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[–] 88 points 6 months ago (1 child)

Back in the days where they used miniatures to do spaceships sometimes the vfx dept. would take model kits and glue the entire plastic sheet, sprues and all, to the miniature. You know, like this.

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  • [–] 46 points 6 months ago (6 children)

    Huh. I thought it was the invisible things that only cats can see that makes them kinda crazy.

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  • [–] 10 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    it is. this is just word theft. ;p

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    The term "greeblies" was coined by George Lucas in the 1970s to describe details on model ships used in the production of Star Wars

    ;-P

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  • [–] 22 points 6 months ago (8 children)

    i like the star trek borg cube texture instead personally

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  • [–] 36 points 6 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] 122 points 6 months ago* (8 children)

    Forgiveness for my pedantry, but pretty sure a greeble (or greeblie) is the individual plastic details that they would glue on to create the texture, not the texture itself.

    You wouldn't say a texture is "greeble".

    Edit - and if you're talking 3d modeling, greebling is done during sculpting, it's not a texturing step.

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  • [–] 36 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Blender modeler here. We often do grebble in geometry nodes. Not sculpting

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  • [–] 13 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

    I get where you're coming from but texture in layman term is (microscopic) characteristic of the surface. You wouldn't appreciate crisp 16bit RGBA pixels in your mouth when you bite an apple.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago

    In the late 1990s I wrote an Alias|Wavefront plugin called greeble that built a bump field + height field from texture so artists could paint greebles on by hand, so whether or not that’s the proper way to do it, it’s been a texture thing for a long time.

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  • [–] 19 points 6 months ago (6 children)

    So in the future, have they also solved the problem of "dust"? Those poor cleaners...

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  • [–] 23 points 6 months ago (5 children)

    No dust in space because vacuum.

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  • [–] 40 points 6 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] 15 points 6 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 19 points 6 months ago

    And here I was calling it the Borg

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  • [–] 14 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Is there a special name for electronic doodads in sci-fi? Like the control panels in the Millennium Falcon or Luthen's radio switchboard in Andor. Shoot, Mother's room in Alien is another example. It's like the electronic version of greebles on a starship model. Do they have a special name as well?

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  • [–] 9 points 6 months ago

    You will be assimilated. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile.

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  • [–] 9 points 6 months ago

    The Great Greeble Assimilation was a very important milestone for the Borg.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    There was even a pretty cool plugin for Cinema4D with that same name IIRC.

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  • 10 comments in c/startrek@startrek.website view that post
    [–] 37 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    the borg are never going to recover from this.

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  • [–] 14 points 6 months ago

    Love the grebble aesthetic, it is used in evangelion, akira, ghost in the shell and multiple book covers for Asimov books. I like the way it seems like the technology was cobbled up together because it worked the first time and they are not going to change it. Reminds me also to some shots from the international space station:

    inside of some ISS chamber

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  • [–] 14 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    Term coined by someone working on an obscure Star Trek knockoff in the 1970s. A little more warlike, as I recall, not really worth watching of course.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    TBF, though Lucas allegedly coined (more accurately attributed to "model makers at ILM" instead of that assclown), various different projects' teams used terms like "wiggets" (2001:SO; <1968) and "nurnies" (B5; <1993) over the years, and the "greeble" version became popular only recently, in fact.

    edit: my bad, didn't clock the "source" of OP's "fact" until just now

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago

    I stumbled across this word as a Lego technique to add texture and depth.

    https://bricknerd.com/home/achieving-greeble-greatness-3-18-24

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago

    I like greebles because space is a vacuum and there's no drag. Too many series have spaceships that are basically fighter jets in space. Greebles are common on things like Star Destroyers (which are really more battleships than destroyers) and on Star Trek ships. But, the Star Wars ships look too much like the ships you'd find on water. The Star Trek ships at least have a unique look with their warp nacelles. But, the skin of the ships is too smooth. A real ship would probably be more like the ISS than the Space Shuttle, something that never has to worry about air resistance.

    The Expanse is one of the few that has reasonable space-shippy type ships. But, even then, they imagine a kind of conflict with ships boosting around at high G. Real space combat would probably mostly be long-range sniping rather than manoeuvring. There's nothing at all to hide behind in space. If you can be spotted thousands of km away, why would there be any high-G maneuvers at all? Also, why use chemically-propelled kinetic slugs rather than lasers or particle cannons or something. Space is huge and speeds will be vast. Hitting something with a bullet sounds incredibly hard compared to just using a beam of light.

    I may be an audience of 1, but I want some near future hard sci-fi combat without FTL travel but with in-system battles.

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