Showing posts with label clockwork. Show all posts
Showing posts with label clockwork. Show all posts

Sunday, August 3, 2008

It would have worked with a glass spring

I've just been re-reading Terry Pratchett's Thief of Time, so I suppose it was inevitable that I would make a picture based on this passage:

The glass clock ticked. It stood in the middle of the workshop's wooden floor, giving off a silvery light. . . Within the transparent case red and blue lights twinkled like stars. The air smelled of acid.

Now his point of view dived into the thing, the crystalline thing, plunging down through the layers of glass and quartz. They rose past him, their smoothness becoming walls hundreds of miles high, and still he fell between slabs that were becoming rough, grainy. . .

. . .full of holes. The blue and red lights were here too, pouring past him.

The Glass Clock of Bad Schüschein



This has, among other things, four layers of gears, three layers making up the bright spectrum lines (which mostly look white at small sizes), and two layers for the red and blue lights. The red and blue dots are arranged in hypocycloid and epicycloid patterns, respectively, each with three hundred and sixty dots making twelve loops. Just to be even more obsessively mathematical about it than I already am. (Possibly it should have been 365 dots, to make a year. I could try that, and re-render it. It would mean the spirograph patterns would lose their symmetry, but that might in fact be an advantage.)

There's a lot of messy detail in this one; it's arguably too busy. It looks lousy in this small version, okay at screen-size, and would probably be pretty good printed.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

More gears

After this, I really should put the gears away for a bit, and try something else for a change. But I couldn't pass up the overlapping stacked-up effect on this one.

Aleph-17 Jewel Movement



The jewels don't show very well on a screen-sized render, but at print resolution they're very shiny and detailed: an excellent example of detail at many scales.

[jewel detail]



Can fractals be steampunk? I suppose they're quite anachronistic, but then so are robots. So they probably can.

Monday, July 28, 2008

Clockwork orange brown

Here's the more complicated image I was working on yesterday. I messed with it a bunch today, as well, and I think maybe now it's done.

Keeping Time

Keeping Time

I'm all pleased with myself, because I've figured out how to make the gear shapes using a single layer of orbit traps, instead of two layers. The teeth used to be one, and the center ring or disc used to be another, but now I've got them all crammed into one unit. This isn't even anything to do with UF5; I could have been doing it in UF3, but until now I hadn't learned how the Multiple Traps thing works. Now I've given it a concerted effort, and I know more than I did. It's somewhat fiddly, but it makes the coloring of the gears a lot easier, and avoids certain annoying discontinuities.