I’m still experimenting with variations on the “Volvox” theme (the crystal balls with green things inside them). What if the green things inside the crystal balls were actual islands? For my first attempt, the island was much too large. When I put the dome around it, the dome was so large that it extended into the “you can’t build below this point” zone.

These experiments with “things inside of domes” have been reminding me of the movie “The Fountain”.

There is a tree (or is it a person?) inside of a dome (or is it a spaceship?)…or was the whole thing a dream? I’m not sure, but it was a beautiful movie — I highly recommend it. Very cosmic.

The special effects of this movie were done in an unusual way. Instead of computer graphics special effects, they used a more organic method — blobs of fluid in petri dishes.

Parks and his son run a home f/x shop based on a device they call the microzoom optical bench. Bristling with digital and film cameras, lenses, and Victorian prisms, their contraption can magnify a microliter of water up to 500,000 times or fill an Imax screen with the period at the end of this sentence. Into water they sprinkle yeast, dyes, solvents, and baby oil, along with other ingredients they decline to divulge… The upshot is that Parks can make a dash of curry powder cascading toward the lens look like an onslaught of flaming meteorites. “When these images are projected on a big screen, you feel like you’re looking at infinity,” he says. “That’s because the same forces at work in the water – gravitational effects, settlement, refractive indices – are happening in outer space.”

article here:
http://nofilmschool.com/2013/05/microscopic-cosmic-organic-vfx-fountain-tree-life

And here is a short film clip where you can see the layers being added.

Back to my own little domes!

The blog io9 has such cool stuff. This article has a series of unusual landscape photos that (to me!) look like they could be from Minecraft.

http://io9.com/satellite-images-of-agricultural-fields-make-the-earth-1637547151

These crazy circular patterns are because of something called “center pivot irrigation”. From Wiki —

Center-pivot irrigation (sometimes called central pivot irrigation), also called waterwheel and circle irrigation, is a method of crop irrigation in which equipment rotates around a pivot and crops are watered with sprinklers. A circular area centered on the pivot is irrigated, often creating a circular pattern in crops when viewed from above.

 

If you would like to make your own variation, here is a template for making circles in Minecraft…

http://forums.arresteddevelopmentclan.com/download/file.php?id=523

If you click on the link, you will get a much larger version of this.

Not sure what these creatures are in Minecraft, but IRL they look a lot like the Hawaiian Bob-tailed Squid and the air plant Tillandsia bulbosa. I can’t imagine why!

I’ve been collecting pictures of buildings and landscapes that seem like they ought to be in a Minecraft world. I was just visiting the blog io9 and read about this artist today.

The World Where Everything’s an Iceberg: 90% Is Under the Surface

Created by artist Gediminas Pranckevicius, these are only a few of his excellent digital paintings. (Seriously, go check out some of his character concepts, they’re excellent.) But they all seem to play on the same theme, and could very well depict one world. A hidden one.

Here is the artist’s website. You will be amazed.