The Genie Problem

Returning to Volka's room, the old man turned round slyly, snapped the fingers of his left hand, and there appeared on the wall over the aquarium an exact copy of the telephone hanging in the hall.

"Now you can talk to your friends as much as you like without leaving your own room."

"Golly, thanks a lot!" Volka said gratefully. He removed the receiver, pressed it to his ear and listened. There was no dial tone.

"Hello! Hello!" he shouted. He shook the receiver and then blew into it. Still, there was no dial tone.

"The phone's broken," he explained to Hottabych. "Let's unscrew the receiver and see what's wrong."

However, despite all his efforts, he could not unscrew it.

"It's made of the finest black marble," Hottabych boasted.

"Then there's nothing inside?" Volka asked disappointedly.

"Why, is there supposed to be something inside this, too? Just like in a watch?"

"Now I know why it doesn't work. You've only made a model of a telephone, without anything that's supposed to go inside it. But the insides are the most important part."

"The Old Genie Hottabych", Lazar Lagin

When I’m doing 3D modeling, I often feel like that genie. He also tried to mimic the shape of things and jazz them up, but always ended up failing ‘cause he hadn’t got a clue about what was inside.

I’m just the same. For the past month, I’ve been putting the finishing touches on a model of a school music room, and guess what? I’ve learned more about how pianos work than I have in my whole life before. I could even give a quick lecture on heating systems in Russian schools — talking about sectional, panel, cast iron, and aluminum radiators, which types pop up most, the spacing between them, why you shouldn’t hook up three in a row, and so on.

I read about this effect: like when you're drawing, say, samurai armor — you end up inadvertently learning heaps about the properties of leather, the different kinds of metal, and the whole tech stack of the samurai era. I never thought I'd run into that from day one — but hey, I think it's a good thing. It fires up your neural connections, broadens your view of the world, sparks your creativity, and all that jazz.

Plus, it’s way more fun working on a model when you actually know what’s going on under the hood.

12 April 2025 3D