2025-04-01
Unusually hectic, chaotic, and scattered.
Before starting this site and blog, I used to do a little monthly music appreciation blog on Spacehey for albums I listened to that month, so I had someplace to spew perspectives and emotions out upon. Presently though, I have a slightly stronger drive to do that again, except for any started, or ongoing artistic projects, now that I've largely accepted that I know exactly what I want to pursue. As a fair warning, this blog post is a lot longer than I'm used to writing, but I also have a lot of passion for the small things I enjoy doing at the current moment.
So exactly what have I been up to ?
The month started out great with most of my time being poured into spearheading the modelling part of an informal commission I had taken on, grinding out the arduous task of getting all the feathers and fluff to look just right, all while definitely not panicking at the quickly escalating tri count. Mental fatigue of staring at this for days on end however started to impact me pretty roughly, alongside some unexpected turbulence in my social life that made me kinda force myself to take a few days break that I honestly, probably needed.
...though, it would end up teaching me how much I absolutely despise still being in the "I'm technically a beginner that's still learning this stuff" phase, where I can't just get lost in my work for 8-14 hours with music blaring, and instead have to tediously look up how to do things, or have to diagnose hardware issues. Don't we all just love a bit of foreshadowing~
This beast. Last month, I had purchased my first VRChat model that was not made by myself, half because dissecting someone else's project files I figured would teach me a lot (this ended up being a huge understatement, even if the process was much slower than following along with a video), and half because it's a shark. I like sharks, this should not be new information to many.
But the amount of complications that mystified me about this model was head-spinning, and I quickly put it off to the side as a "...mneh, I'll let some ideas with this marinate while I charge forward with other things" kind of project. Just glancing at it taught me a ton about what a proper workflow looks like, and how tricks like UV stacking should be done. But, fatigue on the first model shown here set in, and I decided to take a break from it for a couple weeks to see if I could blow through this before the month was over
...and for whatever reason, time after time I made a little bit of progress with it, some technical issue would fall upon me. At first, it was the shitty CPU fan in my computer deciding all of a sudden that it didn't really feel like spinning. Alright...I do my usual diagnosing, and somehow get it running and operational by manually spinning it with a fountain pen. Presumably some bearing in it was jammed, who even knows
A couple days after that was fixed, I quickly learned that when you run out of storage space on your main drive, it starts eating up your RAM for storage instead...grinding everything to a halt, and causing me to lose a day clearing out and organizing some files, which to be honest...it was overdue, my desktop is always a wreck of various projects, no matter how many folders I designate for myself. I've found that I've been having a fair few problems keeping naming conventions consistent, and base files organized properly on larger, more freeform projects like this. It's not a nightmare, but there are times it slows me down a little.
Given where I was at with a simple reskin turning into an entire reconstruction and study of an avatar, I kept finding myself getting exhausted with having to constantly look things up, and often allowed myself to go into odd little technical side quests, which strangely became the theme of this month, I feel. A specific track in a collection of some 60+ hrs of music had an irritating electrical pop in the right channel, and something about this bugged me on a level I was absolutely not having that day, as I proceeded to learn that Audacity allows you to...draw over music ? I knew conceptually that music in a digital format looked like this, but I had never actually zoomed in far enough to see the individual samples within a track.
Still, a couple hours later, and I had it fixed...kinda well-ish enough. I'm not an audio expert, but it sounds better, and is less irritating, so I chalk that up as a win. Later on in the month, I'd go on to do another tiny comfort fix, and spent some time in Audacity making myself a not awful Thunderbird notification noise, as I found that sometimes the unusually loud mixing of the default sound just...really got under my skin. It was mainly just me messing with some sticky notes, but the sound is pleasantly unintrusive, and reminds me of the "recycle.wav" file in the sound effects used for Windows XP.
"Hey Cynthia, can I call you Cyn ? We're buddies, right ? I got this far into your post after all, but I'm left with the impression that these are not particularly artistic subjects !"
A fair point, straw-reader, but the things that happened around me steered a lot of my decisions and revelations I ended up having, along with how odd side projects like simple audio fixing plays into the next weird side project...
(Get ready for a tangent that you were likely not expecting...)
See, for a while now, I've been using a music player on and off called AIMP that was spurred on by a desire years ago for a more... "Windows XP to 7 era" music player. On the surface if you downloaded it, it'd be pretty unremarkable, but the skins are where the real fun of it is. The one I used back then, and still use now is by "Black_AVP", one based on an old cassette player (it all comes back to cassettes in the end, huh...) that has all the stupid little dials and switches you can click, and cassette skins you can swap out that change the little material light-up area. AIMP's site claims it was made on 2020-01-16, but that's objectively untrue, the Wayback Machine easily goes back to at least 2017 for the entry...
Now, why is any of this relevant ?
Well, AIMP tends to import albums as playlists, and it tends to just...keep them around. This created an odd situation at times where an album I was listening to last time would be setup in the queue after whatever I had chosen to listen to in the moment. This would kinda lead to oddly jarring moments of tonal shift that bugged me, so instead of just...figuring out what I needed to change in Preferences for this, I just made a singular track that acted as a buffer playlist in the queue. Something warm but unintrusive that signals the end of an album. I had watched some video on Lego Island at the time, and opted to just swipe the ingame radio for that, while adding some tactile sounds around it to simulate switching to something like a radio intermission.
This would end up entertaining me to no end for a very long time, and leads into the next side project I threw together in a couple hours. I promise we're getting back to the big projects soon...
See, last month, I had successfully ripped and converted the sound effects from a copy of Burnout 3, partially out of irritation that no clean rips existed online, and the only examples I could find were poorly AI generated. Fuse a past project (buffer track between playlists) with a more recent one (sound effect extraction), and you start getting ideas of making a completely superfluous but incredibly entertaining second track...
...and then you start to go "you know, at this point I should really smash together some album art real quick now that there's multiple tracks", and then you start to fuse that with some practicing you've been doing with layer effects like Screen and Multiply, and...
Yeah I don't regret a thing, though the style was maybe a little more chaotic than I usually aim for. In my defense, I was listening to Merzbow at the time, so it's not completely my fault
The final side project that steers back into reskinned model progress was waking up to an interesting Discord status that accidentally sparked a conversation about a project a friend was working on, a custom font for something they were doing. Naturally, typography was practically my favorite class in college (I feel like Plankton for how often I talk about the fact that I went to college...not the worst comparison actually), so I was very happy and eager to help and give feedback, along with help them out with vectorizing a few letters, as I knew deep down for as much vector stuff as I had done in college, I was pretty rusty. Doubly so because back then, I used Adobe Illustrator, while in the present I stick to Affinity Photo and Designer, and had really not messed around too much with vectorization using them.
I'd definitely like to come back to this font at some point, been meaning to mess with making a custom typeface full of the specific quirks I enjoy...
This actually helped me spearhead progress on certain parts of the reskin-rebuild I was doing, as I needed to generate some vector patterns for clothes, and really just didn't want to brute force figuring out the tools in Affinity Designer to do so. But, I did it, and now I could do it a lot better if need be. Progress was agonizingly slow on everything to do with this model, every single step forward required extensive research to understand how the author got to where they did, but this ended up being a very intense yet productive final leg of learning (no increase to intelligence) for the month.
Now we get back to the reskin. The easiest problem that required the least amount of thinking on my part was optimizing something completely unnecessary. The public copy of this skin conceals a QR code in the inner chest that links to the author's Gumroad account, and while I, as someone that paid for it, could simply erase that, I kinda just...felt like keeping it. But because I was rearranging UVs and redoing whole textures, I'd also have to copy paste the QR code and web link too. It felt inefficient, and something in the back of my head went "You know, I bet I could optimize this little floating QR code, it's just text and a QR code on a white background..."
This raised a really interesting (No I'm not Wikipedia, yes I am going to say when I think things are interesting instead of allowing the reader to decide that for themselves, it's my blog and I have to assume in some capacity anyone here is interested in my perspective, and how I feel on the things I work on) question to me that I had a lot of fun solving. You're working with something that inherently uses a very low amount of pixels, and you want to optimize this as far as you can. How far can you compress this data while still making it legible ?
The QR code was the simple part I had no issues solving, they're inherently very simplistic in how they store data. This QR code in question that was supplied with the skin was a Version 3 barcode, which is a minimum of 29 by 29 pixels. Because we want each pixel to scale perfectly, we have clear steps we can scale up to. Scaling it up so one pixel takes up a 2 by 2 space proportionally (2 * 2 = 4) would be 29 * 4, which would make it 116 by 116 total. If we wanted to do one pixel in a 3 by 3 (3 * 3 = 9) space, it would be 29 * 9, or 261 by 261. Simple, and I was fairly confident I could just work with 116 by 116 while still making it legible
The font was the trickiest part. Any "low resolution" font I found online wouldn't really generate pixel perfect, so I kinda half cheated, and manually placed out the pixels while using the font as a guide of sorts, then tweaked it in ways I wanted it to behave or look. Pixel Operator uses OFL for its license, so I didn't feel too weird about doing this, and the end product actually barely looked like what I started out from. Mm, too many font projects, but I would love to finish this one, given the low amount of reference I have for examples of a 7 by 5 monospace font...
A practically imperceptible change that nobody may ever notice, but to me, it's those details that bring out things in art that you may not perceive, but you might be able to feel. Plus, now I know a lot more about how Affinity Designer does pixel art, which gives me future ideas...
Now for the fun, creative parts of the model I get to talk about ! The first and somewhat older idea I had was designing fake paint canisters to replace the oxygen tanks this model came with, the inner lore idea being that it was a hijacked robot used for vandalism and tagging instead of diving.
There's a lot of subtle details you need to fake properly to get something that at least gives a vague illusion of something being a feasibly real product, like the lowercase "e" you see on anything sold in the EU (called an EEC symbol), or the ACMI AP seal you see on art supplies that classifies them as non-toxic enough for sale. Things like having correct names, multiple packaging languages, and filler text that gives off the right feelings are all paramount... but you can have fun with it in subtle ways too~
Next is the insane technical stuff that nearly broke me, only to come out on the other side incredibly confident in my abilities. The model came with a premade texture for ambient occlusion, and while I can tell you quite confidently how to do it in 5 minutes, this was one of the bigger, more annoying hurdles I had to face, and even then it still isn't as good as I'd like it to be. But presently, I'm going for serviceably, presentably okay, not a submitted final piece.
If you don't know what ambient occlusion is... I'm gonna be honest, looking it up will likely give you more information that's better phrased than what I'm capable of. Just know that my computer was gasping for breath while generating this AO texture, and that April will be a month of hopefully fixing whatever weird cooling issues are currently keeping me kneecapped and hesitant to just smash out another AO render.
Technical stuff number two ! Weight painting, the act of telling vertices how they will deform exactly when certain parts of the model deform and bend.
As it turns out, those three icons in the corner, along with the Vertex Groups that get generated when you auto-assign weights to vertices based on armature, *actually do things*. See, people terrify me, so I have largely not been asking for help or reaching out to anybody, so learning that there's actually precise ways to do weight painting is a gigantic technical improvement for me to discover.
Now, did I almost lose several hours at some point due to accidentally deleting the armature five saves ago ? Yeah, almost. Incremental save was my savior however, and I no longer regret keeping some 120 incremental copies of the same progressing file, because that would've been a crushing thing to have to redo
Final sidequest ! I was informed that one of my mother's coworkers was in the hospital for something surgery related, and she wanted to do something nice, but I knew nothing about the woman. I casually threw out "oh I can make a card if you'd like", and actually stuck with it to an oddly passionate degree, using it as an excuse to mess with some ideas and new materials.
I grabbed some scrap watercolor paper, folded it in half, and started designing stencils to cut out of other scrap paper, with the idea that I can use them as ways to press heavy body acrylic to the card to have the letters physically be raised up off the card a little with that classic acrylic texture, then use some newer acrylic inks as a contrasting background that makes the letters stick out further. This absolutely annihilated my desk with acrylic smears and smudges, but I kinda love that honestly
While I do love how it turned out, and have a strong craving to make more cards when I feel the opportunity arises next...or if I just have a sporadic urge to send a card, it did generate a strange amount of scrap. I ordered some index cards recently, thinking they were my typical really heavy card stock ones I'm used to, but they ended up being shitty, flimsy lineless stock that I now have a huge pile of. I used a bunch to try and contain the chaos of acrylics, and for some reason, didn't feel quite right about just getting rid of them.
So naturally, I busted out the scanner, used a Sharpie and a grey alcohol marker, scribbled a background, and scanned my scraps for possible future use. I also had the idea to just like...throw them somewhere I can share, but where the hell would accept random scans of something like this in a quality I wouldn't have to worry about being downsampled or reduced in any way ?
I was told once throwing things on the Internet Archive is intimidating, so I spent a whole 20 minutes vaguely figuring out how it should work, and did a test upload to see if it would kinda look like the rest of what I see on there, and I feel like I got it...vaguely good enough. Enjoy, and use however you please (something something, attribution because license if for whatever reason you are actually crazy enough to both read this far, and enjoy random art assets I scanned at like 5AM)
If this for whatever reason doesn't result in someone yelling at me, I might just host more of my weird stuff and possible assets on the Internet Archive. Kinda feels like... vaguely what it was designed for. Here's a (now outdated) link to it, this was technically a test upload, so it will auto-delete eventually, but when it does, I'll simply reupload it and link the new one here instead
I had set myself a goal to get this presentably useable by the end of the month. This did not happen, but I got really damn close, and it was just pleasant to see it like...functioning, the results of a lot of lost time, sanity, and excess creative passion. In the back of my head, I worry about it being a bit too all over the place in terms of what I want to go for, but at the same time, I definitely don't care, because it was made for me first
With 3 hours left in the month, and a list of things to accomplish that had a big chunk taken out of it, but not enough to consider it completed, I noticed very quickly that I had developed a splitting, nauseating migraine, and decided to simply lie down. Water, aspirin, and a dozen or so chapters of Red Dragon on audiobook illuminated by the easel light on my desk was more or less how I ended the month, occasionally pausing to look up phrases I didn't entirely recognize, and largely discarding the restraints I set myself to in the last few hours.
Good stuff. See you next month~
(Oh wow I smashed out 3,000 words in one night, that's new... next month won't be nearly this long, nor scattered. Hopefully. I didn't even cover absolutely everything here, just the most stand-out stuff...)