Concept art and palaeoart (or palaeontography if you prefer) are two very different beasts. On the outside they can look very similar, but with all but the most informed artists, the underlying structures reveal these surfaces to be at best convergent. I ran across these juicy images by Gondwana, a skilled concept artist. Wow! Look at those textures. Yet the dinosaurs leave me with an odd feeling that there’s a man in there, wearing a fantastic rubber suit.

No matter… check out his raptor, switch-blade Smilodon and Styracosaurus.

The unfeathered bird has some very impressive artwork – here two pin-up rooks. I can look through the details for ages: the trachea and esophagus, the massive pectorals and the thigh musculature. Wow! Check out the site for duck tongues, ostrich feet and owl ears – there’s something for every fetish.
via the birdbooker report

Der Spiegel reports on the Massopondylus nesting site with the above illustration by Julius Csotonyi (click to embiggen). Cool that they include an artist credit, and cool to see a master delve into 3D – if he is indeed. The image sure looks like it, but I have no insider knowledge. I’m judging by the cover, so to speak. If anyone knows more about his technique, let us know in the comments!

On his site, the image is described as a “digital painting / photographic composite“. I’ll go out on a limb and -aside from some painted touch-ups (the egg membranes and such) – call this a 3D illustration with photographic elements used as textures, background elements – the solidity of the volumes, consistency of the details and the lighting all encourage me in making this assumption. Assuming this is the case (despite my father’s warning that to assume makes an ass out of you and me), it allows us an intriguing comparison of toolsets in the hand of a talented artist – as we did with Angie Rodrigues.

On to the analysis…

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We interrupt our regularly scheduled npr and paleo posts to say… say no to scareware. I spent all day cleaning and rebuilding my system, and would have spent more if not for the fantastic aid of Daniel Koenig, from CAI Systems. As these things tend to come in waves, I thought I’d share the solution and spread the word.

The thing that shocked me about this is that I have a decent level of protection (with AntiVir business edition) and wasn’t on any dubious sharing sites or such. Nor did I click any buttons, attachments or similar. And still I got this nasty system warping… thing. It bars access to all system controls such as the task manager and reports disk errors in a visually convincing Windows panel. (I was put off about a supposedly missing c disk despite having already booted.) Anyway, turning off the autorun options is the way to stop this kind of stuff, and I’m apalled at how deeply buried this option is in Win7. Daniel to the rescue… he found it.

1) enter gpedit.msc in the search bar of your start bar (it will only appear after being entered in full)
2) navigate to the user and computer configurations (successively) / administrative templates / windows components / autoplay policies. For you Germans out there, the panel is called “Richtlinien fuer automatische Wiedergabe”
3) enable “turn off autoplay”, “turn off autoplay for non-volume devices” and “default behavior for autorun” paying attention to the details they offer about each option.

How’s that for convoluted?

Check it out if you’re interested.

I haven’t written much about NPR and the aesthetics of artifacts for a while now, but developments here at brainpets GbR are about to change all that… so prepare to see more about non-photorealistic graphics again. In case you’re particularly impatient and have a mac, head over to YouGlitch and corrupt your videos. It’s all the rage.

Supporting multiple platforms will be an important part of changing the landscape of education.

Oman Rashid, CEO of digital textbook company Kno, on Apple’s foray into Textbook publishing. Here’s a look at the 3D molecule viewer they’ve got. I can’t wait for interactive 3D illustrations to get beyond the gimmick stage.

███ ██ █ ████ everything ███ █████ is █████ ████ ████ fine ████ ███ █ ██████ love █████ ██████ ███ your █████ ████ government.

via infinityImagined.

arstechnica

google

flowing data tracks the clueless – wtf wikipedia

wordpress blackout

The principals of animation are exaggerations of actual phenomena. The squash and stretch that makes Bambi so lovable was developed as Disney animators pored over frames of live-action footage of a real fawn. As reported in the Illusion of Life the animators were surprised by the how extreme individual frames from real life were… and emboldened to become more extreme in their drawings.

Well, it seems another element of animation has found its real-life counterpart, this time in a static hum that – as Carl Hogan believes – imbues everything. Classic animation boil consists of 5 images of the same, still object. Looped, this keeps the line ‘alive’ even if the drawn object remains still. Done with subtlety, it’s an effect that you feel more than you consciously perceive… I suspect real-life boil is like that.

I wrote a while back about the top 1% of American wealth owners, and the 10% who believe they belong to that exclusive club. Well now, thanks to the New York Times – king of meaningful interactive info-graphics – there’s no guessing to it anymore, just check on your own.

On average, you need an annual income of $383,001 to belong to the exclusive 1% and the 50% line is at $50,742.

The 2011 hurricane season in 4.5 minutes… NASA.

Okay… it’s Friday… I’ve seen Dolphins do this before, but never to the degree that this guy does: he makes subset after subset of toroidal bubble and pushes it about his pen. Followed by other toroidal phenomena.

Definitely recalls the section in Raptor Red in which the starring Deinonychus play in the snow.

fakeisthenewreal has a wonderful page of scaled line drawings of public subway systems from cities around the world. Surprising: the size and sprawl and the felt character of the respective cities via what look to be simple scribbles.

Transportation has such an impact on how you experience a city. It would be interesting to see how you could reflect further characteristics… ie. the NewYork system of local and express trains vs. the one-track-leads-to-all-destinations systems you often encounter in Germany. Payment systems are also profound… NYC is a gateway – once inside your inside. Berlin has an identification system… you can be controlled at any time.

I do far too little graphic design work lately, so when PZ Meyers called for a logo I … did nothing. And then, after two days of that, this came out. Needs refinement of course, but sure was fun.

Here’s an incredible video of the process of preparing a Clypeaster fossil, from the Echinoblog. Leaves a huge, gaping question open at the beginning… how did they know that guy was in there? So… enjoy this (HD at youtube) while awaiting the prequel… Excavating Clypeaster.

Zeitguised proves that German can sound sexy.

Sit back in your seat and then… don’t sit back in your seat.
Beautiful animal footage by Joel Sartore.