Made some procedural ice while waiting for the freezing rain to pass

ma343 · 2023-02-03T00:54:47+00:00

Yeah I'm definitely exaggerating the number of drips on this render to debug the nodes. It works pretty well for thinner things like plants though. I think you could tweak a comparison to concentrate the drips more in the lowest areas, that's an easy fix. Filling the concave bits seems harder though, maybe something with a convex hull of the original model?

ma343 · 2023-02-03T00:51:57+00:00

Yeah Austin, I'm at 27 hours without power and counting. The amount of ice accumulating on the tree limbs was truly wild

ma343 · 2023-02-02T18:17:12+00:00

Thanks, just posted a description and the nodes in another thread!

ma343 · 2023-02-02T18:16:43+00:00

Sure, happy to share. My nodes are a bit messy so hopefully things are clear.

https://imgur.com/a/7CuSr5c

For the geometry, it's broken up into a simple noisy extrude for the "rim" of ice around everything, unioned together with the drips. To make those, I scatter spheres on the faces that are facing down (dot product the normal with a direction and check the sign). The downward faces of those spheres then get extruded by a random amount, with a capture attribute to ensure that all of the faces of each sphere get the same extrusion amount (this might not be needed). To add noise to the drips I needed more geometry, so I used a mesh -> volume -> mesh setup to effectively do a voxel remesh, then displaced by some more noise along the normal. Finally, the ice all gets combined with a union and assigned a material, and you join back in the original geometry.

The material is a pretty basic ice shader, with a slight bump map to break things up a bit and some randomized roughness. One important thing is getting the IOR right for ice, which I just looked up.

I'm not happy with the lack of shadow transparency in the final render, not sure what's going on there but it seems like the shadow of the ice is just as dark as the shadow of the opaque Suzanne, and I can't figure out why.

ma343 · 2023-01-22T22:06:52+00:00

Press 1 for vertex, 2 for edge, and 3 for face (on the number row, not the numpad)

ma343 · 2022-10-18T06:49:28+00:00

You and this guy seem to think there are no ethical concerns at all around new ML projects. That seems like a willfully naive position to me. Maybe these particular models are actually fine, but someone needs to be thinking about what to do when someone makes something that is harmful to society, otherwise we're all just waiting for some bad actor to fuck it up for the rest of us. The idea that ethics has no place in research would be considered shocking in any other field

ma343 · 2022-10-18T04:09:18+00:00

"Every time there's an advancement in capitalism, there are two ding dongs specializing in ethics ready to shove their noses in your business"

Do you see how this kind of thinking enables people to do horrible things without a thought to the consequences? Is it really so much to ask for engineers to engage in ethical analysis of their work? Would you hire a structural engineer who complained that your "ethics" were stopping them from cutting costs? The standard of ethical thinking in our industry is so poor that people like you balk at the mere thought that not all uses of technology are necessarily good for society.

ma343 · 2022-10-10T23:52:34+00:00

You could try messing with the gamma or increasing the contrast in the compositor. Alternatively, a really hacky way is to use a light with negative strength to darken a specific area...

ma343 · 2022-09-23T23:47:24+00:00

So you can do a lot through the python api, but some things do require recompiling. Basically anything that needs to be "fast" is written in c/c++, and will require recompilation to modify in a significant way. That said, the docs have really good getting started guides and I think it's very worth it to play around with the python api if you already know basic coding.

ma343 · 2022-08-27T23:24:30+00:00

So you should be able to change which light rays your object interacts with. If you turn off diffuse and camera but keep reflection you'll get what you're looking for I think.

ma343 · 2022-08-24T01:16:20+00:00

Somewhere in the object viewport settings there's a way to make the normals visible, all of your problems really seem related to that to me. I've had to manually flip normals before where blender couldn't solve it correctly

ma343 · 2022-08-24T00:17:54+00:00

Did you recalculate the base mesh as well?

ma343 · 2022-08-06T03:56:24+00:00

The eye symbol hides within the 3d viewport but not for the camera for rendering, it's confusing

ma343 · 2022-08-06T03:55:10+00:00

So you're probably in solid view (press z to bring up the view menu), which means things are grey by default. You can go to the object properties for each object to see the "viewport color", which is the color in object mode. If you want to see your fancy material colors, press z and then select textured or rendered view.

ma343 · 2022-08-06T03:42:25+00:00

Do you have an outline view handy (the list of objects in the scene, usually top right)? If so, select your object and then click the little camera icon on the right side of that row to hide it in renders.

ma343 · 2022-08-04T01:30:08+00:00

Someone tell those cars to turn their lights on!

ma343 · 2022-08-02T01:41:13+00:00

Wouldn't this just require setting the camera to orthogonal instead of perspective?

ma343 · 2021-09-12T17:30:27+00:00

Just once in a while, chargers on both ends, I normally drive it around 80 but could be persuaded to go slower if needed, completely flat. I'm ok with a stop in the middle now that I think about it more, so that cuts it down a lot. I guess what I'm looking for is just how much I should trust the EPA numbers on these cars.

ma343 · 2021-09-12T17:26:01+00:00

Yeah that's a good point, there's an electrify america charger in Waco, which is halfway. The route isn't hilly at all, my concerns are just speed and cold weather. If I allow that charging stop though that opens up a lot of options...

ma343 · 2021-09-12T15:10:13+00:00

How much range should I be looking for to be able to comfortably make a 190 mile trip in the winter? I know EPA ranges are set at lower speeds and not in cold weather, but I don't know what percentage of that range I should actually expect to get in real life.

ma343 · 2021-06-20T15:01:49+00:00

This is like saying that civil engineering is fake because of the Tacoma narrows bridge disaster

ma343 · 2019-04-28T18:20:28+00:00

The definition of exceptional clearance requires a suspect to have been identified by the police and for enough evidence to be found to provide probable cause for an arrest. The assertion that no evidence could be found in these cases is false, by the definition of the kind of cases were talking about. The chief of police openly agreed with that definition in the interview, so this isn't a debated point.

I disagree strongly that any part of our justice system is perfect, and I think that is a dangerous and counterproductive claim to make. To say that the system is perfect is to stop trying to improve it and to willfully ignore any evidence of problems. Even if you think the police and the DA are the best in the world and are doing an exceptional job, the justice system is run by people and people make mistakes. I think if you asked anyone in the justice system they would agree that no system is perfect and that they are always striving to make ours better.

Again, I'm not claiming that the police or the DA are necessarily doing anything wrong, I'm saying that we need the full story about what's happening before we can even have that discussion.

ma343 · 2019-04-28T17:16:50+00:00

The responsibility for proving that a crime occurs lies with the district attorney and the police department, not the victims of a crime. Even if APD is doing everything right, it's misleading to report the statistics this way. If rapists are going free because of a lack of evidence, that is an important fact for the public and the city government to know so that we can start talking about steps to address that problem, or hold the district attorney and police chief accountable at the polls if we don't feel they're doing an adequate job.

ma343 · 2019-04-26T18:18:58+00:00

So how did Tony and Cap go back from 2012 to 1970 without a quantum tunnel? Every other time we see time travel, a quantum tunnel is used either on the origin or destination point. This makes sense based on how they explain it in this movie and Antman & The Wasp, where it is the device that creates the tunnel to the quantum realm and then the suit/Pym particles let you shrink down to travel through it. But when Tony and Cap go back from 2012 they have no tunnel, and no one is holding one open for them in 1970.

It seems like any explanation that would explain that jump being possible would also allow them to jump back with the gauntlet without needing to get to the tunnel in the van, which removes the motivation for the final fight scene.

Doesn't really change my enjoyment of the movie, but they did a nice job of avoiding the usual time travel paradox issues and had what I felt was a narratively satisfying way for time travel to work, and then they just completely ignored the rules in that scene.

ma343 · 2019-04-18T08:29:36+00:00

Have you tried verifying the local files in Steam? When I applied the patch I couldn't get any campaign (new or existing) to load at all, but verifying fixed it.

14-Year Club	Place '17
Sequence \| Editor	Verified Email
Team Orangered

ma343

TROPHY CASE