I'm playing an ocarina of time rom hack and anyways I had an idea for a different ocarina of time rom hack where it's just a giant water park or perhaps just the lazy river. Like, what if there was a lazy river, and it went around in loops in a cave, and whoops it also has a few waterfalls. And that's it! Just a little lazy river cave for you to explore and drink in the vibes.
and maybe also one of those novelty water park ice cream stands were the ice cream is a bunch of tiny spheres for some reason
I saw this as I was trying to fall asleep last night
Imagine standing on the middle of that rickety bridge, holding on to the sharp slimy metal for dear life as your mind gives way to the deafening roar of the waterfall felt through your entire body and you experience the most sympathetic nervous system activation you've ever felt in your entire life.
I forgot to post these earlier, but I drew some more pictures last night
I made a thing that creates flow maps from curves, and then got a little carried away. #blender #geometrynodes
Getting the water to look right with blender's material system is shaping up to be a bit of a challenge. I figure I'll bake the actual flow map out to a texture so I can use it to distort and animate whatever texture I end up using for the water. I'm probably going to end up just using vertex colors for lighting and just use eevee to blend everything together, since the actual lighting system is too ham fisted for this.
that or I might build my own vertex lighting system with geometry nodes and just use vertex painting to make corrections
anyways I think I've decisively determined the answer to the main technical hurdle for this project, which was "can I make creating elaborate vector fields fun and easy" (ans: yes)
I made another one of these. I'm going to try to turn this one into a simulated marble run type thing with godont.
@aeva if you ever want to get into vector field for pathfinding :3
https://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/crowd-flows/
Crowd Flows

@pupxel that looks awesome. I like the UFO example in the paper
@aeva it's the paper behind the supreme commander pathfinding and everything based on that
@pupxel @aeva Hehe. "Requires DivX to view" :)
Been a long time since I've seen anybody mention divx or xvid.
@kojack @aeva look at the year lol 2006
@pupxel @kojack just think, they're doing this at interactive speeds in 2006. with this kind of tech, the games in 2026 are gonna be out of this world

@aeva @pupxel The one I've wanted to experiment with (but have never gotten around to it) is reciprocal velocity obstacle pathing for crowds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Fn3Mz6f5xA

Last time I read the paper it didn't really make sense to me, but that was years ago, maybe I'll get it this time.

Reciprocal Velocity Obstacles for Real-time Multi-agent Navigation

YouTube
@aeva @kojack the key thing that makes it work is that instead of doing A* per unit, it is doing A* per target without a terminating condition so the pathfinding cost changes from per unit to per grid and when you're supreme commander that is a lot of time saved
@aeva are you making an interactive scene or just rendering?
@efi I'm just experimenting right now. I'm aiming to build out a full map in Blender, and then eventually make it into an interactive prototype, so I'm trying to think about this all in terms of the water's appearance being a gameplay signifier.
@aeva then maybe you should do the shaders in Godot, not because it's a better result, but because it's easier to understand what the fuck you're doing when you can just plug in a PNG or type COLOR = vec4(UV, 0.0, 1.0);
and see it instead of blender's arcana
@efi I'm considering using godot for the early interactive prototype, but I want to do as much as possible in blender to keep iteration time fast and make it easier to migrate to a custom engine later on
@aeva fair, but im saying shaders feel easier to iterate on godot for me, and they're easy to port to glsl at least
@efi makes sense. i'll look into it
@aeva The Vertex Painter would make for a good film title
@aeva is this mario64?
@wagesj45 Blender64 :)
@wagesj45 which is to say, regular blender, but I suppose it is a 64 bit build, so,
Two Vortex Rings Colliding in SLOW MOTION - Smarter Every Day 195

YouTube
@aeva that is such a beautiful green and this makes me want to draw again
@aeva love the “Oh, you!” fish! 🐡