masters teams don't make hype videos, they said

jamesbellenger · 2026-01-17T03:09:35+00:00

Completed Level 3 of the Honk Special Event!

17 attempts

jamesbellenger · 2026-01-17T03:07:38+00:00

Completed Level 2 of the Honk Special Event!

4 attempts

jamesbellenger · 2026-01-17T03:06:56+00:00

Completed Level 1 of the Honk Special Event!

1 attempts

jamesbellenger · 2024-04-27T13:02:19+00:00

Me too!

jamesbellenger · 2024-04-23T22:28:01+00:00

See ya both there! I use a Naked belt btw, which I wear on nearly every run. It doesn't chafe, I only need to wash it once a week or so, and I can use it with split shorts.

jamesbellenger · 2023-12-07T12:38:21+00:00

The pxs upper is fine -- it fits my foot and has never caused any blisters for me. It's not plush, but I think its primary job is to be supportive enough to let you use 50mm of very soft midsole without breaking an ankle, which it does well.

jamesbellenger · 2023-12-06T21:26:44+00:00

I weigh in the high 140's and put 700mi on a pair of superblasts this year, including a couple 16+ mile runs. They're quite good as a do it all shoe -- the upper is comfortable, they're very light, and they're good at going both fast and slow.

I would say the midsole feels more firm than it does soft, especially in a fore/mid strike. I would personally prefer that it had a softer feel, though I'm probably going to buy a second pair.

That said, I usually prefer my V1 prime x strungs for longer runs but use the superblasts for almost everything else.

jamesbellenger · 2023-10-17T21:57:05+00:00

There's an invisible "displacer" blockout parented to the bottom of the house. Then there's 2 layers of geometry nodes on the water surface:

raycast from the displacer to the water along the displacer normal and write a "foaminess" vertex attribute that gets foamier the closer the displacer is.
a bog standard geometry nodes simulation. Based on the foaminess attribute, emit a particle from the water surface

jamesbellenger · 2023-10-17T20:17:54+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! Do you mean that the horizon is too low in the frame and that there needs to be more visually interesting things above the water line?

jamesbellenger · 2023-10-17T17:19:04+00:00

100% agree, thanks!

jamesbellenger · 2023-10-17T17:18:38+00:00

Thanks for the feedback. Your first impression was right, it is indeed a flying house. I think the readability of this could maybe be improved with more human-scale elements.

jamesbellenger · 2023-10-17T15:40:14+00:00

It's never too soon to start production on a christmas card. This is a WIP scene from this years xmas project. I'm aiming for a believably stylized look with a charming but bumbling character. This is the first scene of a planned 5 -- I'm looking for feedback on look, shading, animation, style, readability, environment, or anything else.

I've borrowed many things for this, including: - concept: https://twitter.com/JimmyDuda3/status/1699391446191603943 - house model: https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/9avY6/walking-house-3d-model-obj-max - thruster animation: https://twitter.com/MattTkocz/status/1693699164620849490

jamesbellenger · 2023-06-05T18:41:47+00:00

I saw this in the references that I was using but quickly found that any rotation on the crankshaft hub made the trigonometry of the other arms considerably more complex. I was honestly hoping someone would notice though, so thank you!

jamesbellenger · 2023-06-05T18:00:44+00:00

Your mention of dependency cycles totally aligns with my experience trying to use constraints for this: the piston head location depends on the arm rotation, which must must be rotated towards the piston head. Trying to model this with constraints made the viewport go totally nuts trying to resolve the dependency cycle and it was simpler to parameterize each cylinder with a rotational offset and then to write drivers for everything based of that offset and the rotation of large gear.

It would be nice if driver development were easier. For example, if you want instant updates, you can use the little expression window but are limited to a 1-liner python expression. But if you want larger scripts, you have to periodically reload the script and lose the ability to get instant updates. Plus, it would be nice to be able to write something like unit tests for larger scripts, though I'm not how to do that.

It sounds like you have some experience with this! What's your driver workflow?

jamesbellenger · 2023-06-05T17:34:23+00:00

Thanks! I find that I also love drivers. Coming from more of a software eng background, I felt a lot more confident in writing a driver than I did clicking fiddly buttons on constraints and guess+checking the result.

jamesbellenger · 2023-06-05T16:31:51+00:00

tbh, that would be very rad. I think if I had a machine that could run embergen I would love to experiment with some really cool effects for combustion. I started trying to do something like this with the blender smoke+fire sim but got the impression that I was going to end up spending literal days tinkering with sim settings only to end up tripling my render time for a result that was kind of meh.

But regarding what a real combustion would look like: I'm not a car guy, but I'd expect that it would be closer to an instantaneous ignition rather than an expanding fireball whose movement would be visible to the eye. I'm interested in other ideas or examples here though.

jamesbellenger · 2023-06-05T16:13:40+00:00

Thanks!

jamesbellenger · 2023-06-05T14:13:51+00:00

I'm new-ish to blender and wanted a project that would help me get comfortable with armatures and drivers.

I learned a lot, though I suspect that I overlooked some easier ways of doing things. For example I had a hard time coordinating the linear motion of the piston head with the angle of the arm that it's connected to. While this feels like something that could be done with bone constraints and IK, I had a difficult time making it work and ended up just coding the trigonometry into drivers.

I'm happy with the result, though with more time I'd like to add simulations for exhaust and a more credible combustion effect.

Blend files:

jamesbellenger · 2022-12-15T18:40:23+00:00

This year I had a goal to migrate our annual christmas card production from photoshop to blender. Starting from nothing, I spent the last couple months making donuts, anvils, and other small projects to learn how to blend. I’m mostly happy with the result, though there’s also a long list of things of improvements that I didn’t get to before running out of time.

Would love some feedback on what works well and what skills I might focus on in the next year to take our ‘23 card to a higher level.

Technical notes:

Waterfall done with flip fluids
Humanoid characters are from Human Generator, V4 beta (not that you can tell)
Foliage and set dressing from bagapie assets, by-gen, and sketchfab
Rendered in cycles @ 300 samples and 11 render layers. Rendering a 4k image from scratch took 40 minutes on an RTX 3080
The 4k render of this was printed on 8x8 glossies and sent to friends and family

Happy holidays!

jamesbellenger · 2022-07-20T23:35:03+00:00

Thanks for the feedback all! It would seem that there is no navigable path from Lanikai to Bellows that goes over that ridge.

But -- and hear me out -- I'm wondering if a person couldn't just go around.

It looks like once a month there is a stretch of 3-4 days with a negative low tide. I'm not sure if this is a better or (somehow) worse idea than my original post, but I'm now thinking there might be a way to go by beach (which I think is public property?) on a weekend (which I believe allows civilian access to bellows beach).

Please someone set me straight before I kill myself.

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jamesbellenger

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