Greeble
Encyclopedia
Cylinder (geometry)
A cylinder is one of the most basic curvilinear geometric shapes, the surface formed by the points at a fixed distance from a given line segment, the axis of the cylinder. The solid enclosed by this surface and by two planes perpendicular to the axis is also called a cylinder...
s, cube
Cube
In geometry, a cube is a three-dimensional solid object bounded by six square faces, facets or sides, with three meeting at each vertex. The cube can also be called a regular hexahedron and is one of the five Platonic solids. It is a special kind of square prism, of rectangular parallelepiped and...
s, and rectangle
Rectangle
In Euclidean plane geometry, a rectangle is any quadrilateral with four right angles. The term "oblong" is occasionally used to refer to a non-square rectangle...
s, combined to create intricate, but meaningless, surface detail. Greebles are commonly found on models or drawings of fictional spacecraft in science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
.
Etymology
The earliest recorded use of the term "greeble" found to date was by those working on the special effects for Star WarsStar Wars
Star Wars is an American epic space opera film series created by George Lucas. The first film in the series was originally released on May 25, 1977, under the title Star Wars, by 20th Century Fox, and became a worldwide pop culture phenomenon, followed by two sequels, released at three-year...
— the group who would later become Industrial Light and Magic
Industrial Light and Magic
Industrial Light & Magic is an Academy Award-winning motion picture visual effects company that was founded in May 1975 by George Lucas and is owned by Lucasfilm. Lucas created the company when he discovered that the special effects department at 20th Century Fox was shut down after he was given...
. They also described this design method as "guts on the outside".
Ron Thornton is widely believed to have coined the term "nurnies" referring to CGI technical detail that his company Foundation Imaging produced for the Babylon 5
Babylon 5
Babylon 5 is an American science fiction television series created, produced and largely written by J. Michael Straczynski. The show centers on a space station named Babylon 5: a focal point for politics, diplomacy, and conflict during the years 2257–2262...
series.
Greebles in science fiction films and television
2001: A Space Odyssey (film)
2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, and co-written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, partially inspired by Clarke's short story The Sentinel...
(1968) where they were called "wiggets".
In physical models, these greebles could be anything from parts of plastic cut to an interesting shape, or actual elements taken from shop bought model kits. For instance, in Star Wars the original Imperial Star Destroyer was constructed from a plywood frame and adorned with sheet styrene. Panel lines were cut into the sheet styrene, but essentially that left the ship looking extremely bare. Hundreds of model kits were purchased and the model department promptly took pieces of the model kits and cut them up and stuck them along with more sheet styrene to the surfaces of the ship. The ultimate effect was to make the ship appear more believable to the viewer through the addition of these large areas of ancillary details. The greebles themselves served no purpose other than to fill space and individually had no definite function to the design of the ship, although later each greeble was given a specific function by either fans or technical illustrators for fan guides. A plastic soldier was part of the greeble for the Executor.
Another example of greeble application was the Battlestar Galactica
Battlestar Galactica (ship)
The Battlestar Galactica is a space battleship in the original and re-imagined science fiction television series Battlestar Galactica.The Twelve Colonies of Man in the original television series built a number of Battlestars during their thousand-year war with the Cylons, whose battleships are...
model for the original 1970s series, which featured on its hull pieces from a wide assortment of kits, including Apollo orbiters
Apollo spacecraft
The Apollo spacecraft was composed of five combined parts designed to accomplish the American Apollo program's goal of landing astronauts on the Moon by the end of the 1960s and returning them safely to Earth...
, Saturn rocket boosters
Saturn (rocket family)
The Saturn family of American rocket boosters was developed by a team of mostly German rocket scientists led by Wernher von Braun to launch heavy payloads to Earth orbit and beyond. Originally proposed as a military satellite launcher, they were adopted as the launch vehicles for the Apollo moon...
, F-16 fighter jets, and various tanks.
As would be expected, given these origins, greebling is most commonly associated with the particular kind of large city-like spaceships made popular in Star Wars, but has been generalized to refer to any dense covering by different (usually mechanical) components. Similarly, Borg starships
Borg starships
In the Star Trek fictional universe, Borg starships are huge interstellar spacecraft used by the Borg race to assimilate other species. All of their ships are simple geometric solids with greebled exteriors and very generalized and decentralized designs....
(and drones
Borg (Star Trek)
The Borg are a fictional pseudo-race of cybernetic organisms depicted in the Star Trek universe associated with Star Trek.Whereas cybernetics are used by other races in the science fiction world to repair bodily damage and birth defects, the Borg use enforced cybernetic enhancement as a means of...
) in Star Trek
Star Trek
Star Trek is an American science fiction entertainment franchise created by Gene Roddenberry. The core of Star Trek is its six television series: The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise...
appear heavily "greebled" using leftover sprues from previous kitbashing and photoetch bits.
An anecdote from the creation of the first Star Wars movie involves the Tunisia
Tunisia
Tunisia , officially the Tunisian RepublicThe long name of Tunisia in other languages used in the country is: , is the northernmost country in Africa. It is a Maghreb country and is bordered by Algeria to the west, Libya to the southeast, and the Mediterranean Sea to the north and east. Its area...
n customs enquiring what a part of C-3PO
C-3PO
C-3PO is a robot character from the Star Wars universe who appears in both the original Star Wars films and the prequel trilogy. He is also a major character in the television show Droids, and appears frequently in the series' "Expanded Universe" of novels, comic books, and video games...
's costume (listed as "assorted greebles") was. Their response was allegedly "Something that looks cool but doesn't actually do anything."
Automated greebling
In 3D computer graphics3D computer graphics
3D computer graphics are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data that is stored in the computer for the purposes of performing calculations and rendering 2D images...
, greebles can be created automatically by specific software, in order to avoid the time consuming process of manually creating large numbers of precise, custom geometry. This can often be tedious, and repetitive work, and some consider it a task best suited to automatic, software based procedural generation
Procedural generation
Procedural generation is a widely used term in the production of media; it refers to content generated algorithmically rather than manually. Often, this means creating content on the fly rather than prior to distribution...
, particularly if a great degree of control is unnecessary or the greebles will not be particularly large on screen. Most greeble generating software work by sub-dividing the surface to be greebled into smaller regions, adding some detail to each new surface, and then recursive
Recursive
Recursive may refer to:*Recursion, the technique of functions calling themselves*Recursive function, a total computable function*Recursive language, a language which is decidable...
ly continuing this process on each new surface to some specified level of detail. Similar algorithms are used in the creation of fractal
Fractal
A fractal has been defined as "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is a reduced-size copy of the whole," a property called self-similarity...
surfaces.
External links
- Staffan Norling's comments about greebling
- Starship Modeler: an invaluable resource for science fiction modeling
- Greeble plugin for 3D Studio Max3D Studio MaxAutodesk 3ds Max, formerly 3D Studio MAX, is for making 3D animations. It was developed and produced by Autodesk Media and Entertainment. It has modeling capabilities, a flexible plugin architecture and can be used on the Microsoft Windows platform. It's frequently used by video game developers, TV...
- Greeble plugin for Realsoft 3DRealsoft 3DRealsoft 3D is a modeling and raytracing application created by Realsoft Graphics Oy. Originally called Real 3D, it was developed for the Amiga computer and later also for Linux, Irix, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows....
- Greeble plugin for trueSpaceTrueSpaceTrueSpace is a freeware 3D computer graphics and animation software developed by Caligari Corporation, bought-out by Microsoft. As of May 2009, it has been officially discontinued, but with some 'unofficial support' up to February 2010, at least.- History :The company was founded in 1985 by Roman...
- Greeble plugin for LightWaveLightWaveLightWave 3D is a high end computer graphics program developed by NewTek. The latest release of LightWave runs on Windows and Mac OS X.- Overview:...
- Greeble Script for BlenderBlender (software)Blender is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software product used for creating animated films, visual effects, interactive 3D applications or video games. The current release version is 2.60, and was released on October 19, 2011...
- Greeble Script for Autodesk Maya