#procedural material

[phoenixiancrystallist]

Month 6, day 9

More procedural textures in Blender :) This time a green marble texture :D Left is default, right is with settings played with!

[totenrand]

Distant City Windows

Like I mentioned in Gelatinous Cube in a Dungeon, the second ‘quick scene’ immediately got well out of hand, ballooning into some cyberpunkish shopping arcade that I made the mistake of making one wall a giant window, and having a giant window I needed a cityscape beyond it; so went my addled reasoning. Further over ambitious thoughts lead me to thinking “I can node my way out of this” and to an extent I can, randomly scattering some vaguely buildingish shape about the place isn’t too hard, and making materials for the buildings ends up resulting in something that I’m pretty happy with.

So I’ve broken it out and thrown together a quick scene to display it.

What I’m trying to replicate here is the look of a window into a lit room at night, where there’s some main lighting, and maybe some other lighting that’s a different colour temperature, and there’s indistinct patches of shadow suggesting occupants or maybe some furniture.

It basically some soft, distorted, noise driving a colour mix between a 2000k and 8000k blackbody colour node, that drive the Emission channel; with a couple of noise textures and a Musgrave texture being mathed together to drive the Emission Strength channel.

I’ve attached a shot of the whole node tree below the fold (now I know I can make a fold).

Some Time to Forget

Coming back to this project file after about six months to pull out the city windows material, I’ve found that whatever the image I had in my head for it at the time that overwhelmed me has died away to a dull roar, and I’ve actually managed to make some headway including a nifty geometry nodes system for generating the railings.

Where I stalled at is on the left, and my progress is on the right; now if only I knew what that vaguely church looking thing I’ve made at the end of the corridor is so I know how to detail it, but hey, one step at a time.

Shader Nodes for the city windows material below the fold.

[artstationable]

Anna Koroleva

Senior Environment/Material artist

artstation

More from «Artstation» here

[soullistrations]

Immmm not allowed to open any more tabs on my phone bc apparently 500 is the limit

[sparklehoard]

Does anyone have any suggestions for apps that let you:

-Make mock quizzes and flashcards

-type in your own notes.

-is free with no ads?

-don't use A*I

[smile-files]

i'll be completely honest... i don't want to study for the exam i have tomorrow! as it is i've procrastinated enough by spending half the day making collages but i guarantee i'll procrastinate some more

[terrorbirb]

Anyone who is like "why do engineers need to take English classes? You don't have to write papers" should look at the 4,000 word comment letter I've written, not to mention the 10k + reports, or the 52,000 word documentation of processes at my last job.

[arminthada]

hello claire! i think it was thaks to you that i started watching smym so thank you so much for that because i really really enjoyed! (even the heartbreak), are you looking forward to any series with a similar vibe or do you have any recommendations? thank you 🤍

Awwww hi nonnie (❁´◡`❁)

Oooh this is a hard one but I guess if I had to make some recommendations, it'd be some series you may have already heard about but (maybe? hopefully?) haven't watched so I hope at least of these end up for your consideration on your to-watch list.

1. History 3: Trapped

I consider this the OG 'cop falls for criminal' BL series, dare i say - set the standard for modern mafia bl. It's got a great balance of romance, comedy, action for you to get sweeped into their story.

2. Laws of Attraction

From the same director and screenwriter as SMYM, this is a fast paced romance action drama features the most charming lawyer BL verse has ever known.

3. Master Of The House

If you enjoyed the investigation aspect of SMYM, I cannot recommend enough this Netflix Thai original thriller about a diamond tycoon's mysterious death. It may make you squirm as there are quite few disturbing assault scenes.

4. In Family We Trust

Also an investigation series featuring the death of a patriarch of a big Thai Chinese family. It is the most incredible suspense lakorn I've ever watched til this day and it features a strong cast full of veteran actors.

5. Under The Skin S1 and S2

Chinese bromance police procedurals are probably the closest in vibes you'll find to SMYM. I find that the cases in Under The Skin always have really good moral stories behind them and I enjoy the dynamic between the leads very much.

6. The First Shot

Here is another Chinese police procedural bromance that has a lot of unpredictable twists and reveals.

Honorable mention: Justice In The Dark

This cancelled/never finished airing dangai (censored bromance) series is like a piece of lost media but SMYM reminded me a lot of it so I will include it in this list just for the sake of it.

[phoenixiancrystallist]

Month 6, day 15

Got four more materials tonight! :) The channel that had the second nacre material I did has as bunch of other texture/material tutorials, and they're so far super quick, too, so I've been having fun going through them lol

[alectoperdita]

i wish joukai had more mystery/case fics where like kaiba is accused of a murder and he won’t say what his alibi is until mokuba begs him to at least talk to his lawyer and the lawyer has to hear “i was getting railed by a blond guy i used to bully in high school. i could not have killed my business rival last tuesday.”

Anon, you're speaking my language. 🙏

I adore situations where Kaiba's calcitrant nature makes him his own worst enemy. And case fics where Kaiba is accused of a crime are a great setup for exploring that. He knows he didn't do it. Why should he have to explain himself otherwise because the truth is he's innocent (at least innocent of what he's being accused of here)?

To have his actual alibi then also be a clandestine hookup/relationship with Jounouchi is chef's kiss.

[emmathompsonegot]

White Collar just hit that perfect spot of almost really good, where they had actors with great chemistry, and a fun set up, but the writers fundamentally misunderstood what's appealing about them, so they just kept fucking it up progressively worse

[creamsicle-art]

Needless to say, I am hopelessly dependent on the ingot

[ctl-yuejie]

it's so fucking funny that during rotation all of my peers can do their jobs (as judges, prosecutors, jurists in administration, lawyers etc) but in the end a non substantial amount of us will fail the bar

almost as if sitting the bar is a shit system

[withered-rose-unbreakable-lotus]

I wanted to make a teaser with some words before the video starts but alas, even in 2025, free stock footage for video is ridiculous.

[mylordshesacactus]

on endlings, and despair

Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?

If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.

We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.

We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.

Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.

In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.

It worked.

The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.

It worked.

Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.

It worked.

The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.

The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.

This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.

Nothing less.

One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.

For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.

Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.

Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.

It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.

One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.

If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.

All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.

We never know what miracle we might be buying time for.