+1000
Just keep it in perspective, everybody.
QFT, the “true nature” of 3d modeling is math. Break out the geometry book, put down the bong.
Like Jonathan L said, get your hands dirty.
Also QFT, the true nature of 3D modeling is also that it’s a tool for art. The art is the point, so in that case, the real “zen” of blender is to never forget “if it looks good, it is good”.
Or, better, change from low quality highs (bong) to the most sublime human mind can experience (math).
Uhmm what can I say? I’m dumb founded.
+1 awesomest addon ever. by far. far.:yes: I’d really recommend it for those who want to go more “funky” with blender lol
At the least it would all be visual and you’re not putting a bunch of toxins and crap in your body (which will eventually gunk up your brain). That is as long as you take care to make sure it doesn’t cause seizures.
Except for cigarettes, caffeine and alcohol. Sorry, I just hate the bias people get against “drugs” when they fully accept the other drugs that are prevalent in our society. Not all illegal drugs are bad, and not all legal drugs are good.
Well I also don’t smoke nor drink alcohol, I do drink a somewhat light amount of caffeinated beverages, but not the super-high content ‘energy’ drinks that regulators seem too naive to take into account the fact that people treat them like plain soft drinks. I also think society would be better without cigarettes or alcohol, so I’m not exactly in full acceptance of the legal stuff.
Caffeine is not a drug, it is fuel. Put caffeine into a programer and you get code, put caffeine into a 3d artist and you get renders, put caffeine into a mathematician and you get theorems :D.
Actually, too much of it at once can cause serious health effects and even death, that’s why there is so much concern over those drinks that now contain over 300 mg per serving (and then multiply that when people drink 3 or more throughout the day). I personally drink Mountain Dew and the caffeine level is only about a fourth of the amount of those higher-dose drinks.
So to see it simply as fuel implies your body only having a minimal level, otherwise it can become dangerous.
Don’t forget sugar, aspirin, Tylenol, antibiotics, preservatives, gasoline fumes in the air, your neighbor spray painting his barbecue with an acetone containing paint, the stuff in your shampoo being absorbed through your scalp, camphor in your body lotion, nutmeg, curcumin in your Tikka masala, the industrial grade Chinese soap used by the lady who assembled your computer keyboard, Methampheatamine on the paper money in your pocket and the guy who sneezed in your direction on the bus just after taking his asthma medication.
Every chemical is a potential ‘drug’. No absolute definition of ‘drug’ exists. Everyone defines ‘drug’ in the way that best suits their prejudices, desires and profits. And especially their fears. Don’t let someone else tell you what to think.
As a long time 20+ years user of a wide range of Psychedelia I do speak from my own experience. There is a certain flow in images created from the use of different mind-altering/expanding drugs and if you have used it you can recognize it in various art. If you have a understanding of classic compositing, color theory, values and all that is necessary to create good imagery you can also add a great value from different states of mind but it has more to do with expressing fantasy and visions in image content. I don’t think it will enhance your technical skills at all but some of the substances such as psilocybin , LSD etc will improve your brains ability to learn new skills in a much faster. It should be said that learning how to properly utilize those strong chemicals can be very dangerous and I do not encourage anyone to do so. As previous poster have said coffee (central-nervous-system stimulant) and carbohydrates or good healthy diet for that matter is the right fuel for getting your brain to work optimal. So psychedelia is a great inspiration booster and will get you ideas that you might never in a lifetime think of otherwise but as far as learning 3D it comes down to just learn it.
… and the problem is that “everyone’s brain is different,” and the drugs that you speak of have active-quantities in micrograms. I just think that you’re playing with fire. Some people have had “20+ of good experiences” with these things, but other people have been destroyed.
One thing that works very nicely for me is … trance. Maybe light music, but the steady, focused, gentle beating of a large drum. Focusing one’s attention gently on the sound of the drum, the feel of the drumstick, the feel of hitting it. You enter a light, or deep, hypnotic trance that you alone fully control. A semi-sleep state, and totally natural. After a while, you gently rouse yourself back to an awake state, and then maybe you go to bed.
Your entire network of senses will be enhanced, much as with dreams but you’re awake. Music, sound, your memories of the visual things you are working on, all are much more-intensely perceived and realized. And yet, it’s all just your own nature. There are no chemicals, no stimulants, certainly no direct manipulation of the chemistry of your own brain.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the significance of symbolism. It was the dichotomy of the hardware / software relationship in digital machines that really started me thinking about it years ago but recently it seems more profound.
You see; several months ago I was reading a comment thread where scientists were considering the fundamental principles of the formation of… well… everything. One suggested that the universe was in the business of entropy. That was profound to me because the mass of entropic forms seem to normalize each other while carried by the flow of energy from one form to another. It’s really entropy that is emerging and naturally normalizing. One could say that the most complex known form in the universe - the human brain - is essentially the cutting edge of that process. Through that process symbolism emerged and has or is being normalized.
Daniel Dennett has contended that products of the qualia were insignificant. I would think that he views them - from what I have gathered from some of his talks - as entropic. Even as such - when considering the before mentioned experience and what I’m about to get into - I don’t think that really matters.
I’m thinking that this natural process has brought about a level of complexity that borders on agency. I think that is significant. I tend to push epistemic justification however that has limitations when we try to consider whether or not we get to decide what is significant. What is actually occurring? Has the universe become self aware through us?
Lets look at how this happened. It came about through the processing of environmental information in non sentient life forms and by a process that we don’t understand yet became sophisticated enough to have an understanding of observed environmental stimuli. We do have records of the tools that have been used and they tend to be symbolic. Some examples are early art, language, writing, belief systems, Philosophy, Mathematics and Science. We need symbolic representations in order to get beyond our lack of experience in realms where we would be constrained by our physical and / or perceptual capabilities. In order for us to have some understanding of systems that are strange to our previous experience, we need to find a way to relate and that is what we have used the symbolic tools for.
Now on to 3D technologies. The will to have a concise definition of reality has been one of the driving forces in our search for knowledge. 3D technologies have not only been a symbolic tool for creating crude simulations of real instances but have also provided a contrast to what we tend to consider reality. It has also challenged our ability to impose a definition of reality as some have suggested that the universe itself - in principle - could be simulated to striking degrees of accuracy by using sufficiently powerful symbolic tools.
So no there is not a deep philosophical understanding of how 3D modeling works. 
Yes it is true that is playing with fire. As I also said it is dangerous but if used right it can be constructive. I have my fair share of negative and harmful experiences. As you said really small amounts can do big damage and if someone has psychotic tendencies that person might end up with a psychosis or even trigger schizophrenia and in some cases be the cause of suicide.
So yeah it should not be taken lightly the chemicals are not toys. My 20+ years are not only good and I’ve had my share of facing demons. But the question was if anyone used psychedelics and done 3D. To that question I say yes and it has not really helped me understand it better, quite the opposite, but from an artistic point of view it has given me inspiration. It should also be said that I have not used it in actual work related situations. But something that I would suggest to anyone anytime of the day is meditation, plain good.
Personally, I think that 3D, like all other forms and offshoots of computer-programming(!), is mostly: “a boots-to-the-ground, pragmatic craft.”
Your job is to make an “insanely stupid, albeit insanely fast” machine, which doesn’t have a clue what it is doing, “do sh*t.”[/i] And you must do it graciously, accurately, on a budget, and to a deadline."
You’ve got to satisfy, not only your boss and the investors, but also many copies of a machine that still outperforms everything: the visual cortex of the human brain, located between the ears of someone who’s out there munching stale popcorn.
On the one hand, it is art. But this is no “piece of canvas, tube of paint, brushes and sunlight.” This is every aspect of movie-making, all rolled-up into one. Your model, say, has to look good … good enough … but it also has to work as a piece of digital input.
You have to be at one w/the mesh!
lets ignore deep philosophy, it just leads to endless loops of unanswerable questions that might not be worth asking in the first place.
the core of blender, and all other 3d programs is two things: 3d geometry and a turing computer(you might add a third thing, geometric optics).
using a combination of mathematical(largely trigonometric)formulae a 3d “structure” can be produced, and using what are individually simple formulae repeated millions of times per second the computer can construct a 2d image of what the 3d structure would look like from any given angle. the use of a computer allow for very rapid calculations but, in theory and in practice, you could do everything the computer does with a paper and pencil, if you followed the right instructions time after time and then manually input the outputs of your calculations into the pixels of a screen you could be running blender from your head, it would take years(perhaps centuries) to even perform a rotation of the camera around the 3d viewer window. what a 3d program is is just a set of instructions for a machine to follow which map out how the geometry fits into 3d space and how it looks through the 2d screen. when it comes to rendering another thing comes into play, geometric optics, this is a piece of physics describing how lenses,mirrors,shadows,refraction and diffraction will happen. once again it is simple calculations and rules executed very fast by your turing machine(computer) to calculate how light sources in your scene will illuminate things and what the camera will see. if you are using particles and collisions the computer will also run rules about newtonian conservation of momentum when working out how things move throughout the course of an animation. in the end 3d modelling is nothing deep and philosophical(it doesn’t need to be), it is a very fast practical application of mathematics to turn the input data you give it into an output image or video. the device for turning the inputs to outputs is a machine following alan turing’s rules and descriptions in just the way that the original colossus(enigma code breaking, bletchley park) computer did.
it does ofcourse use the only useful thing descarte ever invented, cartesian co-ordinates but beyond that “no philosophers were harmed in the making of this program”. you might use the fact that 3d modelling creates a world from pure mathematics to argue that the whole world can be described in numbers, but that has been known by physicists since before the 20th century.
I beg to differ. Though mathematics “seems” to be able to express just about everything, there are natural phenomena that science and mathematics not only are far removed from but also are sometimes in denial of. In the order of emergence these would seem to be the cutting edge of emergence of greater complexity via the normalization of entropy. I guess it could be considered entropic however it was essential to the advent of the sciences. De Cart was also trying to quantify reality. He suggested that anything could be doubted… well all but one thing… the existence of ones consciousness. “I think therefor I am”.
The very real method by which we wield the scientific method via a metaphysical symbolism is far from the reach of physics. This is the purpose of Epistemology (the philosophy of science). Ideas cannot be reduced in their all important context with physical law. It is observed that, from the fundamental processes of the bulk emerges components that are vaguely physical, metaphysical and even non-physical. The physical can be considered information however information is not necessarily physical.
Ethics for example could be considered a form of normalization of entropy. This war on suffering is an endeavor that is rooted in the rejection of natural stimuli. The plausibility of it is shown with the most recent of emergences. This is a philosophical endeavor being carried out by the most basic of principles.
Science is gobbledy gooke without a philosophical methodology. This is what scientists tend to defend because; when the method is followed the rest falls into place. Science was derived in The Enlightenment from Natural Philosophy.