Me, too! lol I saw it posted on FB that I thought was awesome.
It’s impressive, but I like to think that my current system limits how many spools I can have to the space available under the counter. (I know that’s a lie, they’d just overflow… but I like to think that)
The little lies we tell ourselves are important!
Simulated view of the 3.3.26 lunar eclipse as seen near Boulder, Colorado. ![]()
Not only that, but I have a new scope being delivered on Thursday, just in time for the first snow in over a month… ![]()
Huh. I think someone’s forking someone here. Same template names between the two systems we’ve mentioned.
I thought they were similar but now I’m thinking they’re the same underlying engine.
Aha! From the acknowledgements:
This project is a JavaScript reimplementation inspired by the original MapToPoster originalankur/maptoposter by Ankur Gupta (MIT license). My app is built using Bun, React, and TypeScript. It allows users to create custom city map posters with various styling options, leveraging OpenStreetMap data rendered via MapLibre and OpenFreeMap vector tiles.
It was cloudy here, so we couldn’t see it at all. ![]()
I got up at o’dark-thirty to watch it in NC. No go
Full cloud cover without a hint of the moon. I even walked down to the dock in my jammies to see if maybe the moon was further south or north in the sky. Of course this morning it showed up bright & shiny due west (the back wall of our house faces due west). And it’s projected to be clear for the rest of the week ![]()
Clear as a bell this morning. I have a new telescope being delivered tomorrow, so naturally the forecast is for our first measurable snow in two months.
Same here, way to many clouds to see the eclipse ![]()
It was cloudy here but browner light than usual. Like an incandescent light, I wondered if that was the effect of the eclipse.
This is awesome!! Tap to pay… with magic! ![]()
Wow, not bad at all! Can’t wait to see what you can see when you get good at using it ![]()
Whoa this is cool. Disney used a plotter to handle certain parts of dynamic shots in their animation.
That is tremendous. I can model things in CAD all day but I could never make something like that in a million years. I am in awe of the skill it takes.
Thank you for the kind words, @chris1.
If I may do some evangelizing, I’ll encourage anyone to give digital sculpting an honest shake. Where you can go with it may surprise you.
Since you mentioned CAD, I’ll ask about the “click point”. This is that very moment where you learned enough CAD functions where courage swells and you FEEL your horizons expanding. That dawning where you can make ANYTHING your mind has envisioned. A simpler “click point” for those who don’t know CAD can relate to that moment of rush when you learned to ride a bike.
This is the high I continue to chase. I brute force taught myself to work in CAD around 2007ish. Thankfully I slept through enough geometry as a kid to realize CAD now allows me to apply the little I had retained. Immersion in surface modeling with CAD tangentially led me into subdivision (subD, tSplines) organic modeling. This facet of CAD is a halfway point toward digital sculpting but still tethered in significant ways to old school CAD. The ability to do organic modeling definitely brought its rush. I pushed tSplines to new heights by modeling my newborn’s head. For whatever reason, folks and admins in that forum couldn’t believe it could be done. Or maybe no one tried.
By now (2012ish?) I started stumbling across some incredible 3D artwork and much of it had a “ZBrush” credit tethered to it. Whatever they were doing, I wanted in. For a schmoe who’s never so much as attended a Play Doh sculpt session past kindergarten, I now know I wanted to see where I could reach with digital sculpting. This is an era where Adobe commanded $1600.00 for a Production Suite and PageMaker was $895 with a promissory note surrendering your next offspring. After eagerly forking out $795 for a Pixologic ZBrush perpetual license and a Franklin for a cheap Wacom tablet, the REAL struggle session started. ZBrush hands down had one of the orneriest and idiosyncratic UI and workflows around. Launch it and NOTHING happens until you hit “T” to go into EDIT mode for sculpting. Mesh objects were called TOOLS and users were discouraged from saving their sculpts as a ZProject. An entirely different pulldown menu saves ZTools. Despite all this whackery, I abided.
After a year of zero progress, I relented and enrolled in classes offered by one of the original Pixologic dev members, Ryan Kingslien. Ryan’s hour-plus sessions went a long way to explain the idiosyncrasies with enough time to also teach the SCULPTING portion of things. By 2016ish, I had finally attended enough sermons to give into the ZBrush way and digital sculpting finally started “clicking” for me.
It’s now 2026 and THANKFULLY anyone with an iPad/Pencil combo and at least $20 spending limit on their credit card can pick up the Nomad Sculpt app. The program is now available for WindowsPC and Macs too, but these flavors require a functioning graphics tablet (Huion, Wacom, XP Pen, etc) to go with it’s still-reasonable $35 one-time cost.
For the initial high cost of entry, ZBrush came at me with THREE obstacles (UI, idiosyncrasies, etc) before I could even begin clearing the FOURTH learning sculpting obstacle. With their new Maxon overlords in 2023, Pixologic is no longer available as a one-time perpetual license. After attaching a $ub$cription $iphon into your wallet, all those obstacles are still there. The struggle continues for newcomers. All of them.
Nomad has basically made cost-of-entry a rounding error and makes the only remaining task that of getting immersed into sculpting. It has a 15-day trial grace period. Give it a 2 week time commitment. An honest fair shake. See how it goes.
If there were a significant count of interested Glowforgers, I might even be arm-twisted into holding a community service seminar to get attendees up to speed. I’ve encountered enough of my own pitfalls on this journey to bridge those gaps for others willing to take that leap.



