Why computer modeling should become a popular hobby (1996) | Hacker News Reader

Why computer modeling should become a popular hobby (1996)

qrg.northwestern.edu

92 pointspoppingtonic31 comments

I might agree with the argument when it comes to plastic modelling, but I would disagree when it comes to wooden ship modelling.

I've been building a wooden ship model kit that I got many years ago, and have utterly enjoyed the process of trying to create something that is both historically accurate, as well as aesthetically pleasing. The selection, preparation, and treatment of the materials used is a huge factor in creating something desirable.

Let's just say I find more value over taking a few weeks to experiment with various wood aging and staining techniques to get just the right look for the weathered decks than I would tweaking a shader.

> Let's just say I find more value over taking a few weeks to experiment with various wood aging and staining techniques to get just the right look for the weathered decks than I would tweaking a shader.

In my opinion beyond a certain level this is also happening with plastic models - the kit gluing is a small part, reshaping the odd parts, adding historical accurate details and finish are the main parts. And funnily, most people doing this also build parts of the detail on the computer nowadays.

True enough - not meaning to dis the plastic ones. I've seen some amazing craftsmanship by some people that just goes so far beyond those kits I built as a kid (or ever could build as an adult).

There's plenty of repos on Github dealing with ship hull optimization/generation. Not sure it would be benificial to your usecase, however if you manage to build a tractor beam, you could be the king of the RC boat pond:

https://www.trebuchet-magazine.com/biggest-ever-tractor-beam...

> trebuchet-magazine.com.

hehehe.

Edit: the link above is about laser tractor beam but the Australian National University also built a water tractor beam, and this is what I wanter to show you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUYCkHWgVss

There's just not enough uniformity of content. There are museum collections and specialist websites, but there's no "WikiSimulate" that aims to be a universal compendium of different objects and their functions. The deepest modeling resources are behind paywalls because it simply isn't practical to gamify every object in the world for free. For example, I can purchase World of Guns or Car Mechanic Simulator, but I don't think the author realized how fragmented and piecemeal the effort to digitally represent the real world would be even decades later.

> There's just not enough uniformity of content.

There's much more uniformity than there used to be. Creation tools now import and export glTF. That's a neutral format and is becoming the industry standard. Until recently, people were trying to move content around in proprietary formats such as .obj and .fbx.

There's NVidia Omniverse, which is a way to link together multiple tools on the same model in real time.

Portable behavior is tougher, although the USD people are working on that. The coming thing there is Unreal Engine's "verse", but it's too soon to see how that will work out.

A big problem now is importing some high-detail model and getting terrible performance. Level of detail generation needs more automation.

3D creation tools are hard to use. It's a really hard user interface problem.

Frankly I'm surprised there hasn't been a 3D scanning revolution the same way there's been a 3D printing revolution.

It's not that useful, except for artworks. The copy has less precision than the scan, which has less precision than the original object, which has less precision than its design. If you scan an auto part, you're unlikely to get a usable duplicate auto part.

I feel like AI could help with this by intelligently asking questions and refining the design. "Is this a flat surface? What is the radius of this curve? What is the exact distance between these two edges?"

The pleasure of building models to tinker with is more or less why I find programming fun, for me the puzzle solving isn't really the real juice. Even when at work the most seemingly boring business domains are fun to model.

I think it's safe to say that it really didn't become a popular hobby, from that 90s perspective.

someone has said some years ago that Modeling would be the new Literacy..

Another hobby soon to be taken away by Transformer Models.

Modeling is a process to help explain phenomena. I'm doubtful a particular deep neural network architecture can replace even the few examples provided in the article. It might be a useful tool to augment, but it won't replace the high level idea of being able to build and interpret computer models.

Hobbies don't go away because there's a more efficient way of doing something, because they don't have to be profitable.

[1996]

And most of the links no longer exist.

They were all broken, but there is still material about the projects out there.

https://hypergami.org/

https://agentsheets.com/

https://sites.google.com/site/modelitproject/learner-centere...

https://web.stanford.edu/~roypea/HTML1%20Folder/Covis.html

https://www.qrg.northwestern.edu/ideas/avlidea.htm

https://www.qrg.northwestern.edu/ideas/sesidea.htm

archive.org is your friend.

For however much longer archive.org exists. https://www.npr.org/2023/03/26/1166101459/internet-archive-l...

https://web.archive.org/web/20010223104840/https://www.qrg.n...

All but the first link work in this snapshot.

It's good to have the occasional reminder that the letterboxing modern websites use is not, in fact, a total waste of screen real estate.

I suspect displays were a good deal narrower in 1996, ha ha.

My display is less than 3” wide. That’s far smaller than my first 10” crt let alone the 17” I had in 1996

I should have specified resolution, not size, ha ha.

Ironically it reads perfectly fine on my mobile phone. The text flows edge to edge with a comfortable width--there's no zooming or panning or frustration like many modern websites viewed on mobile devices today.

You must have a larger phone than I do…

You can just resize the window, you know.

This. The vast majority of my windows are not maximised, since my monitors are large enough.

This is when I'm glad that pressing F9 to invoke reader mode in Firefox still exists. Try it!

Ctrl-Alt-R on Linux.

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