I wrote up a progress report and lab notes on my project to make a computational poetry generator that uses only solar power: https://posts.decontextualize.com/solar-powered-dawn-poems-progress-report/
the prototype device uses an Adafruit M0 Feather, Jasper Sikken's AEMSUCA board, and a tiny solar panel to generate small snippets of dawn poems from a corpus I am putting together
(work supported by CultureHub as part of my residency there)
This technique is so much fun though! Seeing the mountains "pop" as I get the lighting and displacement modifier just right in Blender is very satisfying.
I've been working on a poster sized render of the mid Atlantic (DC, Philly, NYC). I want to overlay more data on this. Still thinking about what. But I'm liking how the terrain is looking. Lots of little improvements yet to come.
you might also notice I have a missing bit of elevation data in the East :/ Still working on that.
Here is a view of Oregon, colored with USGS land cover data (based on aggregated Landsat data, I think) and elevation provided by NASA
I've been having a lot of fun figuring out how to get map data into Blender in a way I like. I've been using QGIS to get data into a map so everything is layered nicely and georeferenced, then exporting elevation data, color (like rendered map) and maybe other choice bits of data as separate images so I treat them as textures in Blender. Then apply the elevation as real 3D heights, and use the other textures in the shader and get a 3D map!
capitalism gripe, software
under capitalism, all labor saved is labor disenfranchised. so software, that endeavor whose sole purpose is to multiply labor, finds itself worsening the situation of the worker, even its own! layers of engineers are invalidated by "innovation" and left adrift, used and abandoned.
it doesn't have to be this way! the plow is not the enemy of the farmer, so why under capitalism is it?
we must defeat capitalism to make good software.
I like space stuff a lot, like stars and rockets. Also I'm a kitty!