This is coming off of some harder years where I felt more isolated, more unsure of myself and my career, more stuck.

I got a new car that literally lets me go places I couldn’t before, and started talking with a therapist at about the same time I joined improv classes. The crossover between these things has led to literal and metaphorical traction this year, with surprises I didn’t see coming.

The thing is, I want a website. But I don't think I'm worthy enough to have one. Or that my life is exiting enough to write about. Why should people read what I have to say. It's exhausting. I don't think I'm overreacting when I say that I've created this website (in some capacity) at least a 100 times. And every time after I upload the files, I'm ashamed of what I created. It sucks.

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In Blender, the hair particle system is a collection of splines. Splines have control points. Everyone has seen the smoothness of bezier curves, etc. Real-time representations usually quantize each strand into discrete points - I do it in my Blender exporter. The number of points per strand is customizable and depends on the hairstyle. Short hair can get away with as little as 3 points.

For example, my Frostbitten hair WebGPU uses 16 points per strand. Increasing the number of points provides a smoother look at the cost of complexity. The rendering performance hit depends on the selected technique. As I’ve discovered, in Frostbite’s tech, the cost evaluation is quite complicated. While you have to process more segments in the tile pass, the fine pass often reaches enough pixel/tile “opaqueness” to return early during the processing. This optimization happens regardless of strand count.

The question now stands: “How to turn connected points into pixel coordinates?“. We will be using billboards that have width controlled by fiberRadius parameter. Increasing fiberRadius makes each strand wider.