2025-11-01
We're back...
So, what happened ?
January, February, and March were all an insane amount of just having epiphany after epiphany, countless ideas day in and day out, and a seemingly endless amount of energy constantly fueling me, like I had finally answered so many questions I didn't realize I had. Like I realized that I'm in a race, and I've been zoned out for 8 years and have so much catching up to do.
Before this year, I could afford to have projects be low stakes, with no actual consequences or issues if I never saw them through to the end. But, upon realizing that if I'm going to go all in on art, especially 3D stuff, I can't keep starting all these projects and simply leaving them be. I need to be able to prove what I'm actually capable of, to have some kind of active portfolio of my absolute best, because this kind of profession requires proving my technical and creative abilities to people who may not know who I am, may not care about how often sentimentality and memories are woven into my work.
It's why I find it really difficult to pursue 2D for profit, it's my internal language that has no spoken words, it's as personal as it gets. 3D however has so much technical knowledge to it, there are things about it that objectively are incorrect and should be done a certain way, but there is still flexibility, personalization, stylistic choices. Around February, I decided that, I am an artist, and I'm going to go all in on pursuing this as a career no matter what it cost me mentally, physically, emotionally, socially, financially, all of it. It's why I made this website, it's why I even learned as much about websites at the start as I did, it's why I started...or rather tried to start blogging about all this.
The problem is, I overloaded myself over and over again. Everything I did was a half-measure while I learned, web stuff included. This month was brutal, and I had to make a lot of sacrifices, but I finally locked down, and focused on finishing one major thing I started on a whim back in August. But first, I want to try and quickly rattle off the best of the best that got glossed over after seven months of starting to write these, only to get massively overwhelmed with trying to track too many details, and putting it off for the month
For one, I've definitely not been idle on 2D work, but it's been split a lot between 2D texturework for 3D projects, and actual finished 2D pieces. I posted a few on my Reddit, and more on my Bluesky, but a few were collaborations, a few were personal, and a few I really only drew for myself or friends. I've been passively working on my own custom collection of brushes that I'd really love to release some day, and just have groups of them tied to certain years. There is the minor issue of documenting it, packaging it, making sure they all work properly and as intended under weird use cases, along with grappling with the idea of making more and more. It is a fun process, and I do really love it, but I think I'll just release them when I release them. Doesn't help that I'm not emotionally tied to Affinity and will jump ship if they try turning it to a subscription model, so the idea of making things for it that others can use feels...shaky ?
One day. Alternatively, bug me about them in private if you're somehow one of the people out there that actually uses Affinity
Another thing I want to release eventually is my font. I've been fairly fascinated with fonts ever since 2019 in college, as Typography (I thought it was called that, but apparently the proper title was "Digital Type and Color". It was typography.) was one of those classes I was so passionate about because the professor was just so positive but gave such solid feedback and was truly invested in what they taught (unlike a certain SOMEONE ELSE WITH TENURE WHO EVERYONE HATED. I got a lot of gripes with college, it wasted so much of my time and killed so many hopes of mine that I had to rekindle), and I ended up passing with a 102%.
It has its issues, mostly because I've never had to actually work with a program that cared about and was ultra-strict about the myriad of concepts I knew of, yet did not know how font files stored this information. The spacing is wrong on a lot of things, and there's some really important comfort features to me that I want before wanting to publish it somewhere, but make no mistake, it will be public eventually, and it will almost certainly use the Open Font License, in part because it feels like a part of my existence, my very being, is saved in a lossless form that I'd find really touching if I found out someone else liked and used. Keep an eye out for its usage across anywhere I make things, because one goal of it was to be able to shortcut text in drawings or possibly even comics while still giving it a very personal, hand-drawn feel
Next up, figuring out some basics of music, or at least lightly scuffing the surface to see how it clicks with my mind. I am not a musician, and I suspect if I ever feel confident in calling myself that, it'd only be in the next decade. Furnace is simple enough to mess around with, and the mathematics of synthesizers, especially the logic of OPL4 instrument creation. Scratches an itch I didn't know I had, and always makes me feel like I'm exploring something totally new and creatively enriching to me.
While I have a small collection of instruments I've made in it, and a few projects often no longer than 20 seconds that sound kinda fun and make me happy, my use of it thus far has been for sound effects and ambience, along with just learning the slow process, figuring out new things that make music pleasant to listen to that I've been able to sense before, but couldn't put a finger on. It's all super fascinating, but the theme of this post is consolidation and focus
Of everything I've been working on, my own personal model, specifically the one that started as a base of lackofbinding's Chimera AQUA model that I gutted nearly everything from except the general form of the mesh, and slowly rebuilt for a few different reasons. One being, buying and disassembling models genuinely teaches me a ton about the level of quality other 3D artists hold themselves to, the techniques they prefer, and how they handle specific technical difficulties. While I make absolutely no personal attempt to hide the fact that this is kind of a Theseus's Shark situation and that lackofbindings is the individual that created the base, this model's undergone so much editing, breaking, tweaking, repainting, remodeling, that in many ways it feels heavily removed from the original model. In ways, mine's also outdated, I bought it back when their 5.8 model was the most recent, only to miss that weeks later, 6-point-something was released with no doubt countless other comforts and features that I just, wasn't aware of.
I don't know if I'll really truly have this model in a perfectly finished state, it's kind of the testing ground for ideas, complexities, forcing something onto the chassis just to see if I can make it work, like a 3D breadboard that many people at this point see as just, another version of myself. It's a very special model to me, and I'm looking forward to refining a few ideas of mine I want to get functioning, so I can both share the techniques of here, and possibly sell later on, given the whole "oh god the walls are closing in" situation I find myself in
Alternate model, same creator, far less gutted, Chimera HUE by lackofbindings. My plans for this one are far less ambitious, I just fell in love with it, as it was the first model I used in VRChat, and what my closest memories with it come from. It also tends to attract a lot more attention from non-furries for some reason, could be the custom stickers I used. By custom, I mean "just reference anything and everything I'm familiar with"
There's just a lot about it that really works, and my only desires of serious modifications to it are messing with the idle animation sunder the transparent cover, probably putting a few more artsy holes in it, doing something with the ears and eyes...
Oh, I almost forgot ! I took a crack at having some kind of working draft slash prototype logo. For whatever reason at the time, I was a little fixated on the psychological nuances of a heptagon, how if I asked you what your favorite shape is, you'd possibly choose something small, or even. It's an awkward shape that sticks out, and is very blatant about it. The way triangles form tips around the 5-sided star-like "A" I use for my signature, barely not contained in a 7-sided shape. Just...loved it, love so much about it, and I want to refine it just a teensy tiny bit more sometime soon. In the meantime though, it's a really great little logo, so keep an eye out for it in my projects
I also picked up a DSLR for relatively cheap, because photography's one of those things where being able to take really high quality photos for scenes, references, textures, and sentimental reasons is just...kinda magical, honestly, and very eye-opening when compared to the quality of phone cameras. The raw data alone I get to tweak in editing feels worth it, but getting super crisp, 4K shots I have to dial in myself, have to learn how to manipulate the camera myself, it's all just so satisfying, makes me feel like I actually am starting to separate myself as an artist that's trying to be professional in some way.
For those that actually know photography, it is a...Canon EOS 250D. No fancy lenses yet, and probably not for a good while, unless there's somehow a really stellar one for like...under $100, which I don't think currently exists, contact me if I'm wrong and you're an expert about this stuff, because I really love this camera a lot, and wish I could do macro shots. It's also the white "Limited Edition Super Mega Special Rare" version because I feel like public photography is far less to piss someone off if your equipment is conspicuous. If I saw someone going around with a big, chunky black camera, something about that just gives me the vibe that they might be just...up to something weird ? But a white camera stands out, draws enough attention that it feels like a statement of wanting to be seen, of not being a pro, that I have nothing to hide because the colors of my equipment are conspicuous. I'm aware that cameras are black for lighting and reflection reasons, but I also don't want to specifically be a professional photographer, I just want to capture points in my life, and have high quality assets I took pictures of myself with proper equipment
I mean, it's worth noting that on eBay, the white version new was for some reason significantly cheaper than the black version new. I don't know why that was the case, but I was certainly happy about it
Alright, I think we've caught up decently well enough.
"Shark's Solitudinous Sanctuary"
I'm not even fully certain how to begin breaking down this project, as there's a lot of hard to explain layers to it, but it's currently my first public "crown jewel" of sorts, something I poured my absolute everything into, and pushed all limits of my knowledge in every aspect, every step of the process. From here on out, I'll be abbreviating to it as "S-S-S" for brevity
August 26th of this year, something just felt...wrong, off. Wasn't happy, was just filled with all these awful, gnashing emotions, screaming to get out. I don't remember why, I don't even think anyone caused it, it's possible I just got trapped in my own head. I'm glad I did though, because I did the productive thing of taking those awful, corrosive emotions, and funneled them into doing something, anything. I made a sphere, and just started cutting holes in it at certain ratios, creating slightly curved 3D rectangles, scaled up massively. Liked it, felt like it'd make a really good view, and had the idea to make a little island in the middle of it, a little abstract solitude where I could hide and be alone in my own aesthetics I loved.
Took another cube, stretched it out kinda flat, subdivided it a bunch, and molded it into something vaguely resembling terrain using Proportional Editing. Took a different cube, and just started extruding it over and over, until I had something resembling a house ripped of almost all walls, creating a balcony-like look to it. It all just felt very, natural, was one of those moments where I didn't have to look up anything except for the Clip End of the 3D Viewport, as the distance of the whole world exceeds the default draw distance for Blender
Over the next few days, I started messing with making furniture, terrain details, cleaning up the tri count, assembling the UVs, assigning textures, and just keeping it as organized as I could. Again, it all came very naturally to me, there were very few moments of hangup where something gave me problems, and it just felt...really good to have come this far, that there's steps of this process I don't have to double check myself on in the process, I can just lose myself to the work for hours on end with that kind of passion that makes me feel alive. This was something special to me, and the validation in the moment...
Helped that the few friends I kept in the loop about this project all seemed to unanimously agree that this looked cool, and had potential. Friends that might even want to make it not so solitary, but I wasn't holding my breath
So, why are we going onto a side tangent ?
Well, around early August, I got back into Pokemon a little. Then, it slowly became getting back into it a lot. Then I discovered "Oh wow, the Global Trade Station is still active, there's a fan server that's resurrected it, that's awesome, I wanna use that". This evolved into...maybe obsession is too strong a word, but I definitely compulsively checked the listings, and got a great deal of entertainment in attaching silly letters to my trades that might make people smile, even if I never met them in my life.
This then evolved into someone somehow finding one of my offers, and mailing me back. I was...stunned, I had to find this person. This guided me towards the Discord server for the Poké Classic Network, the fan server that revived the GTS. As it turned out, I was a legend among a select few people, a mirage that was inspiring others to send mail too, to get creative and passionate with it. We titled this strange little group "Team MAIL", after a funny bit of formatting you can do with the letters ingame. Art followed, lore followed, and I made some really special friends out of absolutely nowhere, completely unexpected
That is a fairly heavily simplified explanation of this mailboard's full context. It kinda turned into feature creep, as I learned that setting the interpolation to Nearest-neighbor sharpened the mail texture to look more accurate to how it was portrayed ingame, then had the idea to take some photos for the frame texture itself, then went to optimize the texture, added a satisfying padding to the edges, made the Pokemon icons on it metallic...
In ways, it is a living notice board that is always updated as I receive new mail, as I want to keep adding to it as I receive more and more mail, something that shows time and passion within a tiny group in an obscure community. Hopefully updating it in the future is not a gigantic headache
Another one was small asset creation and editing, how difficult is it to create something that's in my room, and insert it into a world. The answer is harder than I thought, but certainly not infeasible. I especially like this example because it showcases how great the detail of a DSLR can be, even though the texture itself is fairly small, only using maybe 1/4th of a 2048x2048 atlased texture of all static objects.
While it might seem strange to pull things from my room and put them into VR, where the objects are also still there if I take off the headset, I enjoy how it makes me feel like I'm inviting someone over to hang out in a place that's distinctly mine, explicitly me. Things I chose, things I like, it's my world and I want it to feel like mine
I'm skipping over some first draft versions that used placeholder textures, because they were placeholder and not particularly good. The sphere felt like the grand centerpiece, and it's something I spent a very long time getting the UV of just right, spent the most time layering paint after paint to get it to look busy enough to be worth staring at, too difficult to find specific patterns in, where chosen colors in certain areas harmonize and battle in just the right ways. I scrapped the first couple attempts at this, and am currently quite happy with where the finished result is at.
While I'm not the biggest fan of Substance Painter given Adobe is Adobe, and creative software as a business makes me gag, and is insanely predatory towards working artists. This is not related to my hatred of Maya in college, I'm sure it does things Blender is not as good at, but I didn't understand why we were being taught software that once we were not students, was impossible for most of us to afford, especially considering that I was only in college because I was poor enough for the government to pay for me to go. As it stands, for what I want to do, nothing else can match Substance Painter in the specific ways I need it, especially in speed of getting certain ideas done, so I accept it, make my issues known, and keep moving forward
Next up is lighting, something that gave me a peculiar amount of issues, but not quite for the reasons one might expect at first. For whatever reason that possessed me, I wanted orange lighting, the warm kind of lighting that feels deliberate, and not kinda grossly artificial like my room's warm white lighting on taupe walls. *retch*.
The issue was in trying to find the sweet spot of variables that generated good lighting without taking the four hours it did on the first generated lightmap...which I decided to just stick with until near the end of completing version 0.1.0 of S-S-S. I still don't 100% understand every single ideal variable for what makes the best lighting, but I know way more than I did at the start. Enough to know that, the lightmaps for this world aren't ideal, and I'll need to come back to it in the future to allocate more size to it, along with figuring out how it'll impact the rest of the world
When I was messing with the overall global lighting however, by pure accident, I found an angle where you could see your shadow way off in the distance, and something about this I really loved, it drew your attention to the view itself off in the distance, compelled you to try and find small details off in the view, made you wonder if you could get over there. It was accidentally beautiful in the moment when I saw my shadow way off in the distance, stuck out to me, became something I wanted to preserve, to draw attention to later on.
It made my mind wander to secrets I could place throughout the world, things to hide that almost nobody would find, but one COULD find, it was always possible if they knew where to look, what to do. As it stands in the current release (0.1.0), there's one active secret you can find and activate, and one passive secret that can be decoded to read a message. I've got several other future secrets written down in a document that one day, I'd like to bring to life
So let's talk skyboxes. In the beginning stages of this world, I had a placeholder generated skybox that was kind of a weird, sickly green. Didn't like it, and I knew that there had to be a way to do something truly cool for the skybox. In my first ever world, I was able to generate one of those six-sided skyboxes using Spacescape, but the visible seams, the fact that I could see the corners of the world if I looked hard enough, irritated me to no end.
The word I was looking for was panoramic. Panoramic images are designed to stretch around the top and bottom, along with loop around the x-axis seamlessly, so they can be stretched over a sphere with minimal distortion. Once I knew what the right word was, I was able to find proof that someone drew a panoramic landscape by hand, digitally, and knew the process, knew what I had to solve on a technical level for my own software. Often, all I need to know is something is in fact possible in order to do it myself
I'll be honest, witnessing it actually work first try, no edits needed gave me chills, it looked fantastic. In VR, the effect is multiplied too, it left me somewhat frozen and in awe at just the viscerally eerie energy it gave off. The effects at the very top and bottom were not intentional, but I kinda loved it all the more for that fact, even if I know how to avoid it from looking so deliberately warped. Gives off the effect that the [electrical sprite is summoning something in particular, looming over the viewer, while a vortex of sand threatens them below, forcing them to stand there and be witness to it all. I have an example to learn from, I could do this again if I so wished.
It's stuff like this that makes me excited to continue pursuing 3D work, with how often my own unique 2D skills play into it, like past skills are coordinating wonderfully with present interests and projects. A functional multiplication of the value and impact I feel in my work, in what I do
Let's talk about the mathematics of 3D shaders, and rugs.
Early on in VRChat, something I was exposed to early on that I couldn't quite comprehend was the rug in Club Fynn. I only saw it in passing, because you had to go through it in order to get to a larger area that someone wanted to show me. Months later, i'd begin getting an interest in learning how shaders work exactly, how they're made, and the general math behind it.
This caused me to stumble upon a video by Acerola about fur shading in video games. Long story short, most of the time they use shell texturing, which is super reliable in performance while looking really good from most angles. This is pretty much near perfect for very plush looking rugs. After some searching around online, I found that the vague consensus for what I was looking for was Warren's Fast Fur Shader. Free, and presumably optimized. Interestingly, it almost felt a little too robust in its options for what I wanted to do, and I now have this itch to create my own shell texture shader explicitly for rugs, especially as the math behind it seems...pretty simple and well documented
The last major hurdle that I had to undertake was figuring out the Udon graph editor, so I could start doing things like teleporting players when they find a secret button, or playing an audio file when they grab something. I genuinely thought that this would be the most difficult part, hands down, but it turned out that if the idea is simple, it's probably been documented in a tutorial video, which is extremely helpful.
The cassette itself...well, I'm not one to disclose explicitly how to get to it, but the secret jingle that plays when you select it is from an old project I did in Minecraft a few years ago, where I wanted to make the Tetris theme play if you hit some wood buttons in a certain order. It never functioned 100% perfectly, more like 90%. Enough that nobody ever got it to trip by accident. It was a really pleasant, gentle sounding jingle, the first few notes that played from beneath the floor. I had to use Minecraft Note Block Studio to re-create it, as the audio from a surviving recording of it has my ingame footsteps baked into it, and there's no chance I was going to let that slide.
Here's the video I put out of the world, if curious
Mirrors fall under the same category of "Wow, this isn't too hard at all because other videos have documented how to do this really easily" and I'm perpetually pleased with myself for the fact that I do pretty much everything that I do without any direct assistance from someone else. There's been a weird trend I've noticed about fundamentally incurious people wanting to be told the answer to a problem they have, especially when making something artistic or creative.
Thing is, so few people truly give a shit about what I do, the things I make, especially in 3D, that I don't have anyone to go to with my questions or problems, I have to solve most of this own my own, with nothing but forum posts, videos, and documentation to go off, and it's made me really damn prideful in how much I've learned this year, given that I started from nearly nothing but basic 2D art at the start of the year. I have value, and I love what I do so much
One of the last things I want to talk about that I found really interesting was another topic covered by Acerola that by the title alone, I expected to really hate, given how much I know about color theory, but it actually ended up being really informative and insightful, if a little bit subjective; Oklab color space. Video in question, and the Wikipedia article about Oklab color space in case one desires a more concise summary.
It's kinda unintuitive to me to think about and find colors in something like Affinity when doing texture work, but the colors it tends to naturally supply harmonize in a really pleasing way that's now stuck in my mind. While I'll still likely be using HSL for digging around for colors when I have an idea, LAB is absolutely going to be something I reach for if I have a slightly larger, maybe more ambitious idea where I really want the colors to be done right, and am willing to burn the time finding the right gamut of colors to choose from. I already started saving collections of colors this year, so this is a super natural extension of it all
So that's more or less it. If you want to visit the page or world yourself, here's a link (requires an account). There's still a lot about it that isn't perfect. Audio needs to be tweaked due to really weird issues I had with editing audio range in Unity that I couldn't resolve, the outer textures are both incomplete and not super well optimized, there's a piece of mail I need to add, the lightmap I know for a fact has issues, I want to say there's a clipping issue somewhere around the TV, I'd like to figure out what requires it to be android compatible...
These are in the grand scheme of things, small. My objective was to have a large project published by the end of the month, and I achieved that on the 18th of this month, then proceeded to spend a ton of time relaxing and obsessing over Pokemon Platinum. No interest in anything past gen 7 personally.
Long one ! But I actually managed to pull it off after some ~5,500 words across 2-ish days. Think I have the right pacing for these down too, and know how long these take me to write, even in a true worst case scenario where I have literal months to catch up on. It really wasn't that bad.
The next major project for next month is adding to, and refining this site to a fine enough polish and flow that I don't have to stress out anymore about how incomplete it all feels. My website is in many ways, a lair of my own ramblings, and my own choices in web-based aesthetics. It's a difficult frontier, but I want to be proficient enough in it that writing here, that adding things to it, doesn't make me feel incapable of improving at this kind of stuff.
Keep an eye out. Next month should have more big updates, more words, more projects pushed to a refined stopping point. I know for a fact I gotta fix a few things about my Chimera Aqua reskin that make my visor appear blank in other people's photos. Actually, I need to get that done before Wednesday...
I flee. Things to do. Thank you for reading this far, truly 🧡