salaivv

I started fumbling around computers at the age of five, wondering how the hell my computer manages to beat me in chess every time. The fact that it can even play games made me go nuts.

Fast forward 10 years or so, I picked up Blender trying to make some pretty pictures using my computer. It took an eternity to render out a clean image without much noise on my PC which had a whopping 4 GB of RAM.

Fast forward another 5 years, I stumbled upon the OptiX Denoiser that finally made it possible to do clean noiseless renders at decent resolution in one-tenth of the time on my – then proud of – 1050 Ti card. It felt like magic.

Fast forward yet another 5 years, today we have Midjourney and ChatGPTs of the world, and saying that I’m mind-blown or astonished only pales in comparison to what these things are capable of.

What I used spend hours on – meticulously placing assets, tweaking the lights and composition, doing post production, etc. – now seems to possible with just a prompt (or few prompts) away.

What next? Where are we heading?

I am not a fan of predicting the future, but looking at how things have progressed over two decades, I can’t help but to wonder how the world is gonna look in 10 or 20 years. Forgetting about how AI is gonna change this or that, the big picture seems to be clear – more and more of roles in the spectrum of ‘technical’ work are becoming obsolete.

In May of 2021, Paul Graham wrote, “There has never been a better time to be a ‘nerd’. In the past century we've seen a continuous transfer of power from ‘dealmakers’ to ‘technicians’ — from the ‘charismatic’ to the ‘competent’ — and I don't see anything on the horizon that will end it.”

When I read that article, these words that jumped out of the screen: “transfer of power from ‘dealmakers’ to ‘technicians’ — from the ‘charismatic’ to the ‘competent’”. I wanted to give Paul a high five when I read that. So beautifully worded.

But he ended that paragraph with a line that reads “At least not till the nerds end it themselves by bringing about the singularity.”

That was just 3 years ago.

Today, the world is shifting towards a future where the ‘how’ doesn’t matter anymore, and it’s all about the ‘why’ and the ‘what’. Where ‘expertise’ doesn’t matter anymore, and it’s all about having a ‘vision’ or being able to ‘dream’. Where the ‘technicians’ don’t matter anymore, and it’s all about being a ‘dealmaker’ who knows what they want.

In 10 or 20 years from now, who will be the technicians? What will they do? Will we have technicians at all? Are the only technicians going to be people building the AI?

If that's how the world is gonna look – a world where I no longer have the opportunity to watch a potter make a pot out of clay, an artist paint a portrait or a landscape from a blank canvas, or to make pretty renders and build things myself, or what not – it doesn’t make me happy when I think about it.

That reality makes me ‘sad’.

In the previous part we discussed the geometry of a spiral staircase and how we can generate a single stair element using the BMesh API. In this part we will discuss how to take that stair element and replicate it into a spiral. We will also be looking at how to generate the other parts of the staircase like the center pole, railing and balusters.

The BMesh API is a standalone module that houses all of Blender’s mesh editing tools. Every mesh tool that we access through the UI, uses some BMesh API function (or some combination of BMesh API functions) under the hood.

In this two part crash course, we are going to learn how to use the BMesh API by generating a spiral staircase.

In a recent post (https://salaivv.com/2023/07/06/perform-arbitrary-transforms), I covered how we can use transformation matrices to perform arbitrary transforms, although it was more about the API than the math.

I felt an interactive representation could help us understand them better.

Basically, a transformation matrix is a 3x4 matrix where:

The last column represents the location of object in global coordinates. The first three columns each represent the transformed unit vectors of the object’s local coordinates (XYZ from left to right). But we have a 4x4 matrix. Why do we have an extra row?

The last row is present to ensure the matrix is compatible with matrix multiplication when using homogeneous coordinates, which is a topic for another day. :)

But for now, let’s keep it simple and assume it’s always gonna be (0, 0, 0, 1) and doesn’t affect our transformations.

With that in mind, notice any patterns in video when we perform certain transformations?

Play around the cube in this blend file and see for yourself how various transformations like translation, rotation and scale affect the Transformation Matrix: salaivv.gumroad.com/l/matrix-world-interactive

If you have ever used Quixel Bridge, Substance Painter or Unreal Engine, you would have come across their live link feature at some point. Live links make your life easier by handling the transportation of data between to applications that are incompatible out of the box. For example, the Megascans Addon for Blender allows you to export an asset from Quixel Bridge, import it into Blender and properly setup their materials all in a single click.

These experiences are enabled by building live links between these applications using their respective APIs. But how do they work? What if you have an application from which you want to send data to Blender, but there is no live link for it? How difficult is it to build one?

We will explore answers to these question in this article.

That looks so satisfying. Which game engine did you build it with?

There is unlimited supply of talent, massive layoffs and general fear around Al replacing a lot of our jobs.

Here are three things I believe that still makes us relevant in today's changing landscape.

I just published a free Blender Python Cheatsheet on Gumroad. It's a collection of most frequently used functions and solutions to common problems you will encounter when writing scripts, macros or developing addons using the Blender API.

Grab it here for FREE: https://salaivv.gumroad.com/l/ovqqx

Just finished writing another iteration of Dunders in Blender.

TL;DR – Can you connect two node sockets using a syntax like this:

node_image_tex.outputs['Color'] >> node_principled.inputs['Base Color']

Read more: https://salaivv.com/2023/03/03/dunders-in-blender-2

I constantly feel like I do not have enough time to learn this or learn that. The amount of things I want to learn always seems to be outside my capacity and available time...

Cool stuff!

Reminds me of one of those Emacs memes that say, 'Your text editor runs in a browser, but my browser runs inside my text editor. We're not the same.'

Haven't tried it yet. It looks interesting, but it's definitely not as simple as Alpine is; it comes with loads of functionality. Will give it a try sometime.

A Hacker News client (PWA) using Alpine.js and Jekyll.

Alpine is one of those tools that when you look at it, you cannot pass by without adoring its design and simplicity.

Modern web-development space is so concentrated with frameworks/libraries like React, Angular, Vue, etc. so much so that they have become the default when it comes to building any website or application regardless of whether they are a good fit for the use case at hand.

I wanted to give Alpine a try by building a simple web application but I didn't want to build a yet another todo app. So, I decided to build a client for Hacker News instead.

You can find the source code here at https://github.com/salaivv/hacker-news-alpine

A few weeks ago, Sahil posted a tweet demonstrating a webapp based on Chat-GPT3 trained on his book, The Minimalist Entrepreneur. He has now open sourced the code for the same.