by Lethn
2
BetterDaysStill 2 points ago +2 / -0

It's always more of a problem with "accessible" software like Blender. Next to no barriers to entry results in too many content creators and too little knowledge. Couple that with the fact that Blender hasn't yet become an industry standard, and there just isn't the same kind of tuition available.

Meanwhile convoluted and expensive industry staples like Houdini have almost consistently good content. I'd wager for a lot of the more theoretical topics, which are largely software agnostic, you'd be better off picking up the basics anywhere and then moving onto something more reputable for the theory and advanced topics even if the course uses another software package.

by Lethn
2
BetterDaysStill 2 points ago +2 / -0

Polycount is a small part of the motivation for good topology in regards to characters.

The flow of edges determines how the surface will change and shade in response to deformation. Bad topology can absolutely ruin the best looking character when animated, while making skinning/rigging a pain in the ass and unnecessarily time consuming. If you're working in a team environment, this becomes more important. Any rework incurs latency and wastes team time, and you'll invariably piss off your colleagues.

That said, your artistic requirements will determine how important this is - you're unlikely to notice issues on a RTS units face. A realistic character viewed up close in first person? Definitely a problem. Basically, as little concern as your project allows for, but no less.

That in mind, since I tend to do more detailed characters, the best approach I've found is the one that allows me to avoid any real retopology or unwrapping for the majority of my characters (clothing excluded, but a lot of that can be automated) giving me the time to either push quality elsewhere in the pipeline, or spend it on characters that don't allow for such an approach.

Also, extrusion is really slow. Blender got PolyBuild not too long ago. It's similar to Maya's QuadDraw, both of which are inferior to Topogun. Seriously, check it out. Really quick.

by Lethn
3
BetterDaysStill 3 points ago +3 / -0

but I feel like that's for people who are absolutely anal about polygon count

Nah, automated tools are great at hitting polycounts. They're just terrible at providing adequate density and correct edge flows in light of intended deformation leading to poor results on animated/deforming meshes. Looking at part 4 where the retopo starts, that looks like fairly straightforward manual retopo. Admittedly, I skipped through it owing to its long playtime and relatively low quality.

In terms of tools, I use a couple to speed up the process. ZRemesher with guide curves can get pretty close for unimportant meshes where turnaround time is paramount. For hero characters, where I want complete control over flow and density, Topogun 3 makes it less of a chore.

For unconventional characters (creatures, weird proportions), I work freehand without thought of topology in Zbrush. Once the form is pretty close to final, I'll retopo and unwrap before projecting and finalising the sculpt. In the end, your lowest sub-d level is essentially your LP. You'll often want to make some minor adjustments before bake, but they are that, minor.

Generally though, you should be looking to avoid as much topology and UV work as is humanly possible. It's a time sink, a formality required to have nice, consistent characters.

Reshaping the closest candidate from a set of base-meshes I've made, and using projection workflows is something I do wherever I can. Best case scenario? Tweaking some verts in a couple of tricky places and relaxing a couple of interior UVs after sculpting. Minutes. It also makes for relatively consistent UVs, which you can use to accelerate skinning across similar meshes.

by Lethn
3
BetterDaysStill 3 points ago +3 / -0

Nioh 2.

The story isn't great, some levels feel a bit labyrinthine with winding, illogical paths littered throughout and it can be tough starting out. Encounters are not random however, and grinding isn't required; The closest I came was repeatedly running harder areas to figure out how best to utilise the metric fuckton of combat options I unlocked and how to approach specific enemy types. That, and because it has one of the most enjoyable and rewarding combat systems I've encountered.

by Lethn
4
BetterDaysStill 4 points ago +4 / -0

In my experience, polish has an exponential cost in terms of time and complexity. Gameplay scripting can be taught to young children. Pioneering solutions to rendering and physics problems reserved for offline computation in a real-time field to provide that extra layer of polish only seen in AAA? Often exceptionally hard.

Engines like Unreal betray the complexity of what, at least when I was part of the industry, constituted "game programming". Most common use cases have already been accounted for, all of the complex work already done for you. This is similarly true for algorithm design in game dev with every indie parroting the same decades old industry tricks. The illusion lasts as long as you don't do anything too interesting or orthogonal to the design of the engine that's doing all of the heavy lifting.

Game programming isn't just performing a navmesh query, it's implementing recast. It isn't prototyping with horrendously inefficient post-process materials. It's adding, albeit fairly straight forward, custom shaders. Or not so straight forward.

by Lethn
6
BetterDaysStill 6 points ago +6 / -0

I've worked as a software engineer in a couple of fields and most of the legitimately challenging tasks I've encountered where as a game dev. These usually stemmed from the severe resource constraints implied with real-time. A naïve solution can be trivial while delivering comparable results in orders of magnitude less time can be extremely hard, often requiring novel solutions. The sheer amount of fuckery required to make shiny things work on potato hardware is almost always underestimated.

Large scale crowd avoidance, as an essential feature, on meagre consoles with tight production schedules and a myriad other responsibilities still haunts me.

2
BetterDaysStill 2 points ago +2 / -0

I haven't been following, but did he publicly take a stance against "What is a woman"? Don't find it hard to believe there are still jannies at Twitter censoring things they don't like.

5
BetterDaysStill 5 points ago +5 / -0

No friend, your psychiatrist who legally immigrated from Uganda is a good person. Ugandans as a whole? Not so much.

Africans, with the exception of a small, well-educated and often quite capable minority whom frequently immigrate out of fear of their less sophisticated countrymen, are really nothing like African Americans. Please stop mythologizing people you don't understand and haven't lived amongst. While it's easy to admire and want to replicate their denouncement of globohomo, you certainly do not want the average Ugandan as your neighbour - and such sentiments are exactly how you get them as neighbours..

34
BetterDaysStill 34 points ago +34 / -0

Some of the tweets call for the deaths of "pornographers" include swastikas

What ever could the connection possibly be?

1
BetterDaysStill 1 point ago +2 / -1

There's also no reason to encourage or support instances of legal inequality

Legal equality is concerned with equal legal treatment regardless of individual characteristics or outcome. Those characteristics can outright preclude a desirable outcome. It really comes down the quality of the laws and their interpretation. Like the definition of those characteristics, interpretations are also subject to change and manipulation - they reflect the current political will. See trannies, legal alteration of your birth certificate and the practical ramifications.

It works more often than not but a strong argument can be made against it in cases where outcome is critical - why the law itself routinely includes exceptions. Personally, I fail to see the victory in an academic application of equality that results in the loss of more of my countrymens' lives.

2
BetterDaysStill 2 points ago +2 / -0

Drafting only men speaks to a societal disregard for male life

Don't for a second dispute this.

If women were subject to draft, there may be so much reluctance to engage in war at all that no men die.

I just disagree with this being the eventual, or even a realistic outcome.

1
BetterDaysStill 1 point ago +3 / -2

It's easy to play games with other people's blood.

Draft women, forever and always.

Totally, but that's beside the point

I don't believe it is. Imp doesn't want to see more men dying in war. A sentiment I share. His response is to demand women be drafted, resulting in (any realistic interpretation) mixed squads which have been shown to be less effective. Hence my issue. I don't want to see more men die in the pursuit of a notion as moronic as "equality".

To have equality between the sexes

Disparate individual abilities lead to disparate individual outcomes, where it is inferior individual outcomes stoking the resentment that makes "equality" such effective political fodder. There will be no true equality between the sexes, because generally speaking, the sexes are not equal.

Failing that, men should somehow be compensated for ongoing sex-based discrimination, especially when the discrimination prepares them to risk their lives.

I have mixed feelings about no draft. I entirely agree with the above though, and I guess traditionally there was compensation. The problem is we're upholding our end of the social contract and seeing nothing in return for it.

6
BetterDaysStill 6 points ago +6 / -0

Which is perfectly fair, if nearly every goddamn inquiry or report on the matter doesn't indicate that men will be in greater danger, both physically and psychologically, in a mixed combat unit. Let go of you ideological compulsion for a second and realize what you're advocating for will likely cost male lives.

Now consider that the average politician and their "interest groups" have a considerably larger influence on men actually being deployed. Let those parasitic fucks light each other up first, then we can talk. The only war I'm interested in fighting anymore is one where I get to put holes in self-serving globalist sacks of shit.

1
BetterDaysStill 1 point ago +1 / -0

Huh, never heard of that. I did come across the DP-12 a while back though - quite possibly the most aptly named shotgun in existence.

Asking entirely out of curiosity and with no intention of buying further firearms I objectively don't need, any idea what the recoil on the burst is like?

2
BetterDaysStill 2 points ago +2 / -0

Injustice going on in Europe today

Could you provide further context on the statement?

I assume he's not referring to the intentional, wholesale dilution and destruction of European cultures?

28
BetterDaysStill 28 points ago +28 / -0

I'm not even sure it's that. I haven't played DnD, so I could be speaking out of turn, but a cursory search seems to indicate that you can still have mixed parentage characters. It just doesn't effect your stats. It also seems they recently removed negative racial attributes...

What's a bet that is the real rub - the implication that your ancestry could influence your capabilities.

6
BetterDaysStill 6 points ago +6 / -0

As to achieve net zero, allow the French farmers to use them as fertilizer.

4
BetterDaysStill 4 points ago +4 / -0

Speaking of shotguns, I always thought the AA-12 would be perfect for home defense/remodeling.

7
BetterDaysStill 7 points ago +7 / -0

Despite emotional pleas, one of country's strictest anti-trans bills becomes law in Kentucky

As it should be. If you have to resort to an emotional argument against a logical stance, you either don't have a valid argument or are ill-equipped to argue it.

6
BetterDaysStill 6 points ago +6 / -0
  1. Is the pope catholic? (unironically)
1
BetterDaysStill 1 point ago +1 / -0

Depends what you mean by freezing up. Pretty much everyone "freezes" for a moment when confronted with an unexpected threat to life. It's an evolutionary threat-assessment thing. How long that lasts is a matter of personality, exposure and training, and yes, women generally fair worse. The freeze response you're referring to is quite different though.

If you've hunted, or legitimately startled someone in a self-defense situation, you'll know that the freezing is accurately named. Think stunned rabbit. Rapid breathing, wide eyes, minimal to no movement, incoherent mumbling or repeated simple sentences.This is not it. She did respond, and her response was to exploit a social network against the threat. A predictable outcome.

That said, it's a shit situation, and one that could have easily required escalation. I'm more concerned about the fact that she closed distance on, and repeatedly put herself between two potential attackers - both of whom where unresponsive to verbal orders and willing to kill a man in front of a cop. Unless this is some rural melodrama and they're her cousins, that's terrible self-preservation right there.

16
BetterDaysStill 16 points ago +16 / -0

That, and the fact that despite being book-ended by greater tragedies, questioning the holocaust is a criminal offence in multiple countries while those tragedies are either overlooked or presented in a positive light by left-wing media and educational institutions.

It's nothing more than a pity grift at this point, and should be treated as such. No sacred cows, for anyone.

17
BetterDaysStill 17 points ago +17 / -0

Likely panic. The badge and stern voice didn't work, so now she's confronted with either intervening and risking actual physical retaliation, or wandering around helplessly while repeatedly radioing for help (which she did).

"Tend and befriend" is the dominant fight or flight response from women.

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