When I told someone Chengdu is a hot city, I meant both food and the city itself. Hopefully, I finally remembered that I forgot procrastinated to post my photos I took when I travelled to Chengdu and stayed for a few days this winter. Still, these pictures are taken from my old Canon 50D DSLR and the mediocre lens.
Author: cth451
The season of white (photo) album
It’s -30 degree celcius in Madison. It’s snowing. It’s the season of white album again.
白い雪が街に——
優しく積もるように
アルバムの空白を全部——
埋めてしまおう——
Camera: Canon EOS 50D (a really old DSLR)
Lens: Canon EF-S 17-85mm f4-5.6 IS USM (yes, the very mediocre default)
Aperture: f/5.6
Exposure: 1/500
Location: In my room [precise location redacted]
GPG Key Renewing
My old key d226918c211f6bb0 will expire on Sep 17 2017, and a new key 94333b156bd49dc0 has been generated and will be in effect after the old one has expired.
Sakura island blender render
Sakura Island is the spawn point in my minecraft server. Of course it would not be possible to place sakura trees in game, so what’s actually in Minecraft is pink wool. Nevertheless they still look nice from far away.
I tried water caustics with refraction and fresnel effects, which make water more realistic at the cost of increased samples and render time. Also I attempted a manual material override on tree leaves, However that seems worth it.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Minecraft creation by me, exported with mineways on wine, rendered on blender with cuda. As usual, full resolution of 4096×4096 is available on pixiv.
[Errata] Windows upgrade to 1703 broke grub
What happened?
After windows upgrading itself to release 1703 aka. the creator update, Grub bootloader can no longer start and says error: unknown filesystem and dropped in to grub rescue shell. Windows boots up fine from firmware memu.
TL; DR
Manually doing hexediting just taught me another valuable lesson: @Windows has the worst upgrade handling.
— @cth451 July 28, 2017
- Prepare a USB linux live environment.
- Find the correct partition number, it might have been changed during upgrade.
- Look for
grubx64.efiin your EFI system partition and use a hex editor to open it - Search for
/boot/gruband notice the(,gptN)where N is your original partition number for linux OS. - Change N to the new parition number, save the file and reboot.
Analysis
Before upgrade, my partition scheme was:
- sda1 fat32: EFI system parition
- sda2 ext4: Archlinux root filesystem
- sda4 ntfs: Windows drive C
- sda3 ext4: AOSC OS root filesystem
Partition numbers were not exactly in physical order of data, for I shrinked Archlinux to make room for Windows installation. However after upgrade, it became:
- sda1 fat32: EFI system parition
- sda2 ext4: Archlinux root filesystem
- sda3: Windows drive C
- sda4: Windows recovery environment
- sda5: AOSC OS root filesystem
So what did windows do down there? It shrinked drive C and made a little recovery partition, then re-sorted the partition numbers. However grub bootloader looks for partitions by partition number. It tried parition 3 (which was a valid linux filesystem), but it’s an ntfs now.
Okay found a hardcoded partition number in grubx64.efi… Attempting manual edit… pic.twitter.com/Cww8706Xp8
— @cth451 July 28, 2017
This partition number is hardcoded into the bootloader efi image, so we need to manually hexedit it.
Self burn notice: Sina Weibo
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 近期由于新浪微博已经无法正常使用，我将不会在 Sat Jul 15 8:00am GMT+8 之后继续发布微博。 以防万一，在此声明此后的所有新微博、评论和私信均非本人所为。但是，我仍然会主动的维护关注及粉丝列表。 - -- cth451 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iQIzBAEBCAAdFiEEsbVKlVRo2o1u8IoTEN2RLfRlcEgFAllo7NUACgkQEN2RLfRl cEgvaRAA0rnVIGjmhV2oJ5Z4wnoO+fiIJxumNws83zdfU0veZNE7I41dJ0VZ9BMT FDFd6bVaBiCDML36bb4L4N48M5TB/zTo2N7bAoIhebCuMJV45D7z29Iif3IsxoO2 TnPUYIyKuLu23or0Ya0i3Y6Jtp6mviYKKYlK4DuK5ZO8d3dd3QjUswr5kxCOCBMA l7/PowUpoBHQw2cDqlJDwCywXQztroIuXgau472Wbk22owRDUQu8B4gexJqYwDWQ FAu8t8Me4FYlbaXXUUfV5K7ZmnRAfDNa535LIzaE6OpNe14BdQSbVyOE42dsYQHI Qf7gPvjahqQh1U4J4XwMjI03JYd2Y0TpvlSHeYu5c7lRyxoaTUjNjwKEvDBZqukO 2S40brJ6Qgrex+SISV0VZcMm1lBfQYewA4jzrU9RbY5TEb3078KcZ6Q0nUiAUpZb qIYoSG7W/8vQ0JWkEFA+039Rs7ZIs+cnKB+45xVV3JGPawQk7cNG9rk8RcQm+fjr Hjzwi2QfHAQ7PNkTwDYc2M4lOanSUKKP7wE9Mw7NpK6GdWAv8Lbx+m+9liNlhkzM jbhD7QqIfOlgsDrp3UqgWqbwhRnKmMMtq8y9svm/MDok6jGMGKIIOQCsJTouHHpK acR3ubO26cDAdqaezSLMYMPGmfj58SyRY3z5NUMPEFvJzv+Wx7Y= =btsa -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
我将会陆续停用其他社交网络与新浪微博之间的连结，并且可能出现大量数据删除。感谢微博上不知名的各位在过去对一个普通学生的支持。
Lake superior and sunset
Lake Superior – Sugarloaf Cove
Position: 47°29’11″N 90°58’59″W
I took this photo with the waterproof Xperia upside down with camera underwater. Not exactly what I expected but still amazing enough to see colorful cobblestone underwater.
Yet another regular collection of colorful stone beach.
Lake Mille Lacs
Position: 46°10’52″N 93°43’42″W
This one is pretty off-road on the side of a trail beyond Indians point. Cold, but beautiful.
Minnesota Route 1
Unfortunately I lost Geo-tag in this photo… So I don’t know the precise location on the road.
Triangle Garden (Blender Rendering Teaser)
New features I discovered in blender: manual (and sophiscated) water surface reflection controls! I tried some techiques from the computer graphics class I’m taking this semester, and the result is over fancy. I forgot to ask blender to keep rendering specs. The only specs I remembered are 4096 samples per pixels and that I started blender before I went to sleep, and the process actually had finished before I woke up the next day for classes.
Anyways, here’s the pic. As usual, the image here is downscaled so that the page loads in acceptable time. Shoot me an email for the full image at 4320×2160 if you have 4K (?) displays. See Minecraft Server Page to join the server where I built this thing.
Goodbye, chunky. Hi, Blender! (with the Interior Of Dat Triangle)
This would be one of my last frames of Minecraft renderworks with chunky. I will be switching to blender, an open source modeling software that supports GPU ray tracing with CUDA and allows tweaks to model before performing actual (now night-long) rendering.
Chunky is still pretty straightforward to newbie CG makers, written in java that virtually runs everywhere, but it does not support GPU rendering, and java multi-threading overhead made it even worse.
Blender, on the other hand, needs a few hours to setup but provides far more precise control over elements, vertices, edges and fancy stuff. Cropping down map portions out of the camera view, customize torch light color, removing specific blocks, render entities with actual motion…
So… Goodbye, chunky. Hi, Blender!
I might still recommend chunky for those who want to have a sip of minecraft rendering, but for more complex terrain and huge creations, use blender.
Here’s the downscaled rendered frame, but you can still find full resolution on deviant art.
Rendering Specs:
Rendering time: 1.57 days
Threads: 3
Original dimensions: 4000x4000
Downscaled dimensions for uploading: 2000x2000
Self burn notice
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 Qzone is now completely abandoned. All correspondence, articles, pictures, codes are only released here from now on. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iQIzBAEBCAAdFiEEg1wZoHV/Mn9J13Mv0iaRjCEfa7AFAlidXUMACgkQ0iaRjCEf a7CLVxAAqZgf4xp6v9srZob0/vMiYtzTT5UCQ84GtaH0NqtK6RQeQA06lT7kJiPE uBfJlwc18lOQutrQsH8M7LSr3l/cDBhxgSqTKL7MR+XljPCiB/+en7Jc+KrLToHk QAJ34NS1vQIg216Qsf1KBOaiRmpr7G+pD5OpS4tQi2I80Nzc/ziFyR2JVtkYo6G7 Zi3OkiXqZhX3aQrGgtjFO8wZ+w6ADG8sf8Wi2ppck76pJKUE/3Iq0lRau1bPvGFU qHxdtt0cQpDY2JOohp4Xdv2G5Ce5+1Pf6Y60I5zsrPug10SCQUo8IDxNp0O6VPH1 8fsU8yAK7aqDKNE9UaNQPMHVN4JKc5CTbn0kimLsIrSLO9fUKuZSeq8MdPmxZx39 MpqcOsYPIrxZtAhTb3sve5l5M9tBGnNTZ8t4AuL3zeVxhQLQ+5BQFC8gYGTP6F2b +JZAXn/Lk8LlxONWmDXRMC0kBirLipBGlUqWu4pPhnPVhNmXUG7LQk1Fx5FrWnf4 fYRCl/+QYIzOtkERBUf0LrvD5IyOJr/ByHLyoX0RRJ3TxV9mN1U1Yw8RUqRlcVOG 2UiA/hHticRlsOW36ObAEBX+L05/MQ8EUHn4HxY4L85EsI/JiKVj2NJM3nTi2ldL GOSPUXex5iv/xqNO1gI2CelY9aa2PYq+gEcsUlEnpeYhUH52N8A= =wOjD -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----