I've been very stressed and not blendering much, but I had a random idea for how to do fake caustics with geometry nodes 🤔 I'm sure this has been thought of before lol, but I thought it was a neat way of doing it:
basically, just displace the water surface mesh by the refracted normals of the light source, and then you can compare the face area to figure out how bright the spot should be:

here's some random thing I made ages ago for doing laser shots through water

never got around to making it animate in a good way though :/ here's how it looks in the viewport - all it's doing is twisting the mesh, but it also instances some spheres on it which allow it to maintain volume and "blobbiness", without them it looks kinda flat (last 2 image comparison)

crazy hair day with the new geometry simulation nodes :)

(there's somethign wrong with the indexing so just ignore the top half of the curves being all over the place lmao) The bottom half looks so cool and the top half is just broken 🥲

So, there's a concept I was thinking of for a while and I couldn't seem to find any existing examples...

How useful from a modelers perspective would "sparse" UV mapping be? What I'm envisioning is something that removes the [0-1] UV bounds, and instead of packing tightly you - - do your UV unwrapping *and all your texture work* on an open, "unconstrained" area, without any concern for wasted space in between - think like PureRef board. The end result could be backed by a single texture, but you can freely change the texel density of each island easily.

still experimenting with that simulation "hack" for geometry nodes lol

Back home, realised I hadn't used blender in almost a full month :/

still thinking about Girls' Last tour... wanted to do some stuff with the custom nodes to show them off a bit more, didn't have too long to work on this (maybe 1 hour? 1.5? something like that)

original reference image:

uploading Street model is "After the rain... - VR & Sound" (skfb.ly/6uQxu) by Aurélien Martel (CC-BY-NC)

Thinking about Shimeji Simulation again... I should probably be thinking about the exams I have in the morning instead lol

Shader-only black hole effect #b3d Sort of mini breakdown:
- first layer is the base distortion
- adding a reflection-mapped hdri for the stars
- ray-sphere intersection for masking the center
- ray-plane intersection for the disc

Monke of the Void the compression will not be kind to this one

Another part from the "Late tries to make a character model" series - the shirt!
Once again I tried to avoid doing any hand sculpting or texturing, all the details are procedural :) The poofy sleeves are entirely made with geometry nodes, here's a comparison and nodes
All I had to do was UV-unwrap it.

wobbly energy shield feeling trapped

geometry nodes geometry nodes

geometry nodes really hit different

"I was a failed god. Goodbye..." Trying something a little different to my usual style with Lineart/Grease Pencil in #b3d. No strokes were (manually) drawn in the making of this image :^)
The shading is very minimal, it's just a bayer matrix dithering thing and some gradients slapped on stuff lol.

"low poly" foliage is so hard to get right as are the rocks lol
maybe the high-detail textures don't work so well for the style hmm

I saw @iquilezles sdFbm article (iquilezles.org/www/articles/f…) and tried it in blender.
5 octaves of noise, 16 raymarching steps. That's all opengl can handle before hitting uniform limits with nodes. As you can imagine, lots of nodes :D

The node editor lags to death, but viewport is nice and fast still (since unrolled loops run about the same in the end on the GPU side)

Note there's no drivers in the shader, as that *wouldn't* run anywhere near as fast!

How to make stuff emit from cracks in cell fractured meshes: 1: Do the cell fracture, duplicate the fractured mesh and join it together.

2: remove all non-sharp edges by selecting a non-sharp edge, Shift+G->Sharpness, then X->Edges:

zoop #b3d In a style very unlike how I usually work, I just randomly slapped modifiers on until I have a blob of stuff and then add only a couple of nodes lol

Basically 90% of the effect is just the blobby mesh, the other 10% is a vertical scrolling noise which helps break it up a bit.