Welcome to the Mid 21st Century

It’s 2025! How futuristic does that sound? There’s not many sci-fi films left that are set in the future (eg Blade Runner was set in 2019). We should all be flying round in hover cars and fighting Pleasure-Bots by now, but instead we’re listening to people banging on about their Air-Fryers. Unacceptable.

This post is a ‘Happy New Year’ along with an example of getting a computer to do exactly what you want. In a world full of ‘One prompt and AI did this in 10 seconds’ this is a 'Here’s 5 seconds of video that took days of planning and a couple more days to render using a raytracing program’. It will come as no surprise to you that we prefer this version of things.

This is the set of shader settings that you can use on blender to make a colourful transparent cube.

Having set that up, you now have the pleasure of listening to the computer fan whirring away for a couple of days as the computer does all of the mathematics needed to trace the light through an exotic solid like this.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some chocolate coins that still need to be eaten.

Happy New Year. Here’s the five seconds of video: