It’s mostly people who did not try any M1 mac I think.
I got M1 mini with 8GB ram a while back to see if should make the switch and I was blown away by what that thing could handle. But same spec PC would be hell, especially with Win.
If I understand the chip in Neo should be more capable than M1.
Playing with two recent exciting additions to my Houdini, the @thegrove3d.bsky.social addon and the MoonRay renderer.
love it!
same struggle every time 🫠
First finished personal project in years!
www.artstation.com/artwork/qJDxqD
#Gaffer #Cycles #Houdini #b3d
To mix up all the CGI nerdiness a bit:
Here is an edit of some shots I took on the last two snowkiting trips to Norway. Let the freezing fingers and sketchy gear be the excuse for some of the sloppy photography and color handling. I'll try to do better this year.
toy GPU renderer update:
- DoF / customizable bokeh
Amazing!
to commemorate alan dye moving from apple to meta, here's one of his best quotes… Followed by an unreadable quote in Apple’s Liquid Glass style
And it's not Presto either ? 👀
I've decided to finish an environment project I've stared a loong time ago and has been collecting dust ever since. Here's some fresh water sim test.
#Houdini #Gaffer #Cycles
It has support for it but it is not there out of the box.
It's such a shame that Mixer is likely not gonna be developed anymore.
They gotta keep the hype traing going, the money flowing in, to keep the investors, lure more governments in , and so people don't start to wonder about the overpromises, the actual usability, the insanely inflated bubble and circular investment schemes.
Hahaha, just upgraded to MacOS 26 and the ui really is hilariously bad 🤣 how could they ship this?
Time to start donating to Asahi Linux.
My partner just re-started uni and there a whole course on AI. 🫠
It’s ego I think, they want to bath in the awe of people who have no experience with AI and to feel like they are part of the “miracle”.
Also it’s easy.
Toy GPU renderer update:
- Nishita sky
- refraction
- VMF Diffuse
I find Houdini very useful for prototyping stuff for my toy renderer, here bokeh sampling for example. VEX code is easy to translate to shader code.
Panel 1. image of a huge nuclear plant. “Reactor Overheating” 2. A worker in a hazmat suit works at a computer. The screen reads: “Press cancel to avoid critical overload” 3 - 9. The worker continues to type at the computer. The screen changes in each panel and reads: “Enter password to confirm” “Incorrect password” “Incorrect password” “Do you want to reset your password?” “Reset link has been sent to your email” “Please choose a new password” “New password can't be the same as old password” The colour gets hotter in each panel. Starting blue in 1 and ending in red in 9. Panel 10. Wide view. The entire earth is blown up.
My latest cartoon for @newscientist.com
p.s. this week I am on a USA/Canada tour with my new book. Details and preorder links at tomgauld.com
Isn't adding a black hole to your render a pretty good optimization? I mean if a black hole swallows a light ray you don't need to continue tracing it 🤔
Phew, that looks much better. Rogue ggx sampling was making everything glossy, but broken glossy.
There's many issues which mostly come down to me being lazy to learn the light transport math and going just by intuition or trial and error.
Also, I've spent a lot of time trying to understand how to generate random numbers for sampling which are well-spread and decorrelated, i think I got it now.
Having recently acquired a house to fix and an offspring to raise, I have little time. But I've sneaked in some toy renderer time here and there.
Added light MIS, wavelenght importance sampling and really tried improving variance. Battle testing it on scene like this, basically only indirect light.
If you want only terrain Gaea is state of the art rn for erosion sim etc. but for finalizing, scattering you would still have to go to e.g. Houdini.
World creator is more complete package with vegetation scattering etc.
I would still go Gaea though.
My fellow EU citizens: we've got work to do and someone made it extremely easy 👏👏👏
For any danes out there, I've made a translation of their basic text, so if you want that please let me know!!
Will any of the presentations be up on youtube later like in previous years ? Or the only way now is the virtual siggraph pass?
Most of the slides and course notes for the SIGGRAPH 2025 Physically Based Shading in Theory and practice course are now online, with more to follow:
blog.selfshadow.com/publications...
In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen www.colincornaby.me/2025/08/in-t...
Amazing stuff!
bonus points for the soundtrack.
I've had a lot of unsecussful switches, trying different ditros and being frustrated. PopOS was the distro that finaly worked out of the box with no issues on several different machines, been using it for years.
( I've switched to mac recently, but for the hardware)
