Simon Telezhkin explained how he created an ice cube for the annual Nodevember challenge.
He showed how he set up the shape, the internal fog volume, the bubble scattering, and the droplets, and then shaded each part: 80.lv/articles/nodev…
I have a question for all procedural 3D graphics programmers and coders: Have you ever studied systems thinking? I'm looking for silver-bullet knowledge on organizing complex systems that don't crumble under their own weight—something like the chip manufacturer guides for building modular factories in Factorio. Does this kind of resource actually exist? It feels so universally needed that it must, I just don't know what to search for.
Day 30: Tessellate. Completed 30 out of 30 days without skipping. Now back to endless CG tutorials and soloing courses, gaining endless knowledge in case it helps someday (😅). See you all in a year, I guess. Fun challenge—happy to have participated.
It's a Voronoi boolean with custom scattered noisy grids and material fracture on top. For some reason I can't set up chipping correctly with manifold meshes, so I added Labs Edge Damage to the larger pieces. It's sadly very slow and unreliable, so I added a circuit break based on area comparison between unchipped and chipped versions. You can do anything you want in Houdini, but most of the time you'll have to put 100 times more effort to get just 10% closer to the desired result.
После 1000 тактильных датчиков на кончике пальца Sharpa, сверхловкой руки, компания представляет своего гуманоидного робота в качестве шеф-повара
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Day 25. Connections. To me, connections mean roads and rivers. So I get the chance to dig into KTT tools from @samuel_krug. To say that it's awesome is an understatement. Very intuitive and super fast. #nodevember#nodevember2025#houdini
@allTheYud@IsaacKing314@BenKorpan I'm not 100% confident that chickens have qualia, but I'm not 100% sure anybody except me does. As long as no experiment can show with 100% certainty that someone is a philosophical zombie, you're taking a chance by eating a being that might have conscious experience.
@IsaacKing314@BenKorpan It has hardly escaped me that if a thing had conscious experiences, I would not want to eat it. My model of vegans is that they have mostly blank and featureless models of "conscious experience" and so imagine chickens to be inhabited by qualia because why not.
A consistent theme I've noticed when carnists encounter vegans is they feel a need to vice signal. They don't act as you'd expect if they simply didn't see animals as moral agents, no different from plants or rocks. Instead they go out of their way to be weird about it, loudly going "yes I'm also evil in other ways that ~everyone would agree with; now what are you going to do about it?"
I'm not sure why they do this, but I've seen it quite a few times now. My best guess is that they "know", in some sense, that what they're doing is wrong, and they know that having any rational discussion about it would result in them rapidly losing the argument. So as a defense mechanism they adopt the mantle of irony, escalating all the way to maximal badness and accepting it, because it effectively cuts off any further serious conversation.
The nihilism may also help them quiet their cognitive dissonance. Tell themselves "well nothing matters, I have no moral obligations whatsoever, therefore I don't need to think about this particular case".
This is why, despite being a moral relativist in general, I think there is a legitimate asymmetry between the positions. Almost every meat-eater seems at war with themselves, believing on some level that torturing animals is bad, but unable to muster the willpower to overcome their compulsions and the social expectations to conform.