If you’re just looking to get started with 3d modeling, it’s hard to beat Blender. At the cost of free, it’s by far the most affordable way to dip your toes in some modeling tools.

For many workflows it’s world class. If you plan to do more organic forms or don’t need technical precision, then it’s very competitive or preferable to paid software.

You might find it lacking if you plan to do parametric or technical CAD-style modeling. Even then, I think Blender can be a low cost way to learn what you want in your software before investing in more specialized software. You’ll learn enough of the modeling basics to more fluently navigate what other software provides.

To some people, yes. To others, no. You’re replying to specific people who seem to be against the idea, and I’m guessing for them it detracts significantly from the experience.

At the end of the day all of the concepts we have in fantasy are derivative in some regard, so the line will vary just like it will vary for people that want to do total homebrew vs following a book.

My group dabbled with AI when it was at its peak buzz, and if I’m honest, my head cannon sort of ignores those bits. They don’t carry the same authenticity that I came to expect from my group. It detracts from my experience because I play ttrpgs primarily to learn about my friends and how they’ve interpreted a shared world, not to hear algorithmically mid fanfic. I’m also not crazy about following a book. With a book, at least I know someone willfully released the work into the world and is getting appropriately compensated.

These are not the same. Here are some of the ways someone may be fine with reusing existing material while being against AI:

• Someone may value thoughtful and coherent world building, while feeling like the AI generated amalgamation dilutes the cohesiveness of the material.
• Someone can be for public sharing of ideas, while simultaneously against AI companies disregarding licenses attached to those ideas to build AI products.
• Someone can value the personality and individual perspective that a content author or DM injects into material and feel that AI-generated material lacks this character.

Don’t reduce the use of AI down to the reuse of material. It also averages out material into some sort of lowest common denominator - sacrificing exactly the things that many niche fandoms value: personality and imagination.

Oh! Awesome experiment! Yes, they’re shorter because of perspective (foreshortening). With a mirror surface it’s better to think of a duplicate of the object flipped across the mirror plane, then you can apply the same tricks to draw in perspective, which may make it look shorter.

In your example here, since we’re viewing from the side the perspective is not going to factor in as much, so we land at “roughly the same size”

If it helps, think of the water first like a perfect mirror. If it’s a perfectly flat mirror then it would look like there’s another duck upside down below this duck. If you want to be extra precise, it’s mirrored across the plane where the duck meets the water.

But water isn’t usually perfectly flat mirror, and here you have little nods to there being ripples or waves. The choppier the wave, the less it reflects, so you’ll often see people break up the mirrored reflection at the choppiest parts of the wave. Similarly, waves aren’t flat, depending on the part of the wave/ripple you’re at, you’d be reflecting higher or lower as though the mirror is tilted to the angle of the surface.

The last tricky part is that most surfaces are more reflective at a glancing angle than head on, so often reflections are stronger further in the distance and closer up you’ll just be looking down into the water. On a more technical note, you can look up the index of refraction to learn more about this phenomenon.

To tie it all together, this is why those long shots of sunsets have a sun reflection that is really long (much longer than the size of the sun in the distance) - because it’s at a distance it’s a strong reflection and because all the waves are reflecting at different angles you’re getting all the glancing reflections of the sun on the top of each wave. It typically being dark at sunset also means the bright sun reflection blooms to make it look brighter and larger than just the tip of the wave.

Conversely, in water sports like wakeboarding, you might not see much of a reflection at all because all the water is choppy and non-reflective.

Looking down into a pond, you might not see a reflection either because the angle is too steep to reflect.

In short, yes, in this case the reflection should probably be roughly the same size.

If everything was equal (scale of production, subsidies, decades of shipping logistics worked out) I’d agree, but I don’t think vegan cheese is anywhere near that.

A good start would be to remove subsidies for livestock and their feedstocks. I think that would already bring the cost of vegan alternatives a lot closer.

I don’t want to detract anything from this tram photo, but I also know that with all the content floating around in the internet these days it’s easy to build unrealistic tram expectations.

I think this is two trams, each on their own line. Notice how the roof line steps down and the window reflections seem to change halfway through. I think they’re just very conveniently aligned for the photo to make it look like one double length tram.

For those that need a translation:

“You have got to be shitting me”

“I am in fact not shitting you, my dude. It is very disappointing that this is real.”

I don’t know anything about being an electrician - commercial or otherwise, so I’m curious to hear your side.

When all those people go to working remote, it’s not like they’re no longer in need of electricity. Presumably their home demand is higher and we might even see people adding new office spaces to adapt their home. Maybe the public grid needs to change to support it? Won’t this mean that there will just be a different type of demand for electricians?

Are there reasons this would be less attractive to electricians? Pay, job security, or something else?

Maybe those aren’t the same people.

The community-based project of passion to enhance lemmy is already here… it’s lemmy.

This isn’t reddit. There isn’t a big black box and company around the service that is preventing the community from making it what they want it to be.

Sure there can be flavors, but I’d guess if there’s the type of consensus around the usefulness as there is with RES, then why wait for a separate project to shoehorn features on top of lemmy when the folks behind lemmy seem quite receptive to contributions?