Subject:
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Re: Minifig scale?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.build
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Date:
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Sat, 26 Jul 2008 19:14:58 GMT
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I think this whole issue of scale and size brings into question just how humans
see the world and depict it. Western Civilization and the whole scientific
mathematical outlook of the world originated only a few hundred years ago with
the discovery of single point perspective in the late 1400’s What that
invention/discovery allowed was a method of measuring a scene—and in fact the
method itself imposes a structure such that measurement is not only possible but
intrinsic and necessary in the depicting process. It was an entirely new way of
looking at the world. It took only a couple of hundred years for people in the
West to see this as the default “correct” way of seeing. . And subsequently the
rise of all this technology that we now use began with that seemingly small
change in how an artist would depict a scene-real or imaginary. For a natural
outgrowth was of course Copernicus and his discoveries and Newton and his
calculus, Descartes and his coordinate system and the mathematical analysis of
“reality”. But there is one problem and that is that human perception of the
world is not from a single point of perspective, but rather from multiple points
that are moving all the time. Humans see not only by constantly moving their
head and changing their direction of seeing, but also they are constantly also
changing their focus. Not to mention the built in filtering system that we use
to not be overloaded with the scene but also to be able to pick out of that
scene what we are looking for. We can walk into a room and not see anything but
what we are looking for. Just think about walking around a display say of LEGO.
We are constantly moving our eyes around, changing what we are looking at,
changing the focus of one’s attention—in other words constantly changing the
scale of things. In a way we are always changing our coordinate system and
therefore always in Cartesian thinking , changing the position of not only the
origin but also the scale of the x y and z axes. The concept of scale is putting
all the objects in a scene in exactly the same coordinate system. Humans do not
do that. A camera perhaps does that. A perspective drawing from a single point
does that. But we do not see in single point perspective except when we
intellectually make ourselves do so. Eastern art took a different approach. In
Chinese Scroll painting, the scene was not to be viewed all at once in its
entirety, but rather as it was rolled from one roller to the next and thus the
point of perspective of the viewer is constantly moving. Perhaps a much more
accurate depiction of a scene than that of a Western eye. Watch a child play—he
/she has no problem jumping between all kinds of “coordinate systems”, for he
is always creating his own system on the fly according to how he wants it or
to achieve his goals. He has no problem playing with a minifig and at the same
time a building or car or whatever that is not to scale. He has no problem,
because that is the natural way humans have of perceiving the world. Scale is
really an artificial system we have imposed on the world. There is a pretty
well established axiom of photography—the ultimate single point perspective
tool—and that is that a great photo can have only one subject. All that said-I
do like scale models a lot. I am glad that engineers are constrained to the same
coordinate system when they design a bridge or building or train or car. I would
hate to drive over a bridge where the supports were not built to scale with the
load they are to carry. But I like other kinds of models and art also. I am not
sure that LEGO is really a system that is the best for “things in one scale”—it
is a more human system that allows the user to naturally create in any “scale”
he wants and as many as he wants.
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Minifig scale?
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| (...) --snip-- (...) Hey Tommy, I agree for the most part and certainly don't keep to a single scale in my own dioramas (or even work completely to scale on many models). Selective compression, forced perspective and other techniques are very useful (...) (16 years ago, 27-Jul-08, to lugnet.build, FTX)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Minifig scale?
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| (...) --snip-- (...) I think you're demonstrating my point here by confusing size and scale here. A 'scale' defines the ratio of each dimension of the model to the real thing. Thus HO scale is 1:87, half scale is 1:2, true nano scale is 1:10^9 and (...) (16 years ago, 26-Jul-08, to lugnet.build, FTX)
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