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GreebleThe first recorded use of the term Greeble was by those working on the special effects for Star Wars - the group who would later become Industrial Light and Magic. 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 - a design method termed "guts on the outside" by ILM. 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, Greeble 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. An anecdote from the creation of the first Star Wars movie involves the Tunisian customs enquiring what part of the costume of C3PO - listed as "assorted greebles" was. Their response was allegedly "Something that looks cool but doesn't actually do anything". In 3D computer graphics, Greebles are often created automatically by specific software, because generating greeble involves a lot of precise, tedious, and repetetive 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. Greebles is also the term used to describe a type of nonsense object used as stimuli in psychological studies of the visual system. An example includes Rossion, Gauthier, Tarr, Despland, Bruyer, Linotte and Crommelinck's 1999 study of the visual system (example images here).
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