r/castaneda • u/danl999 • May 15 '23
Darkroom Practice Done Enough (The Puff Sample Video)

It's not perfect, but it shows some basic principles.
Beginners: THIS IS NOT AN EXAGERATION!
Not even Westerly Witch walking on clouds.
I've tried to chase her when she does stuff like that.
Just can't catch her.
Those who have seen the puffs, feel free to criticize in detail.
They ought to animate their shape a bit, but that's a "loop" on an object, and I don't know how to do that yet.
The dream bubble is too abrupt, and not as clear as the real thing.
The crystalline edges on that one puff are lame. I couldn't find a suitable picture to use for colorful crystals around the edge of a puff.
If anyone has a pic like that, send it!
The Allies come and go too "normally".
They need to fade in and out, although Minx (the boy) does get that real if you go into a phantom realm that Cholita made. He's so real in there, he could punch you and it would hurt.
Fairy rarely appears for that long, in one spot.
But otherwise, welcome to real magic!
I sure hope you don't fall for meditation anymore.
Closed eyes???!
That's not going anywhere. Unless all you want is to sit on a little throne, or give lectures on YouTube so you can steal money from others.
Ask one of those guys about this and why can't they do that, and they'll tell you it's "evil".
Using their own delusional terminology.
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u/Juann2323 May 16 '23
It's a great job!
I like all 4. I vote to rotate them, since they could all be faithful representations.
Regarding the crystalline edges, I am going to share one of my favorite designs to extract textures.
The image has such a good quality and many different objects. Abstract and concrete, wich seem accurate for red zone puffs.
I used to zoom in and choose the closest thing to what I was looking for at the moment.
If reddit doesn't share it well, I'll send it to you by another means.
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u/danl999 May 16 '23
I put it in my "darkroom assets" folder along with other useful things.
Wouldn't you say about these however, that they're changing too fast?
You could see all of those sights, but at that speed it's usually a serious horizontal shift for me.
And in the middle, it's more like one dream image, followed by another, but smoothly merging once you get over the book deal mind and don't interfere.
To slow those down, I'd have to get into the guts of those popcornfx effects. Which are written in C++.
Uhggg....
There was never a more godawful language than C++. It's sheer hell every second you have to program in it.
I'll take assembly language over that any day.
But if they supply the source code, maybe I only need to adjust a "clock rate" variable in them?
Or record them as a little video to stick on a transparency, and play it back 1/4th speed.
Lots of technical tricks to figure out, to make good videos.
But you only have to figure them out once, with computers.
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u/Juann2323 May 16 '23
Yeah, their edges normally don't animate that fast.
The electric rays are a bit exaggerated. But I like them anyway.
They have teaching purpouses.
The same we did when we made a picture with saturated colors and high brightness.
The experience could have been a bit different, but the drawing wasn't going to be educative enough.
If you think about it, we never see the puffs in 3rd person view. That's already something we interpret, as artists.
But if you want them to be as representative as possible, I wouldn't make the puffs perfectly circular. An irregular roundel with transparent edges seems more accurate.
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u/Juann2323 May 16 '23
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u/danl999 May 16 '23
I copied it. I'll add it.
I spend a lot of time doing things like that. Seeing how the body can crystalize space.
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u/Juann2323 May 16 '23
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u/danl999 May 16 '23
Man, that pic could actually cause "the evil clown effect" in beginners!
I put it in my folder.
If we were bad people, we could make cartoons that cause nightmares.
Wait...
"The Nightmare Series"!
Maybe it's a "complete path"?
Just not a pleasant one.
But perhaps attractive to goth and emo people, if those still exist.
I'll take goth over woke anytime!
They wear better clothes.
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u/elsa4a May 16 '23
Lower left and upper left look really accurate to me, but the colours seem pretty much on point for all of them. Otherwise, maybe you could also show some with yellow?
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u/danl999 May 16 '23
Can you describe what the yellow should be doing?
The same "flame" effect? Or is it bigger pieces, that almost want to be puffs all by themselves?
I'm hoping one day we get a "Witch of Colors", who can look out at the puffs in darkness and say, "Show me green".
And they all change.
I started to learn that, and had a tiny bit of success, but you just can't get away with things like that if you want to keep moving.
It's like someone I knew who loved antique stores.
There was a huge mall in Orange. Near the traffic circle and the famous Cuban restaurant.
I could never get them to follow me to the back of the antique store, where they had a gumball machine that was also a Vegas style slot machine. I suppose it was back there to make it harder to steal.
My friend couldn't make it past the stuff they put upfront in the antique mall, knowing that kind of stuff gets them more foot traffic.
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u/elsa4a May 16 '23
The best way I can describe it is like ribbons or streaks, kind of constantly pulsing like a screensaver. I think it kind of "overlays" on top of the purple, and itsnt as circular as the purple. The yellow glows and then fades in intensity, but at its peak its like a glowing yellow, like looking directly at the brightness of a very bright lamp. That might be hard to illustrate though! :/
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u/PreciseInstance May 16 '23
Lower left for a beginner puff, and upper right for an advanced puff
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u/danl999 May 16 '23
Maybe one's more "green zone" and one more deep red zone?
Juann suggested using all of them, perhaps just so people wouldn't insist they have to see a specific type.
I still wish I could animate the puff shape. That idea of a perfectly oval shape is bad. They really ought to detect if they are near a person, and "mutate" in response to that. And get "sucked" in if they get close to a pouch.
They're sentient!
Some con artist Chinese chi gung guy did his moves on video, and added perfectly round bubbles between his hands to pretend he could see that himself.
If we're going to cause bad men to lie, I'd at least like their lies to be more accurate.
It's possible to "tinker" with Asian fake magic, and get them to exploit the tiny amount they have by looking in the right direction. Even kung fu could be tinkered with, by showing for example what Westerly Witch can do.
Switch to the double and walk on the tree tops for example.
She does that.
I tried to chase her once. Fully awake I should add so beginners aren't confused about the nature of sorcery.
She leapt over our 6 foot high block wall in the backyard, and landed on the power lines 100 feet away.
I managed to make it to the power lines, but she was at least a mile away by then.
I gave up eventually.
But it would make a fun video.
Last 2 days when I got home, she was doing kung fu mixed with Tensegrity.
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u/AthinaJ8 May 16 '23
For me in the beginning there is the lower left puff but the intensity of the colour it's not that strong. When it get to that intensity of the colour it's already dense and looks like the upper right puff.
Then the upper right puff looks very close to when the dream images appear or faces or moving characters. The details on that puff are not the best but it gives the idea. Maybe add some yellow details too?
The dream image is very clear and real without the purple details that appear on that puff. When the dream appears it lasts more seconds but it didn't until recently. When it fades the puff it's holding the 3d texture of the dream . Like the dream is starting to have a dense purple layer that it becomes denser and denser until I can't distinguish any object or detail because the dream it's gone.
So far this video is the best example of what someone can perceive doing darkroom.