Made in TileMill (which I read about on the Routelines about page — thanks to Tod Robbins for telling me about it).
I took the Census Bureau’s shapefiles for Utah County, imported them into TileMill, styled the lines a little, and exported to SVG. Then I imported it into Illustrator, applied a thin pencil brush (it’s not very noticeable, honestly), exported to PNG, pulled it into Photoshop, and added some color and texture. Voila: the roads of Utah County.
Last night I got the idea of drawing lines or circles on my phone in Brushes and then applying them as textures to objects in Blender, aiming for a nonphotorealistic style without using Freestyle or toon rendering. And I mostly just wanted to see what it would look like.
My first attempt:
Ignoring the tiling issue, the look of the floor intrigued me, so I made a mountain using Blender’s landscape generator and applied the same line texture:
At this point I realized I could avoid the tiling issue by writing a script to make a line texture for me, at the larger resolution I needed it at. (Update: I’ve posted the Python code for the script.) Here are some of the output textures:
Which gave me a mountain that looked like this:
Not perfect, but not too bad, either. I can see myself using the technique in some illustrations down the road. Here’s a turntable animation of the mountain:
Finally, for the heck of it, I set the displace attribute on the texture and re-rendered:
Kind of like pen and ink, almost.
Parley P. Pratt’s Key to the Science of Theology is now available in EPUB and Kindle editions.
Today’s ebook release: George MacDonald’s fairy tale The Light Princess, available as always in EPUB, Kindle, and web editions.
I was pleasantly surprised to see how well the book (or story, rather, since it’s actually very short) held up to a rereading. Mmm, I love George MacDonald’s work.
Apparently I’m in a language-chart-making mood. This time, though, the nerdiness quotient jumps dramatically, with an Ogham alphabet chart. Ogham is a medieval alphabet used for Primitive Irish and Old Irish and a few other languages. Very obscure, but also very cool, as you can see:
It can be written both vertically and horizontally. The red letters are the transliteration (according to manuscript tradition), the grey letters in brackets are the pronunciation, and the italicized words are the names of the letters. Some of the forfeda (the last group) changed meanings over the course of time, so I’ve included both. (I haven’t included pronunciations for the forfeda, though, mostly because none of my source materials did and I didn’t want to assign incorrect values.)
Per Dan Hanks’ request, here’s a Greek alphabet chart (in PDF):
(Classical Greek, that is, not modern Greek.)
Continuing with the language chart nerdiness, here’s a chart of Welsh mutations (in Welsh, the initial consonant of a word can change based on what comes before it):
Thanks to Kjerste Christensen for feedback on the chart.
From Mystery and Manners (via Katherine Paterson’s The Spying Heart):
Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you.
When I’m feeling discouraged and imperfect, worlds apart from the holy, unswerving disciple I want to be, I like to remember this quote from Joseph Smith:
Our Heavenly Father is more liberal in his views, and boundless in his mercies and blessings, than we are ready to believe or receive. (In Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, ed. Joseph Fielding Smith)
That’s not a license to sin, of course. But when we’re honestly striving to be good followers of Christ, it feels good to know that God is more merciful than I expect him to be.
Yesterday I came across an article on PHP’s bad design practices that woke me up a little. I started using Python a couple years ago on some projects and I’ve loved it. Pure delight. It’s not a perfect language, but it feels so good to me. Coding is more fun and things just come together. It’s uncanny.
I don’t know why I’ve put up with using PHP all this while. My sole reason for writing apps like Bookkeeper, Donne, and Unbindery in PHP instead of Python was that it’s easier for people to deploy PHP on shared hosting, but I don’t think that’s as much of an issue these days.
So, FYI, I’ll be using Python instead of PHP for coding projects going forward.