The younger man, from the younger discipline, demurred. Well. That all depends on what you mean by "inside." Something in Spiegel's tone implied that no massively parallel array of processors short of the planet itself could hope to extract the perfect equation from out of imperfection's green.
Let's see some veins, Karl Ebesen said. He scrutinized the test leaves from the graphic designer's eye view. How about a few burns and insect bites? The ragged scars that silk imitations never bother to imitate.
Spiegel pressed on, coating the synthetic surface with ever-finer nubs and nuances. Boosting realism required forgoing simple polynomials and embracing a runaway explosion of polygons. Here, he told his charges, pointing at the color plate of the original jungle. Here: trying to keep his finger a safe distance from that woman's chalk-white breasts. Here, this cluster of…
Figs, Adie offered. Figs, I think.
That's supposed to be a fig tree? That? OK. Let s say fig. We turn this cluster of fig leaves into a thousand little trapezoids We manufacture every one of its kinks and blips out of tiny triangles, tilted to lie in every plane that interests us.
What they call a wire frame? Vulgamott, in his former life as an architect, had worked with endless screen-based blueprints — pale Pei imitation monoliths exploded into more tiny CAD corbels than a person could shake a French curve at.
Wire frame. Skeleton. Whatever. Groups of graph primitives: triangles, polygons. Hidden-line removal creates the sense of three-space. Lots more verisimilitude. But tons slower. Tons harder to draw.
Adie cleared her throat. Drawing shouldn't be a problem. I thought that's why we clueless Bohemians are on the payroll.
Oh, not harder for you. I meant harder for the graphics boxes. For… Rembrandt and Claude and Hsieh Ho. Ten video channels, in real time. Were talking real rendering overhead. Every object that we want to paint is an entire community. A whole ecosystem of polygons for each light-face. The better you want it, the smaller your polygons have to get, until your complex object is nothing but vertices. Hundreds of thousands of vertices, smack up against what the hard-cores call your polygon budget.
Couldn’t we just go out and shoot 360 degrees of film around some actual leaf?
Could. But youd still want to translate the picture back into data points. And youd have to do that by hand, or something like it.
Why? Adie asked. Why turn a continuous image of the real thing back into jagged little chunks?
Because, Spiegel began, running the logic through his own internal simulation, like sunlight through foliage. Because well want to give your leaf real qualities. Behaviors. Well want to run operations against it. To subject it to gravity, fire, wind. A photo of a leaf wont ooze when cut. We want a clone that will do everything the original does. Catch rain or shrivel up in heat. Turn gold in a cold snap.
The Cavern would settle for nothing less. Every community of polygons needed its catalogue of affordances: pliant, pulpy, wet, burnable, breakable, taut… And that behavioral catalogue itself decided how the described object glinted in twilight, how it aged and altered, how it floated on the sea of wider rules all around it.
Every fully modeled object became a machine. And every change in an object's catalogue altered the way that machine ran. Leaves programmed the light that fell on them. And every scar of light that leaves accumulated along their way fed back into the living inventory. A branch in the air modeled the wind that waved it, and wind bent that bough through the arc of its own prediction. For there was no real difference, finally, between property and behavior, data and command.
How smart an image was — how much it embodied. Whole volumes of words could not contain the information locked up in one road map. The art and design people knew this instinctively, from a lifetime of looking. The heft and feel of a thing, its list of nicks and bruises, the deed of its actions and of all the actions upon it: in the long lens, these rays met at a single focus, the Maker's outline. But art knew these facts only by other names, other procedures, methods lost in translation…
Spiegel came clean. There's another way we can make you a leaf. The oldest process going, even though we're still pretty new to it. We can build the leafs description the way a real leaf gets built. We can grow it.
Over the course of more makeshift sessions, he showed them how. He drew up genetic algorithms: fractal, recursive code that crept forward from out of its own embryo. He worried over their sapling, a RAM-cached Johnny Appleseed. He spread the best iterative fertilizer on the shaded texture until it flung itself outward into a living branch. His commands no longer called for products but processes. They ceased to stipulate the stipule. The leaf grew itself, from the self-organizing rules arising along its lengthening blade.
Physical law alone laid down this palisade layer. The push of petiole, the stomata's maw, the closest-cubic packing of chloroplast and cuticle and conducting tube: the whole serrated sprig sprung its surprise from out of hidden inevitabilities.
The ad hoc committee of artists and technicians tested their successive grafts in the Cavern greenhouse. The blackness that these graphics primitives floated in was not yet the air. The planes of the confining flower box did not yet compose a volume. The Cavern walls were not even empty. They were whatever came before empty. But in that flat void, just below the front screen's midline, a leaf hung twirling.
And there Klarpol and Loque stood, shoulder to shoulder in the simulator, where their sprig of laurel turned on the mute breeze. Adie stared at the spinning wreath while Sue navigated through a menu waterfall with a tilt of her head, selecting from commands with a blink of her laser-tracked eye.
Loque blinked twice, choosing "Brightness" from a menu labeled "Chroma Tuning." A beveled representation of a knob sprung into existence, out of nothing. It acted exactly like the knob it represented, except that it slid back and forth in its track simply as Loque shook her head.
She slid the knob all the way to the left. In a literal eye blink, the laurel went dark. Each wrinkle and vein deepened into shadow. Dusk swept across the face of the plant. With another head wag Sue swung the slider to its opposite pole, bathing the branch in the overhead glare of midday.
How's that for turning over a whole new leaf?
Crikey, Adie answered. I cant take it What do all the numbers mean? How much is minus 170? What 's a plus 190?
They're arbitrary. The scale runs from zero to 255.
Two hundred and fifty-five? You people are truly occult.
It's a binary thing, babe. Give me this one on faith.
Sue shook her fuchsia head and twitched her ruby-studded eyebrow, dragging the knobs through their paces. She called up sliders for contrast, saturation, and hue. The laurel wreath metamorphosed into supersaturated narcissi and hyacinths. It hardened to a turn-of-the-century black-and-white lithograph. It ignited in a lurid laundry soap commercial.
We can tweak each color channel separately. Or we can nudge around points on a histogram or an active compensation curve.
Adie looked on her colleague in awe. Loque's own aggressive Papagena plumage began to make sense. That's OK. I trust you.