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.
I added trees
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
watch out tech artists i know houdini now #blueprintsfromhell
hornswoggled!
experimenting with using splines to draw roads onto height maps
I figured out how to make non-uniform grids with geometry nodes 💀
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.
I've decided there's one obvious correct name for this technique and it is Spline Distance Field :3
I made a little visualizer material for my Spline Distance Field thingy.
🌲
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.

I... may have upended the production schedule of a game friends are working on by sharing this tool with the artist 😶

improvement idea didn't quite work out :/

The idea was that since I can determine which curve is closest to a given point on the terrain grid, I can use edge data to find the spots where abrupt changes might occur, and then can do a nearest crossing test relatively easily. This does accomplish what it is supposed to, but other artifacts show up around the perimeter of the map so it's not really worth it.

Might have to settle for blurring the height around those edge crossings instead.
still, the technique is pretty powerful even without the higher order curves, and I'm sure someone smart on here might spot a better way to blend between spline patches 🤷‍♀️ I'll probably write something up on my blog in the next few days time permitting.
I'm really quite amazed at how fast the geometry nodes blur intrinsic is, but I'm starting to think the perf measurement for it is just broken.
🤔
happy accident: transforming arbitrary meshes with the spline field
Experimenting with visualizing the extruded spline tangents cropped by the spline distance field volumes. This is meant to demonstrate what is being interpolated to produce the height field, though this doesn't show the part where splines are projected past their endpoints.
Today an artist friend used this technique to completely redo all of the terrain in the vertical slice level for the game she's working on. Judging by timestamps, it took her about an hour to complete after a false start. I'm not posting the screenshots because they're confidential but holy smokes it is awesome :O
what really gives me life today is she wants to push it even further <3
I've been pondering how to adapt this technique into a more general purpose modeling technique, and heh it's funny how problems are trivial when they're discrete, bounded, and 2D, but get a bit harder when they're continuous, unbounded, and 3D
oh great, the piecewise solution is a 3D voronoi diagram. of course it is 😔
I've got a distance field approximation now. Here's something I hacked together with geonodes that runs like a siggraph demo you got too excited about. I haven't implemented blending between adjacent fields yet, but I'm feeling optimistic that I'll be able to get something workable together for real time raytracing later.
getting closer...
The magic here is I spawn one of these for each point on the spline, aligned to that spline point's tangent plane and scaled to that spline point's radius. Then I deform each point toward the tangent plane of whichever spline field it happens to actually be in and bob's your uncle. Its got some quirks but it works surprisingly well.
nailed it :3

Btw here's a cool trick I figured out today:

Say you have a bunch of mesh patches that overlap but the vertices don't line up, and you wanna force them to anyway.

Use the "Distribute Points on Faces" node with the "Poisson Disc" mode and a minimum distance equal to the longest edge in your triangle soup.

Then in the triangle soup, snap each vertex to the closest point in the poisson disc point cloud, merge by distance, and bam! you got something that is very almost a delaunay triangulation :3

Attempting to make a car with the 3D spline modeling technique. So far so good!
blocking out the roof and back window

This is probably as far as I get tonight, unless I get an inexplicable second wind.

So far I think this technique is agreeable for me. I've been able to pick at it a bit on and off despite being sick and tired. This technique is a more fiddly than I want it to be, but that might in part be because I'm trying to make the model accurate to my references.

Unsurprisingly I have some ideas for how to improve this technique further.

I think what I actually want is to make the feature outlines with splines (eg, the windows, the different parts of the car body, the bumper, etc) and then use those to guide the placement of control points that can then be used to further adjust the shape of the local surface, as well as to paint materials. The spline outlines would then also serve as cropping features for the control points / surfels so materials can have hard edges etc.

As for what my game is to render exactly, I'm leaning towards representing stuff authored in Blender as cropped surfel clouds that can then be raytraced to produce more different surfels. Cropped surfels would be a set of pseudo discs that occasionally also have a cropping shape associated.

In that end, anything with a mesh representation can be efficiently prepared for my game via the distribute points of faces node.

The cropped surfels thing is nice because I wont have to commit to any particular artistic work flow in Blender, and should I need some kind of acceleration structure I think the surfels could be made hierarchical be generating sets of them at different frequencies and saving out which ones overlap with which.
I think the goal I should try to work on next is just putting together a simple scene like a road with a guard rail and some cones pretending to be trees and see if I can export that into something I can render, and then figure out whether or not rendering that can be made fast.
I just wanna get lost in the surfels, man 😌

I don't like how Blender does unit conversion.

If you set a unit system, and choose a non-meter base unit for distance, it converts everything to meters under the hood, with the unit scale being a scale factor on the conversion to meters.

Since the units presented in the UI are superficial, if you need to change the scale or the base unit everything in your scene changes along with it ;_;

Anyways I just realized that I was greatly mistaken as to how this all worked several hours ago when I tried to setup the base unit and scale to be able to represent a scene a mile in diameter and thought I got to pick the base unit 😩

I picked a mile diameter for the map cell arbitrarily, but this precision problem in Blender got me thinking about this more and...

huh, I guess the view distance to the horizon is about 3 miles if you're 6 feet tall, and is a few hundred meters less if you're 5 feet tall.

now I'm trying to decide if I want to vary the draw distance based on camera elevation or if I want to deform the relative world positions of things to simulate the curvature of the earth 🤔
again way over kill for a game about driving a shitty car in the rain but on the other hand when was the last time you played a game about driving a shitty car in the rain that even attempted to let you reach out and touch the infinite
@aeva doki doki liquid noise satori jalopy
@lritter is this a real game

@aeva it's yours

(well, jalopy is a game)

@lritter oh I was planning on calling it Rainy Road
@aeva I feel like cyberpunk qualifies 😂
@viraptor I thought that game was mostly about t-posing and seizures
@aeva and shitty cars. Often in the rain.
@viraptor interesting. and when it let you touch the infinite, was that because it clipped through the ground or
@aeva and if you seizure enough, you touch the infinite in another way.
@aeva The only thing infinite in My Summer Car are the forests, so they get away with a short render distance.
@aeva ...well, it snows in EnviroBear 2000, but otherwise I think it meets all your requirements
@ChateauErin that game looks rad
@aeva honestly it really is fun to fill your car with fish and then get attacked by a badger
@ChateauErin never tried it. how's that compare to filling your car with cigarette smoke and listening to the radio

@aeva This is something I was happy about with the geometry editor in Sonnet (EM field solver).

If you change units it gives you the option of keeping the same numeric value (thus scaling your circuit) or keeping the same physical size (scaling the numeric dimensions).

@azonenberg this is the best route imo
@aeva if your renderer is based on sdf's why blender and not something based on b-splines like rhino?
@aeva if you're using blender it might be helpful to get whatever data it's passing to opensubdiv for the subsurf modifier instead of just exporting a mesh and trying to fit something to it
@bob that sound inconvenient and unpleasant :/
@bob this rhino thing looks to be proprietary? that is a nonstarter for my free time projects.
@aeva a bit out of the loop - what's the idea here, why this over standard modelling?

@Mittzy The idea is I want to draw a bunch of splines and extrapolate a 3D model from them. There's a few variations on that idea that I'm exploring in this thread, but the one in the post you replied to is free form modeling with splines. The other variation that I think is noteworthy is generating height maps.

Why I want these things and why another person might hypothetically want these things are different questions and I'm not sure which one you are asking?

@aeva what you have there is still more appealing than a cybertruck
@cloudthethings Well yeah, the bumper and wheels of a 98 Honda Civic CX are actually useful.
@aeva you clearly now have a market cap of at least a trillion USD.
@aeva if you ever find out how do to hard surface really nicely please tell me because oh god every time I try I think I‘m doing good and then I turn reflections on and I am Not doing good
@halcy if you don't mind your hard surfaces looking a little over decimated, and fine creases being difficult I've got the rendering technique for you!
@aeva not sure I understand. Is the spine/plane to let you animate the field at runtime for animation
@cratesmith no, it's for extrapolating 3D models from a bunch 3D splines based on their proximity to one another
@aeva @cratesmith
So, in, say, a VR setting you could use this for free-form modeling? Let the user sketch with a stylus or finger; approximate their movement with splines; then use this to create the intended 3D structure.
@jannem @cratesmith yeah. This would work really well as a VR modeling tool.
@aeva @cratesmith
Or "minecraft but with a smooth world".
@jannem @cratesmith I'm not sure I follow your meaning
@aeva @cratesmith
You could have a fully deformable world - free-form tunnel digging, building and so on.
@jannem @cratesmith oh yeah. It doesn't support CSG nearly as well as voxels do, but it could be made workable with some effort I'm sure