The Complete Houdini: Introduction to Rigid Body Dynamics is now live on Patreon!. This one is the most epic of all epics: 2500 words and dozens of images and clips designed to give you a comprehensive introductory knowledge of RBD simulations in Houdini. Come on over!

Bokeh image optimization feature fully implemented and working great!. Just tidying up some Arnold warnings that Gaffer was displaying, plus a hang in C4D's IPR. This will be a great release, coming soon!.

RT @CgMort: Ever wanted game-like navigation in Maya?.Unlike Maya’s walk tool, this lets you fly around seamlessly without leaving your cur….

You put some stuff in a box. You put the box on the top right shelf in the closet. The cleaner comes and throws out everything in the closet. "Hey, where did you put that stuff?". "Oh, it's in the box on the top right shelf.". THE BOX IS GONE. This is C++ memory management.

Everything looking good! I'll be releasing a new version of Lentil-BHGC in a few weeks. - 4-5% faster renders overall. - 1-2% faster renders with bokeh images and optimization enabled. - Updated User Guide with Polynomial Optics lens descriptions and diagrams. Stay tuned!.

Ran some checks to make sure all the memory juggling is doing what it's supposed to. Looks correct so I think I'm done, but how unpleasant of a developer experience is this? Very unpleasant. Oh well. I guess it's the price you pay for ultimate speed and flexibility.

Memory error fixed, the bokeh optimization feature is working great now! . Turns out I was pointing to a pointer that got, uh, depointered. So, yeah. C++.

Impossible to process all the features listed here, but I have to highlight Live Render around 1:36:30. Such a huge quality of life improvement. Gets Solaris one step closer to the convenience of the framebuffers offered by Arnold, RenderMan and others.

The good news is that the bokeh image optimization is working! Render times are faster after enabling it. The bad news is that there's now a random crash. Don't you love manual memory management in C++?. Rhetorical question. Nobody loves that. We'll figure it out though!.

I've also been pondering implementing SIMD (parallel computing) techniques in Lentil-BHGC. Probably wouldn't do much with Thin Lens, but it's possible it would speed up Polynomial Optics a lot. Would require a major rewrite, but could be an interesting challenge. We'll see!.

Working on a cool new Lentil-BHGC feature. Bokeh images are a big performance bottleneck, so there will (hopefully!) soon be a checkbox to "Optimize Bokeh Image." If for whatever reason you're using a large image (up to 500x500), this could improve render times by. a lot.

RT @RizomUV: 𝗩𝗶𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗦𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝗛𝗶𝗴𝗵𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 – 𝗠𝗮𝗴𝗶𝗰 𝗪𝗮𝗻𝗱. Need faster, smarter selections?.With Magic Wand, RizomUV lets you quickly select UV is….

Whoa, I learned how to do advanced profiling in Visual Studio and it works great for Lentil-BHGC. I wrote some optimizations for a bunch of legacy code and we're getting 4-5% faster render times. It's all feeling pretty solid so this will probably make it into the next release!.

RT @jaymojamieson: @brianhanke That one was awesome. I bet you could emit from the very fine bits into a volume to fully fog the liquid at….

That cookies and milk and whipped cream sim looks INSANELY GOOD. Like, just. wow.

Been experimenting with LLMs for advanced coding. It's clear that they're the next evolution in search, but also that they don't "know" or "understand" anything. They make stuff up a LOT. Great tools when used in a smart way, but humans aren't going to be replaced any time soon!.

Promises, promises!

If I had a dollar for every time Google AI Studio said "okay, now THIS is the final, correct solution" I'd have a lot of dollars.

Very interesting stuff happening here. I successfully set up clang-cl in WSL (Rocky 9) and compiled a Windows executable in Linux. Big things coming. hopefully!

Just posted a follow-up article showing how to upgrade our Arnold plugin with a few user-accessible custom parameters. Come on over and check it out!.

Introduction to Arnold Plugin Development is live on Patreon! Topics include:. - Build environment setup and CMake configuration. - Detailed C++ syntax analysis of Arnold's camera example. - Rendering using the new plugin. This is a great one, come on over!.