CPS Week 6 - Objects Are Not Exhausted

Theme
This week's theme is 'Objects are not exhausted', and by that, we explore the concept of Object-Oriented Ontology. In a nutshell, it means that the objects exist independently of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their relations with humans - thanks to Max Piantoni and Wikipedia.

Context
From the knowledge I gathered from the internet, and in order to create something that does not have any human footprint, I had to either think of the pre-historic time or the post-apocalyptic time. I thought of an idea where humans do not exist or the things/objects that exist have no human influence, therefore, no theory of the geometry applied anywhere.

Method
At first, it was quite challenging to think out of the box, and as I was surfing through some of the old photographs stored on my HDD, I happened to stumble across a bunch of photos I took way back in 2010 when I visited an exhibition on rocks and fossils held in Mumbai University. I never thought those photographs would ever be useful and after all, who likes taking photos of rocks, never imagined that could be interesting. 

I did some more digging on those rocks and fossils and I discovered a rock called 'Pumice', which is neither the part of earth nor man-made but it is the result of 'climate change' (metaphorically speaking) and can float on water. I also found a meteorite in one of those photographs and of course, this blue marble is not going to be intact forever so I wanted to create a material that has all of these properties, a combination of radioactive surface and melting of the meteorites.

Response
After spending almost the entire day researching the concept of Object-Oriented Ontology and trying to learn everything I could, I decided to just play with the idea itself and be creative. 

I came up with an idea of a post-apocalyptic time where humans do not exist at all, the reason being, the nuclear war. Their fossils can be found on rocks and the remains would be radioactive because of the fallout. I was going to create a fallen city but I believe that would conflict with the idea of Object-Oriented Ontology so decided of a cave, where it all started. "The beginning is the end is the beginning" - not because of The Smashing Pumpkins but it kind of suits the idea here.

So I started with 3ds Max, modelled a small rock. My main goal was to work towards something that has unique properties and clearly reflects the concept, thus, I spent most of my time getting the diffuse right as I wanted to create a material that tells the story itself. To create the fossil material, I like to create my displacement maps in Nuke as it gives me more control and flexibility. Eventually, I ended up creating the whole scene instead of just a material.