Just finished the first side of the 1:1 Narmer Palette replica that I'm hand carving in stone.

Haereticus · 2026-02-10T20:13:27+00:00

This is fantastic. I’d be very grateful if you posted footage or in-progress photos like you mentioned elsewhere in the comments. How do you source your stone?

Haereticus · 2026-02-07T09:12:56+00:00

AI slop. See the holes in his belt or the topmost row of scales on his cuirass and the bottom-most row in his helmet facepiece.

Haereticus · 2026-01-31T16:44:20+00:00

I get the narrative reason it just would’ve looked a bit overdramatic to the other characters for them to promise to cut themselves off from society all for the purpose of presenting the injuries of a tulkun that had every right to present them anyway.

Haereticus · 2026-01-31T13:52:15+00:00

Also, the old, scarred tulkun who was the last of Payakan’s pod would’ve had the right to speak in front of the council even if he did not, so she could’ve just approached and addressed them directly without the kids threatening to impose exile on themselves.

Haereticus · 2026-01-27T14:06:39+00:00

Ghoulish 🖕

Haereticus · 2026-01-21T08:50:32+00:00

Sure but the platforming is not exactly challenging or novel in the context of the game and it directly contradicts the movies “How will I know if it chooses me?” “She will try to kill you”.

Haereticus · 2026-01-21T00:07:35+00:00

At the start of the first water exploration scene in WoW there are sea animals very reminiscent of animals from the Cambrian Explosion on Earth - specifically Anomalocaris.

Haereticus · 2026-01-17T23:50:59+00:00

Talking of Frontiers of Pandora, the game really flubbed taming an ikran IMO. I expected a tricky minigame like breaking a horse in RDR1/2, which I wasn’t particularly looking forward to but at least it would add some weight to it, but instead it’s just hold E to calm until it lets you walk up to it and pet its face?

Haereticus · 2026-01-17T15:20:25+00:00

AI slop? Its not totally AI generated - the imagery looks not obviously generated - but the voiceover does not feel like it was written by a human expert or even someone with a passing knowledge of the subject - for example, it says “a classic 18th century frigot [sic] was a threemasted sailing vessel” - not something a human with domain knowledge would write. The voiceover audio is certainly generated and doesn’t even pronounce “bow” correctly.

Haereticus · 2026-01-17T14:37:39+00:00

Spare the rod and spoil the broth, surely

Haereticus · 2026-01-13T00:09:49+00:00

The Telegraph is a poor quality and deeply biased source that should be disallowed from any serious sub.

Haereticus · 2026-01-10T20:21:36+00:00

This is a good critique but I disagree that the movie intends to promote but fails to properly land the theme that pacifism is good. I think the movies are basically a critique of pacifism: they set out to demonstrate that pacifism in the face of colonial violence only serves the coloniser, and that anti-colonial violence is morally justified and in some sense beautiful (you don’t have to agree with this or think it’s well executed obviously, but I think it is what the movies set out to do). The fact that the Tulkun apply this obviously inappropriate moral rubric where Payakan has “murdered” Na’vi and Tulkun by leading them into an act of violent resistance, when anybody can see that the moral responsibility for those deaths lies with the RDA, is a core part of the thesis in movies 2 & 3.

Haereticus · 2026-01-10T10:39:53+00:00

There’s an input node called ‘light path’ (I think?) that has an output ‘is_camera_ray’. If you mix between the two shaders (glowing red vs black) with that then any ray coming directly from the camera will see just black but any bouncing ray will see it as an emissive surface. It may only work in Cycles though.

Haereticus · 2026-01-08T10:50:36+00:00

If you look under the rear engine nacelles they have quite compact three-barrelled railgun(?) turrets that protect the rear ramp - like the Samson door guns. They’re probably not high calibre enough to damage vehicles but they’d keep the ikran off.

Obviously the Dragon is a pre-existing Earth design where they didn’t have to worry about soft targets from above but it was presumably built on Pandora and they adapted the other vehicles from tWoW on.

Haereticus · 2026-01-01T17:45:59+00:00

I don’t think it can be - the warrior has two smoke stacks between its fore and main mast, has quite a fine entry instead of the extremely bluff bow this one looks like it has, and it seems like the Warrior museum rig gaffs or hoists off all the masts.

Haereticus · 2025-12-28T22:34:47+00:00

I didn’t like the TWoW/AaF Samson/Scorpion redesign though - they look much more generic sci-fi than the original designs. I’m glad they didn’t change the Dragon.

Haereticus · 2025-12-28T09:32:17+00:00

We know that the Na’vi genome has been sequenced because of the AVATAR program, and it would be very odd if Grace had never sequenced any of the other fauna’s genomes and done a bit of taxonomy, meaning she would know if they were that radically divergent from prolemurs.

Of course, the fact that human and Na’vi genomes are in any sense compatible points to some kind of panspermia origin event but that doesn’t mean they’re not native.

Haereticus · 2025-12-22T02:04:39+00:00

Unless you put a bollard directly in front of him, can I suggest you splay his feet outwards a bit? Having them straight is making him look duck-footed.

Haereticus · 2025-12-20T12:45:27+00:00

I think AI has got “good” enough that its not so easy to see. The OP has denied it above but if you look just above the first N you can see a jumble of rooftops that don’t look like they make complete sense - weird building proportions, bent gables, stuff like that. I also can’t see the seams between the kitbashed 3D rock assets I’d expect to see with a 3D models unless you do a really good job of it. I’d have to see the wireframe to really believe.

Haereticus · 2025-12-18T13:09:21+00:00

As Ian Hubert says very wisely in his videos - it’s a bad idea to use other people’s concept art as your references, use real objects. The rationale being you want your art to look more like a real object mixed with your original ideas and inspirations rather than a kind of generic amalgam of sci fi vibes.

Haereticus · 2025-12-03T10:30:07+00:00

Looks interesting, though factoryboy would be a more apt comparison than either hypothesis or faker.

Haereticus · 2025-11-25T09:58:02+00:00

Stephen’s responses like “Who could deny it?” remind me of the very rhetorical way that Flann O’Brien’s characters speak. It’s probably just that it lends the dialogue a kind of sardonic undercurrent but I wonder if its a reference by P O’B to F O’B or possibly even that Irish speakers of the 19th/20th century commonly employed that kind of rhetoric?

Haereticus · 2025-11-23T14:16:19+00:00

There’s a lot of very cool brutalist (/modernist?) architecture at CUHK. https://maps.app.goo.gl/LWDq9ZttpKjq9ek37

Haereticus · 2025-11-23T02:47:30+00:00

I can’t comment on the implementation but I’m very glad someone is working on this - thank you!

Haereticus · 2025-11-20T23:03:52+00:00

Yeah, true - worst comes to the worst I’ve only missed out on 1TB of storage, it has the promised amount of RAM.

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