Greeble
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A greeble is a small piece of detailing added to break up the surface of an object to add visual interest to a surface or object, particularly in movie special effects. They serve no real purpose other than to add complexity to the object. The detail can be made from geometric primitives, including cylinders, cubes, and rectangles, combined to create intricate, but meaningless, surface detail. Greebles are commonly found on models or drawings of fictional spacecraft in science fiction. Another term for greeble is nurnie. This term was coined by Ron Thornton, a pioneering 3D artist and founder of Foundation Imaging.[citation needed]
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[edit] Facial recognition
The term also refers to a category of novel objects used as stimuli in psychological studies of object and face recognition. The Greebles were created by Scott Yu at Yale University. They were named by the famous psychologist Robert Abelson. The greebles were created so as to share constraints with faces: they have a small number of parts in a common configuration. This makes it difficult to distinguish any individual object on the basis of the presence of a feature, and this is thought to encourage the use of all features and the relationships between them. In other words, greebles, just like faces, can be processed configurally. Scott's originals (both the symmetrical and asymmetrical sets) can be obtained from Michael Tarr.[1] Greebles appear in over 20 scientific articles.[2]
[edit] Greebles in popular culture
The first recorded use of the term was by those working on the special effects for Star Wars - the group who would later become Industrial Light and Magic. They also described this design method as "guts on the outside".
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.
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 ships (and drones) in Star Trek appear heavily "greebled".
An anecdote from the creation of the first Star Wars movie involves the Tunisian customs enquiring what part of the costume of C-3PO (listed as "assorted greebles") was. Their response was allegedly "Something that looks cool but doesn't actually do anything." Most of the weapons carried in Star Wars were replicas of common World War II firearms with "extra" vents, scopes and other unneeded pieces added on.
In 3D computer graphics, greebles are often created automatically by specific software, because generating greeble involves a lot of precise, tedious, and repetitive work, and many consider it a task best suited to computers, particularly if a great degree of control is unnecessary or the greebles will not be particularly large on screen.
Most greeble generating software works by sub-dividing the surface to be greebled into smaller regions, adding some detail to each new surface, and then recursively continuing this process on each new surface to some specified level of detail.
[edit] Notes and references
- ^ http://alpha.cog.brown.edu:8200/
- ^ http://www.psy.vanderbilt.edu/faculty/gauthier/FoG/Greebles.html
- Gauthier, I., and Tarr, M. J. (1997). Becoming a "Greeble" expert: Exploring the face recognition mechanism. Vision Research, 37(12), 1673-1682.
- Gauthier, I., Tarr, M. J., Anderson, A. W., Skudlarski, P., and Gore, J. C. (1999). Activation of the middle fusiform "face area" increases with expertise in recognizing novel objects. Nature Neuroscience, 2(6), 568-573.
