"Erasmus" (working title: Droid Probe Bot) | Gallery: Fine Art

mandelsage (60)in #art • 6 years ago

My inspiration for this came from many sources...: Star Wars, Frank Herbert's Dune (actually, more specifically, his son's prequel series) and just a small touch of Van Gogh in the sky =)

The Star Wars is obvious, and I still intend to create a little BB-8 using the same method I used to create the Erasmus spherebot here. The Van Gogh is also obviously from The Starry Night, one of my favourite paintings ever.

The Dune prequel inspiration though, which is the main inspiration for the over-all piece, requires a bit of story telling...:

In the Dune universe (more than ten thousand years in the future) as told by Frank Herbert, computers are forbidden. Society as a whole views them as anathema. But why? Because thousands of years before, humanity had a huge struggle against artificially intelligent "thinking machines". They won the wars, and afterwards, any and all computational devices, beyond the basics, were destroyed.

During that time, the master AI, Omnius, controlled the entire multi-world robot "civilisation". Except one... Erasmus.

At some point, one of the many synchronised robots under Omnius got trapped in an ice-crevice for twenty years. While trapped thus, not being able to move, it spent the whole time pondering a variety of philosophical concepts.

After being found again, the bot didn't want to resynchronise with Omnius, and instead convinced Omnius that his being independent might be beneficial. Erasmus became a key character in the series, and is recognised as the founding father of the "Mentats" (humans capable of computer-like brain-power).

Anyway, now you know! I wanted to capture the feeling of a solitary bot gazing up at the night sky, pondering itself and the universe =) And I HIGHLY recommend reading the entire 14-book Dune series.

Erasmus

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Gallery: Fine Art
Max. Print Size: 36" x 27"

“Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect.”

-- Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

"Reality is not really there."
"One day, we'll all have to do without existence."

-- Inspirobot

“I came to the conclusion that we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask. Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.”

-- Elon Musk

The Creation Process:

There were multiple steps required for creating Erasmus ...:

The grass (heightmap imported into MB3D using normal hmap formula)
The bot (heightmap imported to MB3D using sphere hmap formulae)
The starry night background, made in JWildFire, added in Photoshop

Let me start with the sky... I loaded up some starry flames that I had used before, loaded up a gold and black colour gradient, and changed them substantially by experimenting with new formulae and tweaking parameters until I found something I liked. I then rendered it with a transparent background so that I could use it later in Photoshop:

Next, the grass... I had to use a "static" heightmap to get a grassy effect... And the next challenge was rendering it so that it didn't look pixel-ey (I had to scale down the heightmap size, thus getting the repeated pattern look. A necessary "evil" to get a smooth lawn ;P):

And then, of course, the little droid bot... Again, as I said, I made a heightmap using JSPlacement and then imported it with Mandelbulb 3D's sphere heightmap formula. A bit of positioning to get it to look as though it were resting on the grass, and then just the colouring. I went through dozens of styles of colouring before settling on one I was happy with:

As I said, I'm definitely going to do a little Star Wars BB-8 bot using these methods in the future, so look out for that =)

If you're as into sci-fi as I am, you may be interested in buying this or one of my other space-y themed artworks... Go to mandelsage.com for details. As always, thanks for reading until the end of the post ;P

Thank you for your upvote 💖
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A few recent posts of mine:
Motion Art Preview: "Dodecahedron" | "Bloodflake" - Gallery: Motifs | "How She Makes Me Feel" - Poems, 018
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If you'd like to support me further, or follow me elsewhere, I'm on these social media:
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1DPGX72eQj5TNVpSG1grRMxVAaDuqGG2RL

All images, copyright @mandelsage - All rights reserved.

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