Category: Publications

4/28/2025, By Sage Radden

Monster Meat is an Acquired Taste, So Let’s Just Stick to Seafood…

The subject of my Capstone is the first floor of my D&D group’s in-game home.  The first floor used to be an inn, which has seen little in the way of renovations and serves as their kitchen and dining area.  Throughout the inn section are a number of tables and chairs, as well as a bar and fireplace, while the kitchen houses a stonecraft stove-oven hybrid.  Lamps are scattered around to provide ample lighting, and shelves, while a bit empty at this time, are readily available for storage.  There are also a number of ingredients available in the kitchen, ranging from local seafood and veggies, to more exotic and monstrous materials.   Through creating a kind of tile set out of the walls, I was able to play around with the dimensions of the building a lot.  The densest model of the bunch would have to be the stove.  Modeling the grill and trying to ensure everything was cleaned up properly was a lot to tackle, but I managed to do an okay job.  If I had another pass, I might be able to improve on it, but that isn’t the focus right now.

One of the greater issues I had to tackle was a lack of understanding regarding the quality of my lighting and screenshots.  After some trial and error, as well as a lot of research, I found the cause of my screenshot issues, while simultaneously fixing some of the problems with my lighting from my perspective.  The anti-aliasing was the cause of the issue, as it was demolishing anything I was trying to capture via cinematic cameras.

After changing the anti-aliasing to TAA, I immediately saw an improvement, and was really happy with the results.  Overall, despite the stress, I was really happy working on this project.  It felt like I could just try stuff out and see how it would turn out, which I haven’t had many opportunities to do unfortunately.  I did notice that I was encountering a lot of issues with beveling edges, as certain parts of the mesh would balloon out a bit, which would create issues when texturing them.  I was starting to find ways around it, but wasn’t able to find a complete solution in the time I had.  There was a lot more I wanted to add to this scene, like adding more cooking utensils to the kitchen, more ingredients, kegs to the bar, and overall adding more detail to the scene to show off the kind of people who live there.  I’ll probably keep working on it over time on my own time, but I think I’m ready to take a break from the 24/7 project cycle for a bit.  Looking forward to any input that you’re willing to give!

Link to Artstation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/0lOeJY

28 April 2025

Authored by : Taylor E. Hinchliffe, Co-Authors: Dr. Caroline N. Jones and Dr. Roger F. Malina
1.Department of Bioengineering, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75080 USA.
2.Department of Biomedical Engineering, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX 75390 USA.
3.School of Arts, Technology and Emerging Communications, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75080 USA.

Sepsis is a complex immune disorder that ultimately involves a failure of the immune system to resolve off-target inflammation as it attempts to contain a pathogen, resulting in increasing degrees of tissue damage that can lead to organ failure and death [1]. Although sepsis research often involves reductionist approaches that look for key biomarkers, such as altered neutrophil behavior and form [2], or elevated blood concentrations of cytokines and other inflammatory molecules [3, 4], clinical manifestations of sepsis spanning hypotension [5] to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) [6] ultimately involve a variety of interactions,
feedback loops, behavioral and functional changes, and altered populations of molecular and cellular subsystem components across multiple space and time scales within the body. Therefore, the resolution of sepsis requires nudging a variety of systems back to homeostasis, and understanding its complexity to improve treatment outcomes would thus benefit from a version of systems science that recognizes and integrates differences across multiple system scales while analyzing complex system behaviors such as feedback loops, nonlinearity, irreducibility, criticality, interdependence, and simultaneous bottom-up and top-down causality. Such indicates that the study of sepsis could benefit from the lens of a specific subset of complex systems science — that of emergence — because it arises from a variety of interacting molecular and cellular subsystems with little to no resemblance in form and function to the greater organ and organism systems they constitute. Therefore, we have combined expertise in translational sepsis
research [7] with that of the University of Texas at Dallas Center for Emergence Studies [8] to present sepsis through a novel lens.

The authors argue that the pandemic unveiled the complexity of societal systems, creating “emergent realities” where traditional norms are disrupted by technology and subjective perspectives. This shift has fostered “surrealities,” characterized by alternative realities influenced by AI and societal dissociation.

Authored by:
John McClellan Marshall and Roger F. Malina