Refrenched my quest tonight at Pathfinder.

Art Advent 10: Baubles I put a lot of work into the shaders for this one, and I'm pretty proud of them. The glitter shader uses the voronoi color output, projects it onto the normal, and perturbs the normal by that amount in an adjustable way. That took a bit of work, because I initially tried […]

Art advent day 9: eggnog Spent a couple days working on this one. Couldn't get the cinnamon (both the powder and the stick) looking just the way I wanted, but it's not terrible. I spent forever trying to deform the cinnamon stick with a curve deform […] [Original post on social.axfive.net]

Art advent day 8: Stocking This was a pretty easy one. Just a couple tubes, some cloth deformation in sculpt mode, a quick fur object, and borrowing the candy cane from a previous day. I was going to put it over a fireplace or something, but "Fireplace" is […] [Original post on social.axfive.net]

Art advent day 7: Underground I don't even know what I'm doing, man. #blender #blender3d #3dart #santa #artadvent #advent #christmas #dirt #underground #3drendering #cyclesrender #cycles #art #ArtAdvent #artadventcalendar

[Advent of Code 2025 day 12 solution] Day 12 done. I really didn't like this one. Basically have to do some bounds checking "it obviously always works" or "it obviously will never work" on it to get it to work on the actual input, but it still NEVER FINISHES on the example. I'm slightly […]

Art advent day 6: Snowman Still 5 days behind. Planning to catch up over the weekend. This one was an excuse to sculpt a decent-enough male basemesh, then destroy it with my horrible rigging and posing skills and wobbly displacement in the snow shader. I'm […] [Original post on social.axfive.net]

Art advent day 6: Snowman Still 5 days behind. Planning to catch up over the weekend. This one was an excuse to sculpt a decent-enough male basemesh, then destroy it with my horrible rigging and posing skills and wobbly displacement in the snow shader. I'm […] [Original post on social.axfive.net]

[Advent of Code Day 11 solution] Day 11 done. Memoization actually worked for this one. My first instinct was to just crawl the graph with a memo, and it fortunately did the right thing. It was effectively an exhaustive depth-first search. Really not much to discuss. My code is not nice or […]

Day 10 part 1 done. Part 1 was a little tricky and fun. Solved it by just testing every combination, and sped that up by turning all the buttons and the goal light configuration into numbers that I could XOR together. Technically, part 2 is done too, but it will never work on the real input. I […]

Art advent day 5: Missing Way behind on this art advent, mostly due to Metroid Prime 4. Hope to catch up over the next few days, starting Thursday (am DMing The Lost City for some teenagers tomorrow evening, so I don't think I'll have enough time for more […] [Original post on social.axfive.net]

[Metroid Prime 4 review with some spoilers] Just finished #MetroidPrime4 with 100% scans. It was ok, but I really didn't like it all that much on the whole. I was really looking forward to this game, and like most things I'm excited about, I didn't look […] [Original post on social.axfive.net]

[Advent of Code 2025 day 9 solution] Day 9 done. This one was really hard for me. Part 1 wasn't bad at all; I could basically use the entirety of what I did yesterday for it. Part 2 was really hard. At first, I tried actually building a `HashSet` of all the red and green tiles, and then a […]

Day 8 done. Now that's what I call Advent of Code! I'm happy with the algorithm for the most part. I'm sure it could be improved, but I paired up all boxes and pushed them into a `BinaryHeap` based on their squared distances, then popped the number based on the number of connections to consider […]

[Advent of Code day 7 solution] Day 7 done. Typical "don't even try brute-forcing it" part 2. I kept track of the timeline count as I worked my way vertically down the graph, and then added up the beams' shared timelines at the end. I also considered that dynamic programming with a recursive […]

Art Advent day 4: North Pole I'm a few days late on this one, but I got something working out. I might modify or skip yesterday's prompt, because my youngest son picked something that I couldn't possibly figure out how to represent (but I'll give it a try at least). I'm pretty happy with this […]

[Advent of Code 2025 Day 6 solution] Day 6 done. This was a funky one. Pretty easy for part 1. Just trimming, splitting, and parsing all the numbers and operators and grouping them columnwise. Nothing too hard. Part 2 was awkward. I always am a bit flustered when I have to go back and parse […]

[Advent of Code 2025 Day 5 solution] Day 5 done.. Now this one was the easiest one so far. I was shocked at how simple part 2 was. Just combining all overlapping ranges and doing some simple arithmetic. I initially tried a linear search, and it finished in 1.5ms. Then I switched to a binary […]

[Advent of Code 2025 Day 4 solution] Day 4 done. This was probably the easiest one so far, but it might be because I'm so used to the grid problems from previous years. I felt like just doing the count for part 1 would end up forcing me to rewrite something, so I returned the coordinates […]

Art Advent day 3: Caroling I couldn't really think of anything to do with this one other than literal carolers. It's pretty simplistic and amateurish, but I'm pretty amateur, so I'm not too beat up about it. I'm just glad this thing is getting me actually […] [Original post on social.axfive.net]

[Advent of Code 2025 Day 3 solution] Day 3 done. This one was pretty easy. My part 1 solution mostly generalized to part 2, but I ended up having to rewrite the whole function anyway because I didn't make it flexible enough. For part 1 I initially just scanned for the max digit in the whole […]

Today's advent prompt was "Candy Cane". The ribbon doesn't look exactly right, but I couldn't figure it out after a while of hacking at it. I probably need to do some fabric studies; they're definitely a weak point. #blender #blender3d #3dart #advent #candycane #christmas #art

@amberherbert.bsky.social and I are doing an art advent this year that we threw together. She's doing writing and I'm doing 3D art. Today's prompt was Ice Planet, and this is my bit. The mountains are quite exaggerated, but I still like it as a whole. The […] [Original post on social.axfive.net]

[Advent of Code 2025 day 2 solution discussion] Advent of Code, day 2 done. This one felt familiar. I remember previous years having digit grouping problems like this before. I remembered that doing it arithmetically in most cases performs much better than a string comparison, so that's how I […]

@amberherbert.bsky.social and I are doing an art advent this year that we threw together. She's doing writing and I'm doing 3D art. Today's prompt was Ice Planet, and this is my bit. The mountains are quite exaggerated, but I still like it as a whole. The […] [Original post on social.axfive.net]

[Advent of Code day 1] First day on Advent Of Code 2005, and I had to completely remind myself the difference between modulo and remainder. Already stumbled on part 2 because of how little arithmetic I have to do in my day to day work. Got through it, and the solution is pretty simple […]

The #OneRing from #TheLordOfTheRings in #Blender. This actually took quite a lot of effort to get looking good. I tried a handful of different approaches, from boolean modifiers to normal maps, to actually sculpting the letters in (which did not go well) […] [Original post on social.axfive.net]

The #OneRing from #TheLordOfTheRings in #Blender. This actually took quite a lot of effort to get looking good. I tried a handful of different approaches, from boolean modifiers to normal maps, to actually sculpting the letters in (which did not go well) […] [Original post on social.axfive.net]

Modern UX is so trash across the board. I shouldn't have this much trouble figuring out where I can safely click on a window's title bar to focus it now that title bars are stuffed with buttons, or to discover what fields in a view are scrollable now that scroll bars are verboten, or to even […]

Follow-up music visualizer video. This time I used Simulation Nodes, and it looks a lot better. For each frequency band, I'm generating an icosphere 60 times per second and shooting them up the Y axis. This one was actually far easier than the way […] [Video] [Original post on social.axfive.net]

Follow-up music visualizer video. This time I used Simulation Nodes, and it looks a lot better. For each frequency band, I'm generating an icosphere 60 times per second and shooting them up the Y axis. This one was actually far easier than the way […] [Video] [Original post on social.axfive.net]

Spent a while working on this one. It's a music visualizer using a 10x10 grid of cubes. I tried a lot of different approaches to get this working. It uses Python with librosa to do the audio analysis, using STFT to pull per-frequency amplitudes. My first approach was to use a driver-driven […]

A quick and easy little #nodes exploration in #blender. Done entirely with #geometrynodes and #shadernodes Some of it is basically hacked together with float curves when I probably should have done it with simple mathematics, but I'm time-constrained at the moment, so this is what I got done in […]

After using many different #fediverse softwares and frontends, I have come to the conclusion that boost grouping should be considered table stakes, and I think per-user top-level post grouping is a natural extension of that (but I don't know any frontend that does that). One person who […]