aevaI started learning Houdini tonight. And by Houdini, I mean Blender Geometry Nodes :3
I'm hoping to construct an ad-hoc level editor for my driving game thing and export point sets for object placement, curves for the roads, and height maps for elevation. I'm not sure how to make blender shit out a sparse height map, but I'm sure I'll find some abominable way to do it with python.
I wonder if my old wacom tablet still works 🤔
weird, pressure sensitivity doesn't seem to work anymore, but otherwise it seems fine???
ok the gnome wacom settings test panel thing shows the pressure sensitivity working just fine, so I guess it's just the gimp that's the problem hopefully
aaand it crashes blender :|
there's too much linux in here >:(
yup completely random which applications it works with. blender doesn't pick it up at all?
by any chance is this yet another thing wayland fucked up?
I'm gonna have to install Windows again to use this thing aren't I
Yup. It's wayland. again! it's always fucking wayland! I hate you so much wayland. The tablet works fine with Blender if I restart Gnome in Xorg mode. This operating system is such a fucking joke my hands are shaking with anger right now.
If you're going to wander into my mentions to tell me that it's good actually preferred even that the wayland team broke an entire ecosystem of applications that was working just fine for the last 20 years, do me a favor and just go block yourself instead? I'm not in the mood.
when linux gives you wayland you burn linux's house down
I made some progress tonight on learning #GeometryNodes! I made a little relief with an elevation map of Kauaʻi and a blue noise texture to hide the banding.
it's amazing how much blender has changed since i first spent several hours making a shitty gingerbread man in it back in '02
I remarked to someone that the cost of [open source thing] is "you get what you pay for", and was thinking about how that always sounds snarky and mean but it's totally true and it works. I subscribed to "Blender Cloud" years ago for the tutorials and left the ten bucks a month faucet on for all this time and look what all it can do now :O
I like this Zachtronics game
This looks better than expected with an arbitrary height map applied. I don't strictly speaking need to fix the tearing for what I'm doing, but I might try and patch it up later so my in progress screenshots look nicer >_>
my feature wishlist for #blender #geometrynodes
- selective subdivision (either a face selection field input or making the level input a field)
- collapse edges / faces / vertices operator
- python nodes
played around a bit more with my "drawing roads on terrain" prototype today. this is starting to get a little closer to what I want
I revisited the non-uniform grid geometry nodes thing tonight and figured out a terrible hack to stitch the edges. I think I'm starting to get the hang of this.
Side note, I like how all my node graphs end up looking vaguely like deep sea creatures.
I came up with a cool way of generating terrain from a few splines tonight. Might run with this. Just draw some feature lines and boom there's a mountain or a ravine or something.
Here's another one. This took like no time at all to draw out. I feel like I'm on to something.
A cool thing here is I might be able to get away with simply exporting the curves from blender and tracing them directly without a heightmap image or mesh as an intermediary.
Evie 🏳️⚧️I've decided there's one obvious correct name for this technique and it is Spline Distance Field :3
What is really great about this system is you can just mash stuff together and it mostly just works. Here's the same hill as before, but twice. I'm planning on using this to construct coherent landscapes out of irregular tiles and no grid :3
I think I figured out a way to do inexpensive higher order curves with this, which would mean the transitions between curves (and between between curves) can be interpolated better. This is the main barrier preventing technique being more generally useful imo.
I'll probably take a crack at implementing it in the next few days if I have any energy left between work and random appointments.
d@nny disc@ mc²@aeva NO GRIDS NO MASTERS
@hipsterelectron excelsior!
Miss Aemilia🎀@aeva Are you going to render these SDFs with SDFs?
Please say yes.
Please say yes.
@MissAemilia eventually these streams will cross :3 https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@aeva/113104448301517076
aeva (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 video I figured out how to make the reflections stable while the camera is in motion :3 CW strobing
Janne Moren@aeva
It really is a lot of fun just to follow you putting pieces together and gradually figuring out how to make it work.
I'm starting to get the appeal of live coding streams on Twitch.
Vivi, The Heinous Witch@aeva yeah it really seems like it’d be fun to block out landscapes with it
@aeva that's where the ants go doin their ant stuff
mcc@aeva the splines… they're reticulating :O
jordan@aeva Spline Displacement Field
Celes 🌙
ideaPDish@aeva
Well, at least somebody around here has a spline!
Well, at least somebody around here has a spline!
Axel! 💙
Max Cahill@aeva this is very interesting!
@maxc it's really fun to tinker with and it composes really well too
@aeva would be happy to have the setup to tinker with if you have a file to share 😉
@maxc I'll send you it on discord
@aeva looking forward to having a play around once the kids are in bed haha
@maxc awesome :D if you make something with it be sure to show me :3
@maxc likewise if you come up with any improvements on the technique. I've got a few ideas myself, but I gotta sleep soon.
@aeva i mean it was pretty easy to pull together "mountain pass" or whatever but of course it probably would be with just sculpting haha. the procgen/composable aspect is definitely appealing.
added subsurf and cavity vis here.
comments on the technique - it'd be cool if overlapping curves got blended somehow probably weighted based on distance, so you can pull a trench up a hill and not have the nearest curve just dominate. playing with it made me want overhangs which ofc is not compatible :D
cassie@aeva this looks great
@aeva woah this looks so good 
what do you do with the input feature lines to guide the meshing?
@celestia magic :3
@celestia vertex on the grid picks the closest point on a flattened curve and then takes that point's original height
@celestia I've got a bunch of ideas for improvements but the bare bones version is pretty powerful
@aeva nice! 
I like magic I can actually understand for a change :3
so when you say the curve, I assume you somehow interpolate between the splines to make a curved surface?
@aeva oh, or do you actually look for the closest point in any line without interpolation?
I love the low poly look this creates, not sure if intentional or just low res artifact but I'd definitely keep it
@celestia no interpolation, at least not yet. here's what happens when there's only one curve, and when I add a second one
Dan@aeva I understand some amount of reticulation is key
Joni Korpi@aeva This is a neat idea. I bet you’d get interesting results even by procedurally generating the splines.
vfig@aeva how are you effectively drawing these splines in 3d in open space? ive struggled with that in blender.
Mrs Beanbag@aeva yeah that is cool!
@aeva that is so cool!!
EndlessMason@aeva
Throw some erosion on there and you got a stew going!
Throw some erosion on there and you got a stew going!
@EndlessMason idk how to do that XD
@aeva
Neither do i?
It's more pronounced where the surface forms a channel... And collects more rain by area
Maybe draw cylinders from where the lowest corners of each surface meet sized by the area of the surface? Idk