Making rain simulation as real as possible
rainbowhunt.me
rainbowhunt.me
This would especially be good for me as I do the weather in Nebraska from a studio I built at home in SoCal. As far as I know I'm the only regularly scheduled TV news anchor to work from home in the US and possibly the world.
I am a professional. My job is to forecast their weather and I am diligent in that pursuit. Windows are overrated.
Glad to hear you've kicked cancer's ass.
Where can I get info on doing one?
Also, sneakily, I have other ideas for where my studio can be used beside traditional outlets, especially since I make a full suite of weather maps. This would give me a chance to explain.
It's second nature to me, but most people are sort of stunned when they see a broadcast quality studio in my (former) garage.
It was removed in a six hour, two surgeon operation called a Whipple. It was pioneered in the 1930s. Back then they lost about 1/3 on the table. Only about 1/3 of pancreatic patients can receive a Whipple and only about a third of those have my result. Only 9% live beyond five years.
The Whipple is considered the most difficult operation a surgeon can perform. The docs who do this are hospital all-stars.
On day one I told my doctors (with cancer you get an army of doctors) I wanted to aggressively go at it.
I had a catheter port inserted in my chest for IVs (like chemo or with my CTscans). It's been used over thirty times. When I take a blood test it's commonly a dozen vials or more.
My treatment ended around a year and a half ago. I am certifiably cancer free, though my body knows how to make pancreatic cancer and could do it again.
I am missing a few internal parts. Whipple surgery reconnects some parts of the digestive system differently than original factory specs. With half a pancreas I shoot insulin 4-5 times a day (no big deal). My right pinkie will be tapped for blood drops around 1,500 times this year.
I am the luckiest person you will meet today. And, it's a kickass diet. I lost 35 pounds.
Because I am old I am on Medicare. I subscribe to a Medicare Advantage program, which means I limit myself to an HMO's doctors in return for paying less for services. I would think my medical care had to cost over $500,000. I paid ZERO. I do pay for some drugs -- thousands a year -- but my army of doctors were paid by the government.
People shouldn't go broke or need GoFundMe because they get sick. The US needs Medicare for all. Insurance just means we all share the risk for the few that need it.
Good thing we live in an oligarchy then, otherwise, we would be upset.
give.org provides charity information. WV spends just 4% on administrative costs... https://www.give.org/charity-reviews/national/veterans-and-m...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cbs-news-investigates-wounded-w...
How did you end up building such a studio at home etc? Sounds like a lot of work to me!
(Always cool to see what kind of people hang around here on HN as well!)
Maybe the most unusual part is, none of this would work unless I could run the show by myself. My TriCaster is programmable with macros which is what I've done. I am my own director while on the air.
Oh -- with a friend I created a map making system which runs on an i5 and produces ~ 40,000 maps a day. Here are some samples I threw together a few months ago. These are 100% produced using FOSS including the map databases and fonts! https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/172O4Xl35np8RnbRi07PD...
My last computer class was as a senior in high school, 1967-68 semester. This was BEFORE computers had screens.
I agree with the others here that an AMA might be worth it :)
There's a lot of untapped potential in geospatial (even with Google taking most of the mindshare)
The base map and overlay are both produced in QGIS using the NaturalEarth database. Because GrADS can't read geographical info from graphics they are built by hand and the parameters are entered into GrADS by hand.
Animations are made from still png frames using ffmpeg.
OpenSans is my font.
All of this runs on an i5 with 8Gb of RAM under CentOS7. I make around 40,000 maps a day (one per frame in the animations).
I am 68 years old. My only computer training came 51 years ago. This is all self taught.
I am very happy with my life and where we live. I really don't want develop a big business. Can I just be an artisinal meteorologist?
https://photos.app.goo.gl/wPD2M1yrGZ6ZsEFt7
We park on the street. :)
Seriously, I was on TV in Connecticut for nearly 30 years. Where I lived was common knowledge. I'd often meet someone whose friend had told them I lived in their neighborhood.
Only once did someone knock on my door just to say hello. Most people are respectful and there are dozens of other clues to where I live since I run a business there.
I appreciate your concern, really.
Do you have any problems with this remote setup like Sinclair has with “Centralcasting” local news from far away? (Graphics and visuals for the wrong station showing up, talent’s obvious lack of knowledge of local events and terminology, etc...)
What happens in the event of a California-centric disaster like an earthquake or wildfire, and you’re not available? Or if there’s a major weather event in Nebraska and you’re not there, or not able to feed into Nebraska because Vyvx/internet goes down or the satellite dish freezes over?
It's difficult to explain but what I do is designed for me. There's a lot I do because I understand both sides of the equation which means my studio isn't a turnkey solution anyone could walk into. You need to be able to understand 'why' when something doesn't work.
That being said, IMHO Sinclair did it the wrong way. The weather unit should be an autonomous production, not dependent on the regular studio being free. My all-in studio cost is around Hyundai money. It removes complexity and allows live production where needed and closer to air always.
I had a trip from SoCal to Milwaukee cancelled because a few guys who robbed a gas station decided to drive the getaway car to Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix -- where my first flight was headed. Random shit happens.
In three years of doing this what you describe hasn't ever happened.
We use the Internet for data. I have fiber to the wall.
I mean, the rain effect itself, not the whole UI around it here.
Edit: Here's[1] the accompanying article, and here's[2] some other stuff I made (although my website is also just as old and hasn't been updated since!)
[1]http://tympanus.net/codrops/rain-water-effect-experiments/
Thank you for finding that.
Welp. It's identical. I even tried to defend the current link with "Well, some cool things can happen when you hook up a UI to a shader..." but the UI doesn't even do anything except turn the rain off and on.
There's lightning too in that other one! That's so cool.
As an aside, I’m sorry someone stole this from you and used it unattributed.
You've probably come across it though, as it does seem to gloss over some basic stuff. But it does cover the basics pretty well, just gotta keep an eye for details and seemingly unimportant one-liners that turn out to be fundamental.
It also takes some googling for deeper explanation of some functions, which often result on Stack Overflow answers by the author himself.
Dealing with the WebGL API itself is a bit... let's say tricky, though. But working with shaders for me is a joy.
This also seems promising, though I only skimmed over it: https://thebookofshaders.com/
And also, look into https://shadertoy.com/. Both for using the shaders there as example and as a playground.
But it doesn't matter, I posted the code for it to be used, I'm glad to see it in the wild.
[1] shader: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/MdfBRX
I wrote an article about it here[1], but I made this back when I was first learning WebGL (it was my first WebGL project, in fact), so be aware that a lot of things could be better!
[1]https://tympanus.net/codrops/2015/11/04/rain-water-effect-ex...
On osx mpb performance is stellar in Chrome sadly, while both Safari and Firefox only delivers 2-3 fps.
Weirdly on an iPhone with Safari the performance is smooth as silk.
I would really like to ditch Chrome, but it seems i get full speed fans with Firefox on sites sporadically, and while Safari is much better it's still not on par with any kinds of heavy graphics.
I don't get it. Why can my iPhone 6 run this super smoothly while my 3000 USD mpb struggles? And why can Chrome do it while Safari can't when it should have native access to GPU api's ?
Somebody has made a version using WebGL alone[1] (sadly they got the refraction a bit wrong), try it to see if it works well enough (and let me know, I'm curious myself).
Would be pretty weird if the osx native browser didn't hardware accelerate while Chrome does it on a MPB, but Apple are often weird like that.
Anyone tried it on Firefox + Windows?
[1]: can't verify this as I only have a slowich some years old android phone, on which it runs fluidish but miss renders the effect of the large rain drops...
I was confused at first because I thought the sliders were parameters of the simulation and I wasn't hearing anything.
Curious if this is the best done in WebGL to date, or if there's even better out there? Or what this does and doesn't do, and where next obvious areas for improvement would be?
But there are some neat tricks which, while not necessarily transferable themselves, might serve as inspiration for other problems.
I actually came here to comment on the blur on the edges of the large drops. My guess was it was a fast way to give a passable result for the more complicated refractions occurring at the edge of the drop. Is there a link at which I can follow your work? Thanks!
By that point I had already spent more time on this than I'd have liked, and allowing for a little blur was an easier way for it to look good enough.
I haven't been doing any "public" work lately, but I'll post anything I make on my Twitter[1], especially if I ever get to finish this updated version.
This vfx is actually pretty simple but quite satisfying. Having the drops refract based on look angle is what really pushes it over the edge.
The realism is so-so. Big raindrops do not accumulate smaller ones well enough when touching. And there is no splash.
You can see the app at https://rainpaper.com
Awesome app overall though!
Since seeking is not required, it could do away with keyframes entirely.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.oftn.rainp...
Something about the distribution of the droplets and the movement doesn't seem "random" enough. it seems pretty "regular" for lack of a better word.
The drops themselves look amazing.
Example (it's using an IP for some reason): http://142.44.247.245/sounds/rain/rainbest160.mp3
Not sure what the license is for the sound, so can't say whether it's free or not.
For playback it's using jplayer, which is open source: http://jplayer.org (I'm surprised their site doesn't list support for Opus).
I'm wondering which would be more interesting to watch. Perhaps a combination of the two.
Maybe a better middleground is to use an animation with transparency that you can instead overlay any background, like a looping gif.
Try this version for comparison: https://codepen.io/stefanweck/pen/Vbgeax
It seems like when you change the settings, it can take 15 or more seconds to take effect.