What’s going on here…

Basically, since a dear friend of mine passed on recently and he wanted a spooky monument (and we can’t exactly afford to do that in meat-space) I’ve been banging away with Blender, Inkscape, FreeCAD, Unity, Gimp, and Krita and whatever else tools per task come to mind to make one in “cyberspace”. Because VRChat has the most accessible setup for this to date, that’s the target. In theory Unity can also push out HTML5 AR/XR stuff, but that’s apparently all completely in flux and appears to be thoroughly unusable right now.

This is where I’ll be documenting progress, posting screenshots, possibly even meshes and materials, and doing a whole lot of griping because wow there’s just a bunch of pitfalls with these tools. There’s nothing quite like spending an afternoon correcting UV mapping in Blender just to have the result be completely ignored in Unity and all the textures be the wrong scale and sideways.

Yes, this site is slightly ugly because it is not the primary focus of my work right now. Normally I just do internet engineering stuff that focuses on reliability and security. No, you can’t post replies to the site because I’m not spending my time playing whack-a-mole or incorporating giant frameworks just to use OAuth2 so that someone else can provide the botted accounts for me to then ban. This site can’t accept posts or registrations due to it being entirely static HTML documents because another thing I’m not going to do is spend even a minute of my time frantically patching WordPress. …and it takes all of like an hour to spin up an entire WordPress environment including the database and the virtual machine it lives on and a script to clone the resulting static pages to the live site so that one may proceed with the business of typing and copy-pasting images. Even the theme was hastily selected with the sole criteria being “it doesn’t piss me off”. The dev site is far, far out of reach of any internet worms for a reason. I don’t advert this or my other site anywhere, so if you’re looking at them you probably know me and can easily reach out any other way. The bulk of what I’ll be posting will practically be stream-of-consciousness, so if you have experience with these tools and know of a solution to some problem I’m fighting with, definitely reach out to me.

My knowledge with these tools and types of projects isn’t quite limited. I used to do weird little projects with POVRay and Autodesk tools, and more than once I’ve sat down and written a script to generate files filled with vertexes just because the tool I was working with made me angry enough to sidestep it entirely, so I know my geometry fairly well, and I understand most of the concepts and processes, but again, the tools themselves aren’t exactly easy to work with when you’re not willing to cut corners just because the tool makes it easier to cut corners or hamfist things into place. Give me the at least the ability to manually set X, Y, and X and see the numbers or GTFO.

Presently I’m at the stage of trying to get the hang of “linked objects” in Blender so that I don’t have to spend so much time with a calculator to get things in the places they’re supposed to be.

Basically, since a dear friend of mine passed on recently and he wanted a spooky monument (and we can’t exactly afford to do that in meat-space) I’ve been banging away with Blender, Inkscape, FreeCAD, Unity, Gimp, and Krita and whatever else tools per task come to mind to make one in “cyberspace”. Because VRChat has…