PREPARING THE DIGITAL MESH – SEEKING HARMONIOUS EQUIPOTENTIAL The process of creating the plasmatic works and other trials and examples arising from the

development of the new workflow begins with a nondescript ‘blob’. The blob is not ‘formless’ – by its digital nature it is precisely defined. But rather than beginning with a void, to which polygons are added (as might be the case in a regular 3D modelling process), there is an existing entity onto which the following shapes are expressed. This starting point, which opens not with a vacuum or empty space, but with an existing entity may echo the existentialist notion that we always find ourselves ‘always already’ involved in an embodied, situated relationship with the world. Martin Heidegger in particular notes that Dasein^xvii always arrives into a world that has some familiarity (Wheeler, 2015). In this case, it would be the apparent properties of the object on screen – light falls from above, implying mass and veridicality. The movement of the orbiting 1^st person camera, showing that there is a familiar physics to the scene, and so on.

This ‘defined blob’ must have a particular structure to allow maximum freedom when sculpting forms – as a preparatory phase, occurring before the improvisation phase, this is a carefully controlled process. During the experiment phase, a number of different blob types were trialled, and it was found that the most conducive to the improvisational sculpture process was a mesh entity with the most even distribution of polygon density and constituted by an object where the number of edges that meet at the vertices was most consistent. This is slightly technical, but is important because here the first links emerge between the improvisational process and theoretical understanding of animated metamorphosis.

Plasmatic: Improvising Animated Metamorphosis 72 Consider the following mesh object as a potential starting point for 3D sculpture:

Figure 15. A ‘standard primitive’ sphere, available in 3Ds Max (Autodesk, 2015).

The geometry of a standard primitive sphere uses four sided polygons for all but the polar ring of polygons which use three sided polygons. Figure 15 shows that when the number of polygons is increased^xviii in order to give the sphere potential for more detail, the pole of the sphere remains, but the number of polygons attaching to that pole increases.

Where more than four edges meet, this is known as an ‘extraordinary vertex’ and the term

‘valence’ is used to indicate how many edges are meeting at that vertex. (Stam, n.d.). In Figure 15, the polar vertexes of the 3D mesh sphere are examples of extraordinary vertexes.

A range of other geometry types was tested, and it was deduced that the solution to this is to use a polyhedron sometimes called a quad-sphere, a UV sphere or colloquially a ‘squirkle’^xix. As this term implies, the squirkle is a cross between a square and a circle – or in this case, a cube and a sphere. Very simply put, this is a polyhedron that starts as a cube with six square four sided polygonal faces and then through applying Catmull-Clark subdivisions, this cube is smoothed until it becomes (almost, but usually not quite) spherical.

Plasmatic: Improvising Animated Metamorphosis 73 Figure 16. A squirkle, created by subdividing a cube.

The quad-sphere ‘squirkle’ consists of only four sided polygons and no extraordinary vertexes.

Both in appearance and in behaviour, this form provides the ideal starting point for improvised sculpture (though with a much greater mesh density than is shown here). Despite need during the sculpture process for the mesh to be co-operative and responsive, this process is an attempt to render the starting mesh as ‘neutral’ as possible at the outset of the sculpting process. The squirkle is not offered as a built-in polyhedron in either the modelling and animation software or the digital sculpture software used in this research, but can be easily created by first creating a cube object with one polygon per side, and then subdividing the mesh which smooths the vertices into a nearly spherical shape.

As well as even distribution of polygons, vertex and vertex valences, the number of polygons on the object is also increased to the maximum that the system can reasonably display, sculpt and render. This again inverts the traditional principle in 3D object design which is to minimise polygons where possible (through a range of techniques including image mapping) to reduce animating and rendering times. The higher number of polygons creates more possibilities for areas of detail, especially since the polygons will be rearranged and moved around the model in ways that are not predicted in advance.

I adopt the term ‘harmonious equipotential’ to describe this arrangement of a high number of evenly distributed regular polygons and evenly valanced, non-extraordinary vertices. This term originally comes from Hans Driesch, a late 19^th century naturalist philosopher who espoused what

Plasmatic: Improvising Animated Metamorphosis 74 he called the “Machine Theory of life” (Sander & Counce, 1997), and is used to describe

“embryonic organs or even animals” wherein each part of the organ or animal, even if separated, has the possibility of developing into a whole, with all the elements possessing the same

“morphogenetic ‘potency” (Driesch, 1891, cited in Gordon, 1999). To describe the base mesh as a system of harmonious equipotential is not to adopt Driesch’s philosophical machine theory of life which involves a now discredited biological argument for vitalism (Sander & Counce, 1997) although, as an animator there is always a sense of ‘vitalism’ in the craft. When we experiment with animation, we experiment with the very act of giving life to the inanimate. But further, as a starting point for metamorphic animation, which Sobchack has described as “liberating in its democratic lack of hierarchical attachment to any privileged form of being” (2000), a system of harmonious equipotential establishes this non-hierarchical, evenly featured starting structure as intrinsically connected to the practice of creating improvised digital animated metamorphosis.

Any deviation from the equality of potential in the digital structure, ultimately privileges a future form by creating a bias in the behaviour of the digital mesh. An example of this is discussed in the following section.

Inevitably, the mesh becomes concentrated and re-distributed throughout the sculpting iterations and this neutrality dissolves into the compounding of improvised shapes that in turn influence subsequent sculpting. But in resolving the ideal starting point for an improvised 3D sculpture session of this type, we can say that it should have a dense and numerous polygon structure that exhibits harmonious equipotential^xx.