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]

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.

Sakura Island At Night
Rendered in Blender

[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

  1. Prepare a USB linux live environment.
  2. Find the correct partition number, it might have been changed during upgrade.
  3. Look for grubx64.efi in your EFI system partition and use a hex editor to open it
  4. Search for /boot/grub and notice the (,gptN) where N is your original partition number for linux OS.
  5. 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.

This partition number is hardcoded into the bootloader efi image, so we need to manually hexedit it.

Self burn notice: Sina Weibo

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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
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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

Cobblestone underwater. Taken on sugarloaf cove beach with waterproof Xperia Z5.
Cobblestone underwater on sugarloaf cove beach with waterproof Xperia Z5.

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.

Colorful cobblestones on the beach of Lake Superior
Colorful cobblestones on the beach of Lake Superior

Yet another regular collection of colorful stone beach.

Lake Mille Lacs

Position: 46°10’52″N 93°43’42″W

Lake Mille Lacs, partially frozen. Taken on a trail 2m from the shore.
Lake Mille Lacs, partially frozen. Taken on a trail 2m from the shore.

This one is pretty off-road on the side of a trail beyond Indians point. Cold, but beautiful.

Minnesota Route 1

Sunset on MN-1 westbound
Sunset on MN-1 westbound

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.

Triangle Garden Rev2 2:1 2160x1080
Triangle Garden Rev2 2:1 2160×1080

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さようなら, 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

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Qzone is now completely abandoned. All correspondence, articles, pictures, codes are only released here from now on.
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