# What I've Been Working On



## Renzatic

I can't seem to find my old thread, so I'm starting a new one.

I figured that I've spent way too long away from my hobbies, and it's high time to kick things off again.


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## DT

Neat!

Spooky, I think that gas station is in Silent Hill ...


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## User.45

Renzatic said:


> I can't seem to find my old thread, so I'm starting a new one.
> 
> I figured that I've spent way too long away from my hobbies, and it's high time to kick things off again.
> 
> View attachment 3266



Have you considered doing design for a computer game? I would def love it. The color composition takes me back to those "open world" games in the late 90s, like Little Big Adventure 2 (one of the best gaming experiences of my life).


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## Renzatic

P_X said:


> Have you considered doing design for a computer game? I would def love it. The color composition takes me back to those "open world" games in the late 90s, like Little Big Adventure 2 (one of the best gaming experiences of my life).




You're like the 50th person I've seen gush on about Little Big Adventure. I need to get around to playing those games one of these days.

I've thought about maybe making a game, but I'm really more interested in telling a story than I am doing something interactive. It's already taking me awhile just to bang out a bunch of props and scenes, so adding coding, scripting, and all that good stuff into the mix would end up taking that much more time.

But on the plus side, I figured out how to make things more comic book-y. I lose out on some atmosphere (literally), but I get some nice lines in the trade-off.


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## lizkat

DT said:


> Neat!
> 
> Spooky, I think that gas station is in Silent Hill ...




Edward Hopper...     or maybe John Gorka's The Flying Red Horse

On the other hand  @Renzatic it ain't right if it don't have a can of turnip greens stashed on a shelf somewhere.   What happened to that thread...  or was that over at the other place.


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## lizkat

I found it









						Wherein I Regale You With My 3Dness.
					

Here's a little project I'm working on to get my learn on. I'll post updates on it as I go farther along.




					talkedabout.com


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## Renzatic

lizkat said:


> Edward Hopper...     or maybe John Gorka's The Flying Red Horse
> 
> On the other hand  @Renzatic it ain't right if it don't have a can of turnip greens stashed on a shelf somewhere.   What happened to that thread...  or was that over at the other place.




Turnip greens, you say? Okay. I re-uploaded the pic above. YOU MAY FIND YOURSELF SUBTLY SURPRISED!

And that thread was here, but it disappeared for some odd reason. I think maybe the mods have it out for me. O_0

edit: Well hell. There it is.


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## lizkat

Renzatic said:


> YOU MAY FIND YOURSELF SUBTLY SURPRISED!




I already ate the turnip greens?!!   I don't even remember opening the can!


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## User.168

.


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## Renzatic

lizkat said:


> I already ate the turnip greens?!!   I don't even remember opening the can!




You'd remember if you ate these turnip greens. They're as big as a horse!


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## Renzatic

theSeb said:


> Would you be interested in making little models and textures for a game?




I'm not opposed to the idea. Though keep in mind that I'm not very good at doing characters yet.


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## User.45

Renzatic said:


> You're like the 50th person I've seen gush on about Little Big Adventure. I need to get around to playing those games one of these days.
> 
> I've thought about maybe making a game, but I'm really more interested in telling a story than I am doing something interactive. It's already taking me awhile just to bang out a bunch of props and scenes, so adding coding, scripting, and all that good stuff into the mix would end up taking that much more time.
> 
> But on the plus side, I figured out how to make things more comic book-y. I lose out on some atmosphere (literally), but I get some nice lines in the trade-off.
> 
> View attachment 3282



Now this filter looks like Borderlands.

LBA2 is great BTW, I fondly remember listening to Hello Nasty from the Beastie Boys on a cassette using a WalkMan and playing LBA2 forgetting about everything else. It was ~22 years ago There's a remaster now so you can always try it. AFAIR there's a nice PG13 story included.


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## User.168

.


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## Renzatic

P_X said:


> Now this filter looks like Borderlands.
> 
> LBA2 is great BTW, I fondly remember listening to Hello Nasty from the Beastie Boys on a cassette using a WalkMan and playing LBA2 forgetting about everything else. It was ~22 years ago There's a remaster now so you can always try it. AFAIR there's a nice PG13 story included.




...a little bit. But hey, Borderlands looks like most comics, so yeah. 

I remember those days. That was when I was playing Blood and Command 'n Conquer Red Alert nonstop, jamming out to Chemical Bros. Man, the 90's were so awesome, yet so damn cheesy.


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## User.45

Renzatic said:


> ...a little bit. But hey, Borderlands looks like most comics, so yeah.
> 
> I remember those days. That was when I was playing Blood and Command 'n Conquer Red Alert nonstop, jamming out to Chemical Bros. Man, the 90's were so awesome, yet so damn cheesy.



Haha. Yeah, listening back to Electronica from the 90s...it wasn't very future proof for sure...with a few exceptions. Red Alert was the shit!


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## Renzatic

P_X said:


> Haha. Yeah, listening back to Electronica from the 90s...it wasn't very future proof for sure...with a few exceptions. Red Alert was the shit!




The Chemical Bros. aged pretty well, I'd say. Can't make that claim for the rest though.

And Red Alert. Man. If you were lucky enough to have a computer with Windows 95, and a 2MB graphics card, you could play that game in 640x480. IT LOOKED LIKE REAL!


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## DT

@Renzatic I did find some pre-compiled versions of that app I helped develop, I mentioned a while back, here's the start screen (I can snap a few more if you're interested).  The lights are dimmed, waiting for the director, don't know if you can really see it, but Luke and Obi-Wan are in the background, those floating bars/displays will show the scene dialog and give you action cues (the scene is to the 1/10ths of a second - see clock in the lower right - in sync with the original movie scene).


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## DT

Oh, I guess I didn't totally explain, the player characters are actually using VR systems, so they see the scene from 1st person, and have full 3D hand controls (developed using HTC Vive), and this is from the director or "audience" view where they see it from 3rd person, and can move around the scene using the controls on a KB or control stick.


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## Renzatic

DT said:


> Oh, I guess I didn't totally explain, the player characters are actually using VR systems, so they see the scene from 1st person, and have full 3D hand controls (developed using HTC Vive), and this is from the director or "audience" view where they see it from 3rd person, and can move around the scene using the controls on a KB or control stick.




Looks pretty cool. Do you just watch the scenes play out in VR, or can you directly interact with it?


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## DT

Renzatic said:


> Looks pretty cool. Do you just watch the scenes play out in VR, or can you directly interact with it?




It's fully interactive, in fact, YOU actually "perform" the characters through the scene:  you speak the parts (dialog is shown via the floating teleprompters), you move around, perform actions based on cues ("_Take your father's lightsaber_"), and one of the ideas was to have audience ratings, like who performed the scene the best - and archive all performances, kind of like playthrough videos.

So you would get to be a character, in a scene, from your favorite movie, and not even necessarily a character originally portrayed by an actor (YOU get to be the shark from Jaws, during the boat attack scene, as experience from the POV of the shark )


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## Renzatic

Graphic novel style right here! Gotta work on the trees a bit to make them less lumpy, but I like where this is going.

edit: FOR IMPROVEMENTS!


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## Renzatic

Moar trees! Also better lighting! Some bushes too! RAD!


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## Renzatic

GRASS!

...ignore the overbright bloom on the lamp post. I'll fix that later.


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## User.45

Renzatic said:


> GRASS!
> 
> ...ignore the overbright bloom on the lamp post. I'll fix that later.
> 
> View attachment 3487



Still cool! How much time do you spend on a scene in general?


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## Renzatic

A long ass time. I generally try to do one object a day, though it's rare I'm able to do that.

Considering I'm also trying to build a stylized looking, which results in me doing endless amounts of experimenting, things usually take that much longer.


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## User.45

Renzatic said:


> A long ass time. I generally try to do one object a day, though it's rare I'm able to do that.
> 
> Considering I'm also trying to build a stylized looking, which results in me doing endless amounts of experimenting, things usually take that much longer.



I'm counting ~12 days then. Brutal! How fast does your machine render?


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## Renzatic

P_X said:


> I'm counting ~12 days then. Brutal! How fast does your machine render?




This is all in the realtime engine, so what I see on the screen is about what I'll end up with. The only thing rendering does is apply an extra layer of antialiasing, and a bit of denoising work, which usually takes about 5 seconds or so.


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## User.45

Renzatic said:


> This is all in the realtime engine, so what I see on the screen is about what I'll end up with. The only thing rendering does is apply an extra layer of antialiasing, and a bit of denoising work, which usually takes about 5 seconds or so.
> 
> View attachment 3489



We've come a long way Is this a desktop?


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## Renzatic

P_X said:


> We've come a long way Is this a desktop?




Yup, I'm on a desktop. Though laptops can do a good job of keeping up with things these days.

I hear the new Mac M1's are incredible at animating in Blender.


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## Renzatic

I CAN MAKE IT RAIN, YALL! I AM THE GOD OF THUNDAH!


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## Renzatic

I now have the atmospherics and lighting down to where I want them. It's time for me to move on to stage 2.


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## Renzatic

Yet more done.


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## Renzatic

It is finished. Now on to the next project, which will have rocks in it.


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## Renzatic

I lied. I went back and redid my trees and shrubberies, so here's that same scene again, for the 50,000th time.


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## thekev

Renzatic said:


> Yup, I'm on a desktop. Though laptops can do a good job of keeping up with things these days.
> 
> I hear the new Mac M1's are incredible at animating in Blender.




The devs at Blender probably test more on popular hardware among enthusiasts rather than what large studios might use. They also aren't quite as encumbered by old baggage as something like Maya, with old MEL bindings and lack of divide by zero guards. 

I noticed Mental Ray was finally removed a few years ago, so now you're basically stuck with licensing vray.


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## User.45

Renzatic said:


> I lied. I went back and redid my trees and shrubberies, so here's that same scene again, for the 50,000th time.
> 
> View attachment 4925



Pretty much perfect.


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## Renzatic

thekev said:


> The devs at Blender probably test more on popular hardware among enthusiasts rather than what large studios might use. They also aren't quite as encumbered by old baggage as something like Maya, with old MEL bindings and lack of divide by zero guards.
> 
> I noticed Mental Ray was finally removed a few years ago, so now you're basically stuck with licensing vray.




It's about the same either way, really. If it works well on enthusiast rigs, it's about guaranteed to run that much better on high end studio machines.

Also, not sure what you're talking about with the Vray comment, but I can't think of any editor that requires you use it as its default renderer.

edit: ...and there's this coming up.


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## MEJHarrison

I just came across this thread. Amazing work.  I just getting started in learning Unity and building apps for VR.  It's been the most fun I've had in years.  I saw the first photo in the thread and instantly wanted to be standing there checking it out in VR.  Well done!


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## thekev

Renzatic said:


> It's about the same either way, really. If it works well on enthusiast rigs, it's about guaranteed to run that much better on high end studio machines.
> 
> Also, not sure what you're talking about with the Vray comment, but I can't think of any editor that requires you use it as its default renderer.
> 
> edit: ...and there's this coming up.




Oh, Maya used to be bundled with a renderer plugin called Mental Ray, that died some time ago. It was a fairly messy renderer, but omitting that bumps the starting price a bit higher. If I was going to do that stuff today, I would seriously start with Blender, given how far it has come.


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## Renzatic

thekev said:


> Oh, Maya used to be bundled with a renderer plugin called Mental Ray, that died some time ago. It was a fairly messy renderer, but omitting that bumps the starting price a bit higher. If I was going to do that stuff today, I would seriously start with Blender, given how far it has come.




Ah. These days, all the Autodesk stuff (3DSMax, Maya, et al.) uses Arnold for rendering.

Really, unless you're intending on going into studio production, where Maya is still king, there's no reason not to use Blender. It's pretty well competitive with everything else these days, and hey, it's free.


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## thekev

Renzatic said:


> Ah. These days, all the Autodesk stuff (3DSMax, Maya, et al.) uses Arnold for rendering.
> 
> Really, unless you're intending on going into studio production, where Maya is still king, there's no reason not to use Blender. It's pretty well competitive with everything else these days, and hey, it's free.




I must have missed that. Maya is still king in those environments due to decades of infrastructure built for it and generations of users trained on it. It's not really what you would get starting from scratch today. 

There are a lot of these old standard applications that are probably crazy expensive to maintain, yet not necessarily the only option at this point. Any thoughts on affinity photo?


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## Renzatic

thekev said:


> Any thoughts on affinity photo?




Excellent. I replaced Photoshop for it years ago, and haven't regretted the decision even once.

Though if that doesn't convince you, I think they're still running their 90 day free trial offer.


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## thekev

Renzatic said:


> Excellent. I replaced Photoshop for it years ago, and haven't regretted the decision even once.
> 
> Though if that doesn't convince you, I think they're still running their 90 day free trial offer.




It's also on sale for $25. I seem to recall them running sales periodically, but it's pretty cheap. Photoshop is largely a product of its time. It wouldn't be written the same way today. If I had to write something like that, I would use a DSL to generate as many of the computationally expensive parts as possible. Halide's a little limiting, but a DSL isn't really impossible to write against a reasonable api. Most of the complexity comes in with validating assumptions on dependency ordering and stuff (diophantine equations and all of that nonsense).


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## Zoidberg

Renzatic said:


> Excellent. I replaced Photoshop for it years ago, and haven't regretted the decision even once.
> 
> Though if that doesn't convince you, I think they're still running their 90 day free trial offer.



Yeah, I've been contemplating getting Affinity. My problem is obviously not the price –as Affinity Photo is a steal– but that I have been using Photoshop since version 5.5 (_not_ CS5 but version 5.5, from 1999) and I'm very comfortable with it, I know tens and tens of shortcuts by heart. I don't need it very often these days, just for the quick job every now and then, so I'm reluctant to jump ship because I'm not sure it's worth the time I'll spend relearning everything. Same thing goes with Premiere. I started with Speed Razor on a 50K € workstation in the SD days, then Pinnacle Liquid Edition (which sucked, but it did HD when others didn't), then FCP7, then I ended up settling with Premiere because I find it quick and unobtrusive to use. Since I refuse to use Adobe's subscription model, now I'm stuck with using an old non-cloud version of Photoshop (which I'm sure will not work on the newer Mac models) and for video I use Blackmagic Resolve, which is amazing and –amazingly– free but too intricate and thus, slow, for what I usually need these days.

How many hours does it take to learn Affinity Photo coming from Photoshop, in your opinion?


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## Renzatic

Zoidberg said:


> How many hours does it take to learn Affinity Photo coming from Photoshop, in your opinion?




A goodly number of the shortcuts are the same between both programs, and for those moments when the programs don't quite match 1:1, you can find a tutorial easily enough.

There will be a bit of a readjustment curve you'll have to contend with if you switch, but it's not a steep one. I'd say about 2-3 hours of goofing around (with the first hour being the roughest) would be enough for you to come to term with the differences.

Here's a shortcut cheat sheet if you want to check it out.


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## thekev

Zoidberg said:


> Yeah, I've been contemplating getting Affinity. My problem is obviously not the price –as Affinity Photo is a steal– but that I have been using Photoshop since version 5.5 (_not_ CS5 but version 5.5, from 1999) and I'm very comfortable with it, I know tens and tens of shortcuts by heart.




Version 6 for me. I don't use it enough to really care for the subscription model, and I don't use it much now.



Zoidberg said:


> and for video I use Blackmagic Resolve, which is amazing and –amazingly– free but too intricate and thus, slow, for what I usually need these days.




Free version is a light version, although it isn't bad. Video has much better color correction tools than something like photoshop. It isn't even close.


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## Renzatic

thekev said:


> Free version is a light version, although it isn't bad. Video has much better color correction tools than something like photoshop. It isn't even close.




If you're going for pure color grading, neither Photoshop nor Affinity Photo will work for you. They're more about manipulation than color correction. For that, you want something more like Lightroom.

I hear that Luminar is the best of the best for that. There's also Darktable if you want to go the free as in freedom route.


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## thekev

Renzatic said:


> If you're going for pure color grading, neither Photoshop nor Affinity Photo will work for you. They're more about manipulation than color correction. For that, you want something more like Lightroom.
> 
> I hear that Luminar is the best of the best for that. There's also Darktable if you want to go the free as in freedom route.




That was more commentary. Note that a lot of the raw unprocessed stuff for canon/nikon and similar still has quite a bit of processing either at the AD converter or packaging level. I'm familiar with Darktable. I've never heard of Luminar, although it looks cool.


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## Renzatic

thekev said:


> That was more commentary.




Something of an aside here, but I've been tinkering with the new geometry nodes setup in Blender, and I figured it'd be right up your alley, since for all intents and purposes, it's modeling and animating with pure math.

If you've ever toyed with Houdini, it's basically a pared down version of that.


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## Zoidberg

Renzatic said:


> A goodly number of the shortcuts are the same between both programs, and for those moments when the programs don't quite match 1:1, you can find a tutorial easily enough.
> 
> There will be a bit of a readjustment curve you'll have to contend with if you switch, but it's not a steep one. I'd say about 2-3 hours of goofing around (with the first hour being the roughest) would be enough for you to come to term with the differences.
> 
> Here's a shortcut cheat sheet if you want to check it out.



Thanks. I know it's inevitable that I'll eventually switch to Affinity, it's just I feel it's the end of an era...


thekev said:


> Version 6 for me. I don't use it enough to really care for the subscription model, and I don't use it much now.
> 
> 
> 
> Free version is a light version, although it isn't bad. Video has much better color correction tools than something like photoshop. It isn't even close.



I remember when I started working in the film industry, Resolve was something you'd see talked about in some industry magazines but very few people got the chance to work with because a workstation for it used to cost (IIRC) hundreds of thousands.


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## thekev

Zoidberg said:


> Thanks. I know it's inevitable that I'll eventually switch to Affinity, it's just I feel it's the end of an era...
> 
> I remember when I started working in the film industry, Resolve was something you'd see talked about in some industry magazines but very few people got the chance to work with because a workstation for it used to cost (IIRC) hundreds of thousands.




The fairlight decks still go up into the tens of thousands range, but this is the way of things. Quantel Paintboxes and SGI workstations also used to cost an enormous amount of money. The price typically dives when proprietary hardware with long R&D pipelines is displaced by commodity stuff.




Renzatic said:


> Something of an aside here, but I've been tinkering with the new geometry nodes setup in Blender, and I figured it'd be right up your alley, since for all intents and purposes, it's modeling and animating with pure math.
> 
> *If you've ever toyed with Houdini,* it's basically a pared down version of that.




You really needed to speculate on that? I didn't use it as much though. Houdini had nice particle systems and things.


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## MEJHarrison

I'd love to share what I've been working on.  What's the best way to share a video?

For now I'll say I've spent the last 10 days learning VR development.  And Unity.  Hugely steep learning curve since I'm used to working with Claims and Referrals for an insurance company.  It's nothing fancy.  Just a little working area where I can test new things and whatnot.

FYI, the hands were horrible.  I did it the hard way.  Started with a bare model. Setup my own animations.  My own colliders.  So as you squeeze the trigger on the controller, the finger on screen squeezes too.  I'm glad I did it the hard way.  Now I know what goes into making something like that.  But if I ever release something, I'd just buy some damn hands.  It was not fun and mine are just for demo purposes, not great or high quality.  My hat is off to the people with the patience for it!

Here's a couple screenshots.  I'll post a video if I can figure out how to do that..


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## DT

@MEJHarrison Nice!  I did a fair amount of Unity development, at one point I had integrated Leap Motion hand control into a something we were working on (FWIW, it was visualizing social media content as a 3D city-like construct).


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## DT

I'll have to find a movie because the motion was pretty slick, but here's a very early working POC of a Facebook wall, it loaded content via their API in real time, and there were filtering controls, so it sort of Tetris'ed into different stacks as you applied them ...


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## thekev

DT said:


> I'll have to find a movie because the motion was pretty slick, but here's a very early working POC of a Facebook wall, it loaded content via their API in real time, and there were filtering controls, so it sort of *Tetris'ed into different stacks* as you applied them ...
> 
> 
> View attachment 5269




So the tiles disappear if you mismatch them?


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## MEJHarrison

DT said:


> @MEJHarrison Nice!  I did a fair amount of Unity development, at one point I had integrated Leap Motion hand control into a something we were working on (FWIW, it was visualizing social media content as a 3D city-like construct).




Great!  I have someone else to pepper with questions now!   

Day 11 (I should keep a journal ), was spent watching no tutorials at all.  I read the documentation.  First of all, I now feel like I can finally move around.  That was the first page I looked at.  I think I have it figured out now.  But some things just don't work well on a Mac.  Like slide two fingers on the trackpad to zoom in or out.  It works.  But it's "No, too far, not nearly close enough, too close, why the fuck did you move there?, where the hell did my widget go?, I'm just going to start over now ".  Thankfully there are other ways to move about that do work well on a Mac.  I just had to try them all out.  I think I have it now.  Or at least I have notes!  That was by far the most frustrating thing I've been dealing with.  Hard to setup animations on a hand when you can't properly navigate to see the part of the hand you're interested in.  Shame on me for waiting till day 11 to figure it out!

The other thing I'm working on now, I'm hesitant to say "struggling with" on day 11, is scripting.  For example, let's say I want a chainsaw that could cut down a tree (I don't, but it's a good example).  I could find free assets for trees and chainsaws.  I could build a scene with trees and a chainsaw.  I could have the player pick up the chainsaw.  I suspect I could even figure out how to attach a sound to it even though I've not seen that done yet.  That's all Unity.  But "cutting down the tree" would be script I'd presume.  And that's about where the knowledge ends.  Someone gave me a hint for this particular example, the collision detectors.  Cool, I can set that up (I've been doing C# since there was a C#).  But what code do I write in the collision detectors?  That's the part that has me scratching my head.

The knowledge will come of course.  I've spent a lifetime picking up new computer languages, tools and technologies.  And I get that I'm wanting to skip days 12-30 and just jump ahead to the fun stuff.  When things do click into place however, that's going to be super exciting.

Now that I think about it, I should make "cutting down a tree with a chainsaw" a test.  When I learned enough to make it work without Google/YouTube, I'll know I've finally broken the scripting barrier.


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## MEJHarrison

The other frustration I really need to stop and figure out is that my Oculus doesn't play well with the Mac.  The Oculus Link software isn't on the Mac or something.  So while Windows people can click run and move their controllers and headset and see it reflected on the monitor, mine doesn't do that.  I needed a debug statement at one point to spit out the exact name of my controllers to hook-up the correct controller model.  But I couldn't do that on a Mac like I could on Windows.  Can't run it in the headset and have debug statements popup in the console.  I can't set a breakpoint in the code and trigger it in game.

I think I just need to also setup a mock headset and keyboard controls.  I had it going for a short time from a tutorial for testing, but couldn't figure out how to navigate and was too excited to figure out something so boring.  So adding that to my current playground should be my next task.  At least I could pick up a gun and shoot with the keyboard to see how it behaves and do most of the debug stuff a developer would want to do without needing a headset.


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## Renzatic

Going for more of a painterly style. It might make things too hard to see though.


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## lizkat

Renzatic said:


> Going for more of a painterly style. It might make things too hard to see though.
> 
> View attachment 5289




But it's gorgeous, wow.


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## DT

thekev said:


> So the tiles disappear if you mismatch them?




Not only the tiles, but the people in the photos ... IN REAL LIFE ...   

Hahaha, what it did was to just drop down and fill the empty space if you changed a filter, so like "Only Pics from 2012", a bunch of cubes would disappeared and the remaining ones would just fall straight down, as discrete blocks, but it was kind of a cool effect.  I never finished it, but I was working on something where you could "grab" a photo cube and stick it into various filter/sort receptacles.


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## Renzatic

Update. Now it's looking a little more painterly.


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## Renzatic

I've spent the last couple of months experimenting with styles, always fairly not-quite-pleased with all the results I've come up with not matching what I had in mind.

...until now.

After a number of tutorials, some tweaks, and eventually sinking a bit of money into it, I've come up with my comic book style. It looks great up close, far away, and everything in between. 





The only downside is that I have to redo my foliage. Again. Oh well. Baby steps.


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## DT

Well, that's amazingly cool, yeah, I missed your updates!


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## Renzatic

DT said:


> Well, that's amazingly cool, yeah, I missed your updates!




I'm thinking about seeing if I can ape a bit of this game's style, see if I can get it to work for what I have in mind.









						Among Trees
					






					www.amongtreesgame.com


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## lizkat

Renzatic said:


> I'm thinking about seeing if I can ape a bit of this game's style, see if I can get it to work for what I have in mind.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Among Trees
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.amongtreesgame.com




A more or less off topic observation:   So your parents living in your place while theirs gets renovated has driven you back to your art!   (Or... you've moved all your gear to a motel room for the duration?)


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## Renzatic

lizkat said:


> A more or less off topic observation:   So your parents living in your place while theirs gets renovated has driven you back to your art!   (Or... you've moved all your gear to a motel room for the duration?)




When I'm upstairs, they don't bug me as much.


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## DT

Renzatic said:


> When I'm upstairs, they don't bug me as much.




Oh yeah, thanks for the pic, I like what you've done with the, ummm,  "upstairs" ...


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## Renzatic

DT said:


> Oh yeah, thanks for the pic, I like what you've done with the, ummm,  "upstairs" ...




Well, it's better than...The Basement.


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## DT

I searched for "scary attics" and found a Top N list of each from horror films, hahaha, I won't be going to sleep tonight ...


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## Renzatic

DT said:


> I searched for "scary attics" and found a Top N list of each from horror films, hahaha, I won't be going to sleep tonight ...




I don't need to search the internet for scary basements. I own one.


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## lizkat

Renzatic said:


> I don't need to search the internet for scary basements. I own one.




Are you talking about floods or critters?   I've had my minor share of both in my cellar.

Anyway on critters,  when we get a (pretty rare) tornado warning, I'm at least briefly a little hard pressed to decide whether I'd rather get blown into some peak of the higher Catskills proper or just die trading insults with spiders. 

Some of the spiders I have actually put down there myself, because I don't like to just kill them if I encounter one in the house in winter.   Mostly daddy long legs, not really spiders anyway, which I don't even mind letting stay upstairs really.  

But some of them I do not recognize (or DO recognize and have NEVER invited to the cellar even if I tolerate them).  That bunch includes critters like nursery web spiders or black and yellow garden spiders who've decided to seek more shelter than my eaves or gardens afford them.

Apparently some of that crew have as proprietary a sense of my place as I do.    I disturbed the snares of a nursery web spider in a corner of my cellar one summery afternoon when tornados were on the weather menu, and the cheeky thing actually charged at me in indignation. I guess by brushing past the web or a support structure of it on the way to my chosen shelter-spot, I  had done the equivalent of swinging an unauthorized wrecking ball at a newly renovated house.   I did keep a close eye on it for the rest of the 20 minutes I was down there.   Still I didn't kill it.  And... it didn't kill me!

Nursery web spiders basically hunt for insects along cellar walls, and they don't bite people unless they're harassed, so I figure them as a reasonable part of the ecosystem down there.   The house is over 150 years old,  so it's late in the day to imagine making any real dent in however that ecosystem has developed overall to serve its collection of nonhuman denizens.

EDIT:   yeah sorry I'm collecting tokens to gain the crown of off-topic queen.


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## Renzatic

lizkat said:


> Are you talking about floods or critters?   I've had my minor share of both in my cellar.




I'm talking about general atmosphere. It's fairly wet down there, and probably host to more than a few spiders, but that's not the problem. The problem is that it has this general vibe of an horrific murder scene.


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## Renzatic

The new project begins...


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## Renzatic

Stage 2. Testing out a more graphic novelly style. Still need to add grass and ground foliage.


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## Renzatic

And now the grass painting begins...


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## Renzatic

...and it's done!


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## Chew Toy McCoy

Renzatic said:


> I'm talking about general atmosphere. It's fairly wet down there, and probably host to more than a few spiders, but that's not the problem. The problem is that it has this general vibe of an horrific murder scene.




Since almost all my dealings with basements have been through horror movies I’m going to say I’m not a fan. Similarly, there might be members of ISIS who are open to a friendly meeting with an American to exchange alternative ideas but I’ve seen enough to know I’m not going to be the one to test it.


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## Renzatic

Chew Toy McCoy said:


> Since almost all my dealings with basements have been through horror movies I’m going to say I’m not a fan. Similarly, there might be members of ISIS who are open to a friendly meeting with an American to exchange alternative ideas but I’ve seen enough to know I’m not going to be the one to test it.




I think almost all of ISIS' videos have been filmed in a basement. Really makes you think, don't it?


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## Renzatic

I like how when I look at things from far away, it looks like a little model railroad set.


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