i like the star trek borg cube texture instead personally
this post was submitted on 02 May 2026
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Its the physical manifestation of the old pipes screen saver from windows 95.
It's like a kind of reverse greeble.
As far as I know it's also considered greeble, the term was just coined later
It was coined by ILM in the 70s, a smidge before the Borg.
There was even a pretty cool plugin for Cinema4D with that same name IIRC.
The Great Greeble Assimilation was a very important milestone for the Borg.
Is there a special name for electronic doodads in sci-fi? Like the control panels in the Millennium Falcon or Luthen's radio switchboard in Andor. Shoot, Mother's room in Alien is another example. It's like the electronic version of greebles on a starship model. Do they have a special name as well?
That whole aesthetic is cassette futurism, as distinct from the glass touchscreens of Star Trek TNG.
Oh yeah! I forgot that was a thing. Tx ^^
So in the future, have they also solved the problem of "dust"? Those poor cleaners...
No dust in space because vacuum.
🤔
Suck suck suck suck!
That's @Kolanaki@pawb.social you're taking to there.
Back in the days where they used miniatures to do spaceships sometimes the vfx dept. would take model kits and glue the entire plastic sheet, sprues and all, to the miniature. You know, like this.
The definitive greebled cube.
Forgiveness for my pedantry, but pretty sure a greeble (or greeblie) is the individual plastic details that they would glue on to create the texture, not the texture itself.
You wouldn't say a texture is "greeble".
Edit - and if you're talking 3d modeling, greebling is done during sculpting, it's not a texturing step.
To be pedantic in return - in 3D modeling you absolutely can add greebling as a bump map or tessellation texture.
It seems to use a similar naming convention as stucco, where the thing that is applied shares the name with the resulting texfure.
Blender modeler here. We often do grebble in geometry nodes. Not sculpting
You could also theoretically do it in the texturing step with a displacement modifier using the new(er) dynamic scaling.
Oh yeah. Forgot it was stabilised
I get where you're coming from but texture in layman term is (microscopic) characteristic of the surface. You wouldn't appreciate crisp 16bit RGBA pixels in your mouth when you bite an apple.
It's texture as in surface quality, not the meaning used in computer rendering.
In the late 1990s I wrote an Alias|Wavefront plugin called greeble that built a bump field + height field from texture so artists could paint greebles on by hand, so whether or not that’s the proper way to do it, it’s been a texture thing for a long time.
Huh. I thought it was the invisible things that only cats can see that makes them kinda crazy.
it is. this is just word theft. ;p
The term "greeblies" was coined by George Lucas in the 1970s to describe details on model ships used in the production of Star Wars
;-P
“kinda”
This is nurnies erasure.
I knew Ron Thornton for awhile. He said nurnies were digital and greebles were physical, but most other people I've known have used them interchangeably.
And here I was calling it the Borg
They're half the reason people buy Nothing phones.
What do you mean?
Yeah, none of that shit does anything besides the cameras, the flash and that little screen. It isn't even covering anything with the same shape underneath it. I say that as someone who has a Nothing phone. It looks cool, but is completely funcionless.
You will be assimilated. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile.
Greebles! An important part of making miniature models, here's a great video with examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otvDWcDVeac