On 19-8-2013 21:50, Samuel Benge wrote:
> Well that's looking fantastic, Thomas! The ferns made it through the event,
> partly due to the cloud cover I presume? (Around here ferns don't grow under an
> open sky like that.)

I do not remember exactly why the fern bloom happened. I need to look up 
the publication concerned. It was recorded in the fossil record however. 
It may have to do with the lack of competitive plants in the first years 
after the event and possibly indeed a much more cloudy atmosphere for a 
long stretch of time.

>
> This reminds me of a science fiction story I read in which people hid themselves
> in reflective bubbles that were impervious to the ravages of time. In a
> preserved state, they would remain locked away until a predetermined period of
> time elapsed, at which point they would come out. If all went well, the
> conditions they awoke to would be conducive to human proliferation, but of
> course, since it was an /interesting/ story, all did not go well ;) (I feel like
> I've mentioned that before....)

Those are interesting premisses for a nice story. Reminds me of an idea 
I had some time back: suppose we were able to bring dinosaurs forward to 
our time, and suppose they were able to survive in our environment. What 
would happen to the ecological balance? And as a corollary, if - as we 
undoubtedly would do - bring back dinosaurs in such numbers that the 
original Cretaceous ecosystem would collapse, we would be responsible 
for the demise of the dinosaurs at the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary ;-)

>
> Your image needs something... The radiosity looks good. Ah, you need a touch of
> focal blur to bring the time machine into focus and to blur the foreground &
> background, but only a touch. (Focal blur will also help tie in the clouds, thus
> unifying the composition.) Noise. Variation in fern sizing. A noise texture on
> the ground that includes the color of the grass shoots.

Yes indeed. All that is needed.

>
> My recommendations for good/cheap quality settings:
>
> radiosity: count 1 to 16; error_bound 0.1 to 0.25; normal on
> focal blur: 10 to 20 blur_samples
> area_lights (if any): 2 to 3 samples
> media: samples 1; intervals 1; jitter 0.1 to 0.33

Going to play with that.

>
> That is all.
>
> Wait... is that a raptor in the distance?

Dilophosaurus. Anachronistic, I know. I explained in the original text 
that my personal view is that all dinosaurs did not die instantaneously 
at the impact. Especially at the antipodes and remote corners of the 
Earth, I guess that some survived for some time. However, the ecological 
collapse was such that those (few?) survivors died out pretty soon 
after, within a couple of months to a couple of years to decades. Not 
enough to be visible in the geological record.

Thomas

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