@howinternet   · · ·

And here it is moving, obviously had to render in EEVEE because I'm not made of money. Gotta admit it was fun making this one but I really suffered with the material here, it got a bit unmanageable towards the end.

The whole thing is done almost completely procedurally (only the HDRI lighting is an actual image), the spikes are made by first "spherifying" a plane in geo-nodes and then adding a funky cosine displacement on top of that, following the normals, that was mostly painless.

An unfortunate moment captured in the dark and cold halls of Stella Montis. At least the two of us remaining made it out in one piece.

Fr tho, I had a lot of fun creating the post-processing pipeline for this one and compositing all the aberrations, and best of all it's super reusable!

Another thing I'm dabbling into is video game photography, inspired by this video. I try to keep the process as photographic as possible. So I'm using gamescope to capture the screenshots in as high resolution as my computer can handle, in HDR. Then I use Darktable to process the image the same way I would an actual RAW file, export it, use Comfy to upscale it using three different methods, then GIMP to grab the best details of each upscale, and finally I have a pipeline in Blender to reconstruct the noise the upscalers may have destroyed. I am actually pretty happy with the results here.

The game, by the way, is ARC Raiders (same as the video), and the map is Buried City. I will be trying some other games after processing the batch of photos I took in ARC.

Well, let's kick this off by posting this wallpaper I made as part of a study on geometry nodes (trying to get back on my Blender bs here).

Tbh I'm not 100% happy with the colors, but I told myself I'm just gonna leave things be and just put them out there.

The shapes themselves are made entirely out of math (geo nodes) and lit by a rotated HDRI, it was post-processed in Blender (twice, once after render, another with a noise thing I made), and then the colors were adjusted in Darktable.

Here's the node setup for the shape, if you're interested, it's super basic, I'm just trying to learn this new (old) thing.

I'll edit this post with a link to the full 4K resolution thing whenever I figure out where to host it.

1) As a former sailor here’s my hot take on the stuck boat in the Suez. I’m actually in admiration of the skill of whoever did this. They managed a crash in one of the busiest water ways and all they damaged was a wall. No lives lost. No other boat involved, no damaged cargo. A+ 

2) Lemme tell you about pilots. Pilots are tug boats or crew who lead you through challenging passages. Usually harbours or narrow water ways. The Suez requires you to hand over control of your boat to a government endorsed pilot crew. Some pilots are great. Suez Pilots are not 

3) they don’t protecc. They don’t atacc. Mainly they sleep and snacc. Yep. The Suez takes roughly 13 hours for a big ship to navigate. I have yet to hear of a diligent Seuz pilot who actually stayed at the helm even half that time. And pilots are not free. We pay extra for them 

a small private boat pays $500-1000 US. The #EVERGIVEN this would be over $10,000 US for the pilot crew alone on top of the $100,000 to use the canal. And the pilot crew are mandatory. Considering how much shipping goes through the suez, how are their bad pilots still not known? 

So #EVERGIVEN got stuck in a sand storm with 40kt gusts&no visiblity. This is totally enough to blow them off course&disorient them, they’d be working off radar and sonar. Factor in possible confusion of who was responsible for driving, the pilot of the officer of the watch?

The #EVERGIVEN officer’s concerns went like this -my crew -my ship -other ships -my cargo definitely not holding up global shipping traffic. And probably not that wall they hit with the part of the hill that’s reinforced. The fact that they ran aground without damaging cargo?

A+ #EVERGIVEN Officer & #Evergreen crew. I am truly amazed at your soft landing. I’m sorry no one is talking about the low quality Suez pilot crew who was supposed to be driving (I’m sorry to the good Suez pilots, I know you’re out there somewhere not napping & working hard)

Owha is a leopard seal that has been visiting New Zealand waters since roughly 2012 and is now pretty much a permanent resident who just cruises between different harbours and bays

Owha is short for her Māori name “He owha nā ōku tūpuna” which translates to mean “treasured gift from our ancestors”

she’s a bit of a local celebrity - leopard seal sightings are reported to a team of marine biologists in NZ, and they give us all the good Owha updates about where she is and what she’s doing + photos people have taken (she’s identifiable by two scars on her flank)

she’s also been a source of quite a bit of drama too - she’s very friendly and inquisitive and playful. she’s unfortunately deflated a few inflatable boats in the harbour as well as occasionally pulled pieces off of boats. as a result, the boaties have demanded she be sedated and returned to antarctica

late last year/early this year, someone shot owha in the face, which was extremely upsetting to say the least. what I am glad to report though is that she’s made a full recovery and is still doing her thing!