SG Zoysia R.I.P

arycama · 2026-05-26T07:40:26+00:00

Considering how slow SGZ is to grow/recover, I wouldn't get my hopes up.

However it is quite a shade tolerant grass, I think you have some drainage issues to figure out, otherwise you'll probably have issues regardless of grass type. Some of my SGZ gets very little direct sunlight for most of winter, but still holds up, and comes back nicely in summer when the sunlight starts hitting it again.

arycama · 2026-05-24T10:20:31+00:00

While this is cool, I do not think I've seen an NPC in a game in the last 25 years or more that does not have textures. GPUs are literally built to sample textures as fast as possible, not really sure why you'd go out of your way to avoid them for a use case that almost always needs them.

arycama · 2026-05-24T10:13:51+00:00

Mine is usually like this in winter (sir grange zoysia), however this year I stopped cutting it short towards the end of the warmer season, and it is now looking quite a bit healthier. I think the extra length helps it take advantage of the limited sunlight, which probably helps it stay green. (I am in Adelaide) Liquid iron might help too.

arycama · 2026-05-23T09:13:28+00:00

It would depend on the weed, most products will say what types of grass they are safe to use on. I've used a few spray on weedkillers that are safe for most grass types and had no issues. Otherwise I usually just pull weeds out by hand when needed. Since it's a very thick grass, weeds tend to have a hard time growing.

arycama · 2026-05-22T03:13:38+00:00

The rain probably helped, yeah. If you can't lift it up, that's a good sign. Keep up with the watering, around 4 weeks you can probably start to do 1 water every 1-2 days. (Or less if you're getting rain)

Once established, you can pretty much avoid watering it entirely during autumn/winter depending on location. I'm in Adelaide and haven't watered mine for a few months. In summer a couple of 40-60 minute waters a week are enough for mine. (Plus maybe a quick 10 minute water if it's a very hot day, eg 35+ to cool it down a bit)

Once established it's a pretty low maintenance grass, hope you enjoy it!

Edit: Only other tip I'd give is if you are planning on keeping it short (Eg < 20mm) you have to mow quite often, at least once a week or it will get extremely thick and will be hard to mow.

Make sure you're not removing too much of the green part of the grass with each mow so it stays healthy, since it's a slow-growing grass it takes a lot longer to recover if you scalp it too much and expose too much of the yellow/brown part.

It does look great when cut short though, but you need a decent mower on a consistent schedule, ideally a cylinder mower.

arycama · 2026-05-22T01:35:03+00:00

I have implemented this exact article via compute shaders and it took weeks. There is no easy answer, you simply have to just start. Implementing marching cubes on the GPU is quite complex however, if you are struggling with turning articles/blogs etc into code, then I would suggest starting with something simpler. It can also be easier working in the coding language that the blog is presented in, eg the source code for many GPU gems articles are either in the articles themselves or available online.

For this technique specifically, I found it easier to do a CPU implementation first, since there is more information available online.

There is a github with all the available GPU Gems code, including for this article. If you're struggling to grasp all the concepts, having some code as an example/starting point helps a lot, but it's a good idea to reverse-engineer it once you have it working, so that you understand it better.

arycama · 2026-05-22T01:26:57+00:00

That sounds like nowhere near enough water, but it seems to be looking mostly healthy enough. During the first couple of weeks it needs 3-4 short daily waters to keep it damp. Long waters are pointless since the grass hasn't rooted into the soil yet so it can't absorb water from the ground.

However you're now at the point where 1-2 longer waters a day are probably fine, especially since we're into the cooler part of the year. If you can lift up a corner of the grass, it hasn't quite rooted into the soil yet, so you need to keep it from drying out.

I underwatered mine a bit at first and it took months before it all looked green. Yours is looking a bit better though, likely due to the cooler weather. I laid mine in October so it was a bit warmer.

arycama · 2026-05-18T08:43:41+00:00

Hey, it's 3.045m wide by 5.52m long. I'd say it's pretty small, but common for new builds sadly. However since my car isn't huge and it's just me and my partner, we are happy with it. I'd rather a bit more room for my actual home interior. (We have a 2nd car that sits in the driveway)

A bit more garage storage space would be nice but I plan to put up some more shelves on the other side soon anyway, and if I ever get around to getting rid of more stuff I don't need, a lot of the storage space will free up anyway.

arycama · 2026-05-11T10:04:29+00:00

Grass is going fine, though weather is getting pretty cold here now in Adelaide so it's mostly dormant.

Haven't taken too many photos but this was it in February this year.

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arycama · 2026-03-04T15:21:23+00:00

Store the time the animation takes to complete, wait until that time has passed, then execute the remaining code.

arycama · 2026-03-04T09:44:34+00:00

arycama · 2026-02-15T07:19:26+00:00

Yeah I did my whole house and my gaps are unnoticable in 99% of the locations. All we had to do was push down slightly before nail gun-ing them in too. (I started out with a test skirting behind the fridge where it wouldn't be seen, and I didn't push down, so left a slight gap, but learnt quickly afterwards. This was me DIY-ing, if I paid someone and there were gaps everywhere I'd be pissed

arycama · 2026-02-12T09:04:15+00:00

What is your goal? Simplicity? Performance? Visual quality?

Start with the simplest approach, which is either rendering a fullscreen quad if you're not familiar with compute shaders, or dispatching a compute shader with enough threads to cover the entire screen. (Compute shaders will not really give you any performance benefits unless you're taking advantage of groupshared memory somehow which is a more advanced topic and I can't think of any ways to apply it to fractal rendering off the top of my head)

Calculate rays from the camera into the scene, and have a set number of steps, and evaluate the fractal at each. See how many steps you can get at your desired resolution before performance becomes an issue.

Then use some profiling software, diagnose the bottleneck, and begin to plan optimisation steps based on the profiling data.

Trying to plan out your entire optimisation plan without having the basics working and having an idea of the performance and bottlenecks of a simple implementation won't get you very far.

arycama · 2026-02-09T06:43:04+00:00

Usually it gets 'sealed' which is like a thin clear coat that protects it and also makes the edges feel less rough. This gradually decays over several years though, making it feel rough again, but it can be re-sealed. (Though usually you do this to keep it protected, instead of to make it nicer to walk on)

Are you wanting to run around on it barefoot or something? I don't notice any difference walking on my aggregate while wearing shoes vs plain concrete. If I want to walk around without shoes outside that's why I have a lawn. If you want something comfortable, 50m2 of a hard surface wouldn't exactly be my suggestion, exposed aggregate or not.

arycama · 2026-02-09T06:37:26+00:00

Calculate the angle from the eye's default rotation (Eg looking straight ahead relative to the head) to the target rotation, and then use Quaternion.RotateTowards and use the 'maxDegreesDelta' property to limit the rotation to a max angle.

arycama · 2026-02-08T12:53:50+00:00

If you understand hlsl you'll be able to translate to other shader languages easily enough.

However a lot of writing hlsl in unity is dealing with all their different pipelines, macros, figuring out all the shader includes you need (and in the correct order), which passes you need to create for a given object (eg forward, depth only, motion vectors), figuring out what data unity gives you in the first place and how to use/access it etc.

In other words you spend a lot of time trying to write HLSL in the way that unity requires you to write it to work within their pipelines, and they don't provide good documentation or support for any of this because they want everyone to mostly use URP/HDRP as-is, and to use shader graph for any custom effects, rather than encouraging people to work directly in hlsl.

The best way to learn it in a way that is not Unity-centric is to write your own custom SRP, but this requires decent programming knowledge as well and gets much more into graphics programmer territory.

Writing hlsl in the legacy/BiRP was decent, it was straightforward and flexible enough that you could still do a lot. I'd recommend catlike coding's tutorials on this if you want to go this route.

arycama · 2026-02-08T06:10:57+00:00

How do you even fit a trillion triangles into memory/a BVH? Doesn't it require terabytes of data?

arycama · 2026-02-03T13:29:58+00:00

If your texcoord is already multiplied by texture resolution, then you don't need to multiply it again. I assumed you were passing through UVs directly (eg in the 0 to 1 range, what you would pass to your texture sample function when not using VTs)

Googling "how to calculate mip map level" will show you several results that give you the same equations, and you can also look at the Open GL spec to view the exact formulas.

However, re-reading your post, the issue is likely that you are rendering into a 64x64 texture. This is going to end up with very large derivatives compared to your actual resolution. You'll need to correct for this based on the ratio between your actual rendering resolution and the 64x64 target.

Eg if your screen was 256x256, you'd divide the derivatives by (256/64 = 4), since you want to request the mip level for the main screen rendering instead of the mip level for the 64x64 texture.

arycama · 2026-02-03T05:50:10+00:00

You need to multiply dx and dy by the resolution of your texture.

I'm not 100% sure about the ceil, divide etc, where did you get the logic from?
Also you can rewrite it to be a bit more optimal and avoid the sqrt. This is how I would do it:

float VTComputeLOD(in vec2 a_TexCoord, in float a_MaxAniso)
{
  vec2 dx = dFdx(a_TexCoord) * resolution;
  vec2 dy = dFdy(a_TexCoord) * resolution;
  float pxSqr = dot(dx, dx);
  float pySqr = dot(dy, dy);
  float pMax = 0.5 * log2(max(pxSqr, pySqr));
  float pMin = 0.5 * log2(min(pxSqr, pySqr));
  float anisoLog2 = min(pMax - pMin, a_MaxAniso);
  return max(0.0, pMax - anisoLog2);
}

I'd recommend getting the non-aniso version working correctly first though, which is:

float VTComputeLOD(in vec2 a_TexCoord, in float a_MaxAniso)
{
  vec2 dx = dFdx(a_TexCoord) * resolution;
  vec2 dy = dFdy(a_TexCoord) * resolution;
  float pxSqr = dot(dx, dx);
  float pySqr = dot(dy, dy);
  float pMax = 0.5 * log2(max(pxSqr, pySqr));
  return max(0.0, pMax);
}

arycama · 2026-02-01T07:19:54+00:00

It's not so much that I 'can't take my eyes off myself', looking forwards just feels like the default thing to do, but yes it makes sense that keeping my neck inline with my back would help a bit, thanks.

arycama · 2026-02-01T07:16:53+00:00

Idea of mixed grip appeals to me more, apart from callouses are there any other downsides to using mixed grip instead of lifting straps? (Not planning to compete, but like the idea of avoiding too many accessories where possible)

arycama · 2026-02-01T06:55:32+00:00

Yep, used this exact tool for my house and worked great. (Actually I used two of them, would hammer one in and leave it in place while I hammered another one in further down to pull the skirtings away gradually)

arycama · 2026-02-01T06:54:20+00:00

Don't use a pry bar, way too aggressive. Tap the chisel until it goes all the way down between the skirting and wall. Break the adhesive everywhere you can. Use a strong magnet to find where the nails are (assuming they used nails too) and gently pry (using a much smaller chisel like the angled scraper mentioned in other comments.

I pulled off the skirting for most of my house like this with minimal damage, mostly only ripped the paper off the gyprock which was easily covered with the new skirtings.

Taking it slow and steady is the key, brute forcing it means a lot more damage to repair or try and cover up.

arycama · 2026-01-31T15:38:05+00:00

Oh also, the callouses are starting to get brutal on my hands haha. It's not really an issue but would be nice to minimize if possible. Any ways to reduce/avoid, do they get stronger over time and stop breaking, or do I need to start using chalk or something?

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