What are you working on?

[Valknor]

I thought it would be fun for people to share what they have been working on, and maybe get some feedback from others.

I've been learning to get textures to play nice with spherical objects in Blender. You can see what I came up with in the screenshot below. It is going to get used in some sort of ball themed game I'm learning to make in this tutorial series.

[SfcoAwol]

Nice!. if your looking at spherical uv mapping you might wanna give blender guru's world video a try, he shows how to use a flat texture of earth and map it to a sphere making the sphere unwrap into a cube shape, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q8PwcDzb8Y&t=1s,

I've been mostly working on my website idea and then the next step is to create an app. At the moment I've created a website where you create an account, change account settings, recover lost passwords, subscribe to the service via stripe, what I'm working on yet is adding the ability to go to a customer portal to manage your subscription update payment info ect, then I need to open a section of my website api so my unreal app can login to my webserver (this section is technically already done but my website has no functionality beyond login and giving the app a token session) I need to make it so when the app request data from my webserver it will check their account for an active subscription and then if there is one then reply with data from a database built into the webserver. I'm also looking into getting a deeper understanding of the relationship between html css and java so that I can make a really appealing web design. It's all been allot to process for me coming from a strictly blender background but I feel I've gone a long ways in less than a year

This is a model I was working on for the app part of it.
I want to try and make a few photo realistic models for the advertising part of it first then I'm going to make the rest in a more lower resolution for performance since I don't expect most businesses to be running gaming computers, my goal is that a modern laptop could run the app

[Valknor]

I'll have to give that video a watch sometime. I've been rather side tracked with my companies other website Manistee Speaks. Well that and various things came up. Sufficed to say I haven't made much progress on the ball game since my last post.

That app sounds pretty complicated. I was trying to make one from scratch, then in rails, then said the hell with it, and deployed PHBPP3. Also, cool model. Have you finished it?

[SfcoAwol]

No I haven't had time to finish it up yet, was putting most of my energy in the website and the app first because I know myself and if I'm going to get stumped and not finish it will be over the app or website, I've already gotten a domain bought so it cant be stolen and I'm hosting a cheap 5$ email server from linode which works very well the only thing i don't like about it is even though I've got my email server setup correctly there are no blacklistings on my ip, and it has up to date ssl certificates but gmail throws the emails straight to the spam bin, I'm kind of hoping that maybe I can contact gmail and get my server ip whitelisted later down the road or else I'll have to move to an actual email hosting service which sucks because they are typically more expensive and i would not have access to the linux side of my server which kind of gives me the feeling that I'm not in control of my data, and I hate that feeling. but like always I'm a little sidetracked for this month and last month, lol.

last month unreal had the blueprint ninja event, it was five free courses on blueprints in unreal engine and you had to watch them by the end of the month and they were going to send you up to 120$ worth of merch, I was going to watch them anyways so I went ahead and did that, This month sketchfab is doing an event labeled when "nature and civilization collide" I wouldn't be normally that excited about it but Nvidia is sponsoring it so first place prize is a gaming laptop, which honestly I wouldn't be that excited about, but second is a 3090 and third is a 3080, I would love to claim one of those video cards as nobody can seem to get a hold of those without paying scalpers a crazy jacked up price. this is what I've made so far, some of the textures are a little wacked but I'm still in the tweaking stage, It's because there actually aren't any images associated with them, all of the textures are being generated procedurally with blenders node system, I cant really take credit for the statue because that was a 3d scan I found but I wrecked it and whith some help from youtube made all the materials for it, and I'm making the structure that it stands on.

[Valknor]

I've been through the same bullshit with Hotmail rejecting 33 Gamma's emails (our server is with RamNode). They didn't even make it into users spam folders- they got bounced back right away, despite my implementing SPF and DKIM records, in addition to SSL. I had to write Microsoft repeatedly, and they kept asking for a copy of the hosting companies invoice along with the IP address for the server. I tried to explain to them that the invoices don't contain IP addresses, they are on a per account basis. We went on like this for about a month, and finally someone lifted the blacklist. What probably happened is a previous machine assigned to that IP address was sending out lots of spam.

Sounds like you're having fun with the engine, and modeling in general. That's a pretty cool model you're working on, kindof like in Planet of the Apes. Are you going to include the internal skeleton since it can be seen through in places? While you didn't make the statue itself, you could add some details if it's see through. Oh, and is this for 3d printing?

[SfcoAwol]

the statue was scanned for 3d printing but I'm just using it for a 3d asset, I did make supports for the inside you can see them in the first picture, I haven't made any materials for them yet. and yeah I'm learning that email servers are a pain in the ass Lol, It's good to hear that email services will try to help you to getting white listed.

[SfcoAwol]

All done with it, even if I don't win nothing I'm not sorry I did it learned allot about procedural texture building in the process.

https://skfb.ly/or9Yo

[Valknor]

That's pretty cool.

I'm still focused on Manistee Speaks. I got some new articles up, and am writing one about this supposed pandemic. It's probably going to be a multi-day project.