Daub

It might be a demand issue. In Singapore a lot of people are lactose intolerant, hence the demand for dairy substitutes is greater.

Thats pretty much how I now see it.

Yes it was partly toung in cheek. These were good people who acted on principle.

However... I was young and it took me too long to see the hypocrisy of their thinking. They would happily feed the chickens but I would be the person who killed them... their angel of death. I wasn't even properly shown how to kill a chicken.

One day I was present when a pig was slaughtered a process which was overseen by a vet. That animal certainly knew it was going to die and did not like the idea. I was only 19, and was somewhat badly affected by the experience. For a while I even became a vegetarian but developed health issues as a result.

In the long run what I took from the idea was that meat has a cost. Life is not sacred but it is certainly precious. For that knowing it was worth it.

As someone who has worked on farms i can verify that such things happen. I personally witnessed sheep behaving exactly as decided in The Silence of the Lambs. Our sheep were famously noisy and certainly were used to being moved around in lorries but when the abattoir lorry turned up you could almost smell their fear. I also witnessed a cow storm through four fences in order to be reunited with her calf.

The irony: The farm was run by vegetarians and as the only meat eater it became my responsibility to oversee any time an animal was taken to slaughter. This simultaneously put me off meat eating and vegetarians.

> I now try to stop believing in things. It's mostly just molecules that happen to be in a certain configuration for some time.

That is some hardcore disassociation right there. Interesting that you use the word 'try' which implies that it requires effort to overcome the faith in the meaning of things.

I teach art and over the years I have come to understand that many people use art to subsume their neurosis (well duh I hear you say). What TFA describes is familiar to me as a typical form of this phenomenon - the cataloguer: artists who feel the need to give a home to that which is homeless, to elevate that which is humble. A highbrow example of this would be the work of Mark Dion.

Interestingly, by her own admission Barbara Iweins (the artist whose work TFA features) self describes this project as being rooted in neurosis, specifically one that seems to be a response to lack of stability in her life.

Similar projects seem always to have an unbound quality... like the labors of Sisyphus. So I guess my question to her would be "how would you know that this project is complete?" Is it complete now? According to TFA it is, yet I suspect that even with all the effort she has put into it, the itch is not yet scratched.

As someone who teaches both oil painting and digital painting, I find this project fascinating. They have certainly identified two of the key difference between digital and real paint:

- RYB mixing (e.g. yellow painting plus blue paint = green). I tested it on a mix of alizarin crimson plus hansa yellow to produce a cold orange (e.g. blood orange).

- Relative behavior of specific pigments. For example, a Prussian blue is almost black when applied thickly, but very chromatic when applied as thinly over white. A cerulean blue is pretty much the same in those two states. I tested this on a Prussian and the app performed well.

The app seems to make the assumption that the artist will always want the paint to mix. In a glaze, a thin transparent layer of paint is applied over dry paint. Effectively the result is a filter (the result will always be darker). To a degree, this can be faked using paint applied in a layer the blend mode of which has been set to multiply. It might be nice to add a drying brush to the tool set which selectively dries the paint to prevent mixing. Maybe also a mode switch to selectively different modes of physical application such as glazing, scumbling and dry brushing. While we are at it, why not add a Tonk mode using which thick paint can be lifted off the surface without smudging.

When I paint digitally, I mix the incredible nuance of real paint... even its smell. When I paint with oils I miss the incredible flexibility of the digital process (blend modes, compositing, even the humble undo). Never the twain...

Yep I did. Too late to edit.

This is functionally similar to the Claude glass. Taking the form of a dark tinted convex mirror it was used since the 1700s by landscape painters to simplify and reduce the tonal contrast of a view. When I was a student I would improve a similar effect by smearing Vaseline on my glasses.

Completely agree that Houdini is not currently in the same class as Blender, Maya, Max etc…. It is a different animal.

that being said, it is hard not to see how much their character animation tools are improving without seeing this as a direct threat on eastablished ‘trad’ 3d tools.

What fundamentally sets it apart is that (in my super limited experience) under the hood it closer to being a language than an app in the traditional sense. This makes it more future proof than its competitors. Lack of future proof is what has almost killed Modo, an app I adored. In the end, it proved far too slow and no amount of updates addressed this fact.

> "Why spend hundreds of hours sucking at video games when I could spend the same time sucking at Blender?"

Please come and repeat this in front of my students.

You are quite right. I won't do it again.

I love Blender and was majorly responsible for getting our university to switch to Blender from 3Ds Max. I have written easily 100 pages of support for Blender and have been evangelical in converting my colleagues to it. Nonetheless we lost some things in this move.

I was speaking to someone who worked at a very large animation production studio. They took a serious look at Blender to see if they could accommodate it in their pipeline. This would have saved them a ton of money. Some of the reasons they did not I list below. At the top of the list are the things that affected us in our move.

- Max and Maya are insanely fast at loading large files. On our school computers, importing a 5 gb .obj can take minutes, as opposed to seconds in Max/Maya.

- In Blender Managing large files is similarly slow, only possible by using linked proxies.

- In Max/maya the Arnold render engine comes with proxy management that makes loading large textures manageable.

- May/max are much better for chartecter animation, though Blender seems to be catching up.

- If Max does become unresponsive, it has cool tools such as delaying the screen re-draw for a defined number of seconds.

For the studio in question

- any bug they encountered could be addressed overnight by Autodesk support. Maybe Blender has got close to this with their long term support plan. Don’t know.

- max/maya are comprehensively documented, Blender is not.

All that being said, Blender is certainly finding a place in smaller studios. Simply: it inspire love. The re-factor and UI re-design a few years ago kick-started this.

The artists I know have very little love for max/maya. They use it because they have to. There has been near zero new features in these apps for years and max in particular can be clunky to use. Developers like Tyson Ibele have taken over adding new features with their plugins (check out his tyflow add on which replaces pflow).

Houdini is another matter. Development has been fast and users love it. I believe that in a few years this will have taken a large chunk out of Autodesk’s business.

My bad. I did not know that. Won’t make that mistake again. Pasting below the key info.

Differential Growth and L-systems are both concepts used in modeling biological growth, particularly in plants, but they approach the subject from different angles.

Differential Growth

Definition: Differential growth refers to the varying rates of growth in different parts of an organism, leading to shape formation and structural changes. This concept is crucial in understanding how plants adapt their forms in response to environmental stimuli (like light and gravity) and internal signals (like hormones).

Mechanism: It involves the controlled distribution of growth factors and varying growth rates among different tissues. For example, in plants, differential growth can lead to bending or twisting of stems and leaves, as seen in the formation of the apical hook during germination12.

Applications: This concept is used in various fields, including biology, architecture, and design, to create models that simulate how structures grow and change over time3.

L-systems (Lindenmayer Systems)

Definition: L-systems are a mathematical formalism introduced by Aristid Lindenmayer in 1968 for modeling the growth processes of plants. They use a set of rules (productions) to rewrite strings of symbols, which can represent different parts of a plant.

Mechanism: An L-system starts with an initial string (axiom) and applies production rules to generate new strings iteratively. These strings can be interpreted graphically to create complex plant structures. L-systems can be context-free or context-sensitive, allowing for a wide variety of growth patterns45.

Applications: L-systems are widely used in computer graphics for simulating plant growth, generating fractals, and even in architectural design6.

Differential L-systems

Integration: Recent developments have combined differential growth principles with L-systems, known as differential L-systems. This approach allows for more realistic simulations of plant growth by incorporating the effects of differential growth rates into the L-system framework78.

Functionality: In differential L-systems, the growth rules can depend on local conditions, such as the density of neighboring structures or external environmental factors, enhancing the realism of the generated models46.

Summary

Differential Growth focuses on how different parts of an organism grow at different rates due to various factors, leading to complex shapes.

L-systems provide a rule-based framework for simulating plant growth through string rewriting.

The combination of both concepts in differential L-systems allows for advanced modeling that captures both the structural complexity and the dynamic nature of biological growth.

References

[1] Differential growth and shape formation in plant organs www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

[2] A Model of Differential Growth-Guided Apical Hook Formation in Plants www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

[3] Interactive differential growth simulation for design - GitHub Pages em-yu.github.io

[4] (PDF) Modeling Growth with L-Systems & Mathematica www.researchgate.net

[5] Modeling plant development with L-systems - Algorithmic Botany algorithmicbotany.org

[6] [PDF] L-systems and partial differential equations∗ - Algorithmic Botany algorithmicbotany.org

[7] Differential L-Systems Part 1 | Houdini 20 - YouTube www.youtube.com

[8] Differential L-Systems Part 2 | Houdini 20 - YouTube www.youtube.com

Maybe also to inhibit growth when exposed to a saline environment?

If this were recreated in Blender’s geo nodes these functions would be relatively easy to add using the raycast node.

Maybe also check out this free Blender geometry nodes differential grown add-on from the brilliant Alex Martinelli…

https://www.blendernation.com/2023/07/25/differential-growth...

Kagi search has this to say about the difference between differential growth and L-systems (plot spoiler: l-systems are maths-based and address mostly branching phenomena, differential growth is derived from the fact that within a single organism growth rate is uneven):

https://kagi.com/search?q=differential+Growth+vs+L+system%3F...

One of the things that attracted me to 3D was Maya’s magnificent paint effects system, which is lsystem-based. This was begging to be spun off as a separate product.

Well, I can see that my opinion is not a popular one, but I stand by it. As a skinny-arsed bloke, I find sitting down for long periods very uncomfortable. The literature seems to agree that women are more able to sit upright for long periods, though there is no consensus as to why.

> Pretty much all differences in this regard can be attributed to the fact that the female pelvis needs to accommodate giving birth

I don't doubt that this is true, but a thing can evolve to serve two or more purposes. Feathers likely initially evolved for the purposes of thermoregulation, as well as to serve mating behavior.

I believe that the fact that the female human butt is larger than the males is that it evolved to make the act of sitting down for long periods more comfortable. Effectively, they carry around a built-in cushion which makes squatting and sitting a markedly different experience for males.

I am sufficiently old that I did not experience hard core internet porn until I could manage it. But evidence seems to show that for the vulnerable, porn consumption can lead to dopamine deletion and depression.

From my experience as a teacher, I believe that ticktock and instagram are the worst offenders, particularly for young women. The hyper-visuality and ease of consumption of these media sets them apart from platforms which can accommodate actual discussion (such as discord). The very fact that ‘influencer’ is now a profession supports my position.

That being said, I am not of the ‘for gods sake won’t someone think of the children’ brigade. Their goal seems to be to use the vulnerability of young people to control the internet.

Completely agree. I believe that social media overstimulates a young person’s expectations of society in the same way that porn overstimulates our expectations of sex.

As a (former) manager of a department in a design school, I defined three managerial imperatives:

1. Get rid of old, dead wood. Given that our program is scaffolded, with each course building upon the preceding, A single low performing lecturer can bring down the quality of an entire program. Don’t trust student feedback when identifying such people. They favour nice lecturers over effective ones. Getting rid of low performing team members in a university can be a low process. It can sometimes be quicker to find programs they would be happier/more productive in, and engineer a transfer.

2. Hire effective new blood. Well duh, I hear you say. Finding good new hires can be a difficult task. For those who I really wanted to hire, I did my research on who they were and what they might want, and tried to show them that I was willing to build a nest for them.

3. Have a vision of what the department should be. This vision requires constant maintenance and should always consider input from the team.

Completely true. I have seen this happen first hand many times. Last year I interviewed (online) a Chinese student who had recently graduated from a prestigious Australian university. It became quickly clear that he was using AI to answer our questions. One we steered our questions towards something more AI resistant, his English devolved into something barely comprehensible.

What the betting that they will turn in to a hive of chi-chi coffe shops, gift shops and bespoke offices, like they did to Coventry Garden and borough market. Since the early 80s London has been on a death dive, with real life London being replaced by a plastic equivalent.

> Blackberry at the time was kindof of an “everything goes, whatever it takes” free for all. And this damn the torpedoes full steam ahead attitude was pervasive everywhere. Red tape and beuaracracy was loathed by everyone.

Ironic as RIM became known for its cripplingly dense beuaracracy and red tape.

Looking at this I was making noises like Homer Simpson looking at donuts.

Gotta make something super clear. I love Singapore... I even considered getter permanent residence. I return there regularly and have many Singaporean friends. I was motivated to make my comment in response to a noticeable decline in the quality of life I saw at many levels of society. I have married friends without children who both hold down decent jobs, yet who are compelled to take in lodgers just to make ends meets. I saw grandfathers taking delivery jobs just to help out their adult children. I have seen it become almost impossible to get an affordable apartment, and rent security is non-existent.

Booze: Yes, after 9pm you can buy booze in a bar, with all the mark-up that implies. But most Indian workers do not drink in bars. Frankly, I feel infantilized if I am forbidden to buy a bottle of wine after 9pm.

Corruption: Yes SG is not per-say corrupt. A few weeks travelling through S E Asia will certainly demonstrate that. But, as I stated, in the publicly funded institutions I worked with, I saw multiple low-levels instances of self-interest placed before the common good. So many I could write a book on it.

Cars ownership: I stand by my comment. Car ownership skyrocketed around 2008-ish (Im bad with dates). I know for a fact that this has been discussed as a problem at the highest levels of government. Ease of travel is one of the key quality of life factors.

Refused service by taxis at change shift period: this happened to me routinely. I am amazed that it has not happened to you.

I can't open the link, but from the title here are my reelections on Singapore.

I lived there for 10 years, and in that time I saw SG degrade from being a great place to live to being a place where living was practically impossible. This wasn't just my experience: I saw the same in highly paid academics, middle income taxi drivers, Indian laborers etc etc.

- Though it was introduced in good faith, the 'change shift' system of taxi management meant that it was almost impossible to get a cab at certain hours unless your destination was close to where the driver was going. For this reason I was routinely refused service, despite it being illegal to do so. This is one of the factors influencing the rise of Grab and suchlike. This was a real pity as taxi driving is a protected profession that only native SGs are allowed to do. Many late middle aged SGs become taxi drivers after having lost their jobs as engineers, craftsman and suchlike in SG's relentless drive towards an exclusive white color economy.

- For years, car ownership was kept expensive, to ensure that the roads did not become crowded. After the last recession, the barriers were lifted, leading to a notable decline of use of public transport and increase of mad traffic jams. This was done to 'boost the economy', but was clearly a massive failure.

- It is impossible to buy alcohol after 9pm. This was a knee jerk reaction to the so-called riots in Little India a few years ago. SG is terrified of racial tensions, having had a dodgy racial history in its early days. However, this was a complete over-reaction. For similarly fatuous reasons, they also banned Hookah (hubbly-bubblies).

- Rent is now at insane levels. It is also impossible to get a lease longer than one year. The largest part of one's income is now swallowed up by rent, and even the so-called highly paid academics are now struggling to get by.

- SG has a reputation of having very low corruption, however the corruption is still there. The former Dean of Research of a local university had one of the largest citation counts in S E Asia. This is mostly down to the fact they insisted that they be counted as an author on all papers coming out of his program. I could fill a book with such examples of quality suffering at the hands of avarice.

- With little in the way of wage control, the controlling class are encouraged to bring in low-paid workers from China and fire their experienced staff. I saw many of my favorite food stalls go under as a result of this insane drive for profit.

The outcome is a place where people are struggling to get by, where the quality of life seems always under attack from well-meaning but short-sighted bureaucrats.

On the plus side, their trains (MRT) are well-designed, well-maintained, popular and effective. The people are cool and honest.

> Most people do not write well…

This very much needs to be said. Also… as we are ‘most people’ we all need to be reminded of this of our own writing.