Discovery of world's tiniest Touhou has scientific community in an uproar.

[HakureiSM]

Fightest, I love you.

[Nietz]

I've never felt so much academic jealousy before...
:parseeinlabcoat:

[theshirn]

:parseeinlabcoat:

MUST HAVE THIS

[Zemyla]

That is absolutely beautiful.

Now we need someone who works in an IC fab to put a tiny Suika on computer chips.

[Kinzo the Astro Curious]

That is absolutely beautiful.

Now we need someone who works in an IC fab to put a tiny Tokiko on computer chips.

Know it makes sense 

[shinyjam]

Now we need someone who works in an IC fab to put a tiny Suika on computer chips.

Shinyjam Corp. proudly present the latest microprocessor, the Suika-chip.

[HakureiSM]

Is this for real?

[Fightest]

Shinyjam Corp. proudly present the latest microprocessor, the Suika-chip.

The Suika-chip is built on a fractal architecture to allow it to functionally segment into smaller sections of itself that are perfect replicas, ideal for handling multiple smaller processes at once. Despite its manufacturers' claims that the chip is able to control density of operations in individual volumes of memory, it never seems to do anything of the sort.

[Hello Purvis]

We'll need someone with a field of crops, a combine harvester, and a whole load of patience.

Naw dawg, we need to kick it oldschool.

Early on in my training for this setup I found out that the control software accepts images.

This is the best part. This means that the people who made the program intentionally wanted people drawing pictures. =]

[Zemyla]

This is the best part. This means that the people who made the program intentionally wanted people drawing pictures. =]

It's for press releases.  Tiny drawings = science.

[RuneDevros]

Are you in a Materials Science program? I do SEM work all the time, but our SEM is only suitable for imaging. What's the substrate you're using? I see some kind of a honeycomb structure in one of your SEM images. They look kind of like the TiO2 nanotubes I work with.

[Fightest]

Are you in a Materials Science program? I do SEM work all the time, but our SEM is only suitable for imaging. What's the substrate you're using? I see some kind of a honeycomb structure in one of your SEM images. They look kind of like the TiO2 nanotubes I work with.

The details are a few threads over in my "minor scientific achievement" thread. To put it briefly, I'm working on nanoporous nanoactuators, which I'm making through inverse opal templating, hence the honeycomb.

This is the best part. This means that the people who made the program intentionally wanted people drawing pictures. =]

I came to the same conclusion. To be fair, it would be very useful to etch complex patterns that could be drawn somewhere else, then imported in, like circuitry.

In fact, I would judge that that was the intent all along, as you can see, the picture is made by etching away everything but Suika, which leaves the appropriate image, which is what would be needed to leave metallic tracks intact, and get rid of the connecting material.

[Esifex]

In fact, I would judge that that was the intent all along, as you can see, the picture is made by etching away everything but Suika, which leaves the appropriate image, which is what would be needed to leave metallic tracks intact, and get rid of the connecting material.

So, how conductive is a Suika? We'll have to start measuring conductivity in Ibukis.

[Fightest]

All right, gentlemen. Micro- and nano-Touhous are serious business. Thus I wish to consult with our esteemed collective of intellectuals on how this project will continue. My current proposal is to etch every single Touhou (if possible) in their natural environment (e.g. Reimu and Suika at the Hakurei Shrine, possibly Suika being a measurable, literal one hundred times taller than Reimu), and put it together into the world's largest tiniest Touhou-based collage. I want this to be something us Western Touhou fans can be proud of, hence I would greatly appreciate input from all you learned gentlemen.

Hmm, as much as I'd love original art, seems like create.swf is gonna be the source for art, as I cannot draw.

[fakeedit] Oh god. If I can get my hands on those Bad Apple animation frames...

[Furienify]

All right, gentlemen. Micro- and nano-Touhous are serious business. Thus I wish to consult with our esteemed collective of intellectuals on how this project will continue. My current proposal is to etch every single Touhou (if possible) in their natural environment (e.g. Reimu and Suika at the Hakurei Shrine, possibly Suika being a measurable, literal one hundred times taller than Reimu), and put it together into the world's largest tiniest Touhou-based collage. I want this to be something us Western Touhou fans can be proud of, hence I would greatly appreciate input from all you learned gentlemen.

Hmm, as much as I'd love original art, seems like create.swf is gonna be the source for art, as I cannot draw.

[fakeedit] Oh god. If I can get my hands on those Bad Apple animation frames...

Fakeedit and ye shall receive

[Kinzo the Astro Curious]

This could get very interesting.

Wonder if anyones recreated the frames with create.swf...

[Fightest]

Fakeedit and ye shall receive

Magnificent. Okay, there are 4.3 thousand frames, which is flat-out not doable for me. I recall a certain animation involving apples, however. If I use a similar approach, I believe I can reduce the amount of frames I actually have to use to 50 or so. This is totally doable.

[Nietz]

Is it possible for you to make a video of the process? That would be something quite worth of uploading to Youtube/Nicovideo.

[Fightest]

Is it possible for you to make a video of the process? That would be something quite worth of uploading to Youtube/Nicovideo.

Pretty much impossible, though I can snapshot individual frames as the ion beam does its work, which is what I'm planning to do. I can get lots of those, so it shouldn't be too much of an issue. I can even do fun stuff like mask aspects of an image, say Mokou's flames, etch in Mokou, then overlay Mokou-with-fire and have the fire appear over several frames as the ion beam makes it clearer and clearer. All easily done in Paint.

First draft has 59 frames from the original animation, and I'm already skipping characters (Hina and Rumia). I'll try to cut down even further, then make a test slide next week, see how long it takes and work off that.

[Esifex]

Fightest, you truly win the internet for this.

[Ruka]

I'm more than week late, but I have to say it.

That's AWESOME.

That will go into the publication, right?

[Fightest]

Well, as promised, here's a few sample shots that I made earlier today:



Each takes about three minutes to etch, plus about another minute to process, except for Flandre, who took over 6 minutes overall. There's a weird halo effect with the images, but I can't make that go away, as I don't even know what's causing it. Still, the features are distinguishable, down to even small details if you squint a bit.

Something I realised quickly is that I'm not able to reasonably make screenshots during the process - despite me being able to pause and restart the etching, the ion beam does not perfectly match up with the electron microscope, so I have to do some realigning after each image taken that way, which quickly becomes unserviceable if I want to keep good quality images. What I can do is just use lower-quality images for the "in-process" frames. It'll take some time, but it's not a big deal - I should be able to make them in batches.

Playing around with resolution really yields significant results. Compare



with



I can get much better quality of image if I increase the general size, so, unfortunately, we're not going to get Touhous with nanoscale features, but, I assure you, these are still quite invisible to the naked eye  .

In terms of progress, I've got the inhabitants of SDM plus a few transition frames done. The rest I'll do as time allows, and will be quicker now that I know good working conditions.

[Drake]

If you did the whole thing, even at a quarter frames processed or something, I would worship you forever.
I could likely get you frame-by-frame if you wanted, and if you don't already have it.

[Dead Princess Sakana]

Hey, did we mention before that you're awesome, Fightest? Because you are. 

[Spidere]

Not only are you the fightest fighter who ever fought, but you're also the intricatest fighter that ever did SCIENCE!

[Solais]

If you did the whole thing, even at a quarter frames processed or something, I would worship you forever.
I could likely get you frame-by-frame if you wanted, and if you don't already have it.

This. Also send it to CNN. :V

[Fightest]

If you did the whole thing, even at a quarter frames processed or something, I would worship you forever.
I could likely get you frame-by-frame if you wanted, and if you don't already have it.

As much as I would love to, there's still 4 thousand frames out there (I have them all, thanks for the offer, though). A quarter is still one thousand frames, which translates to about four to five thousand minutes of work, which is seventy-five hours straight. I basically cannot do that without taking up the ion beam FOREVER. I'm certainly gonna do the fifty-odd frames I promised, though, with intermediate frames to smooth out transitions.

[Alfred F. Jones]

Holy wow.

Fightest. You have put a smile on my face that is not going away. This is just too awesome.

[Drake]

Well, matching up pictures to the original video (with still pictures of each character) would still work very well I think, just show a small clip zooming into each picture like you've done in the first post.

[HakureiSM]

Microscopic Apple!!