My condo is finally sold!

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Yay, the big financial albatross is no longer around my neck. Now I can feel a lot more free to move forward with all of the projects I’ve been wanting to do, and not have to worry about, y'know, finances for a while.

I already feel a million pounds lighter.1

So anyway, time to start looking at redoing my kitchen.

Matrix Third Room

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Back when the VRChat debacle took place, I’d rambled quite a lot about the idea of a standards-based truly-distributed VR system. I probably mentioned how back in the day I was designing something like that, and was intending to use XMPP as the actual transport mechanism; in my more recent reevaluation of the idea I was thinking that using WebRTC to stream the actual realtime data (voice, character animation, etc.) would be the way forward.

Well, the Matrix folks just announced Third Room, which is the same basic concept, running on Matrix and WebRTC! They’ve also made a bunch of other great technology choices along the way.

This is pretty exciting and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes. At least from a 20,000-foot view it hits all of the right notes for me. For example, using glTF for all object interchange, focusing on in-world editing, and allowing for (apparently optional) world persistence.

Hopefully this can disrupt the stranglehold VRChat has on social VR and will also be a fun, compelling experience in its own right.

Plaid!

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I reached another big milestone on my avatar!

Then I used it in an area with a low-resolution mirror and noticed some really bad texture seams around the edges of the pigmentation map. And I’m wondering if the pigmentation map approach is really all that useful for the avatar in realtime.

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Kegels (PSA)

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So, be honest: do you know what kegels are?

Last night I found out that most people I know had never heard of them or, if they had, didn’t know what they were. They’re a pretty good thing to know about though!

In short: they’re a pelvic floor exercise. And they’re very worth doing.

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Surface texturing idea

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Right now I’ve been trying to make some more of the pigmentation maps for the critter avatar, and in particular I want to make one for the splotchy coloration (which would also be possibly useful for calico and blue giraffe). But hand-drawing this on a disjoint surface is pretty obnoxious.

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VRChat avatar, referred colormaps edition

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Today I put my literal shower thought into action, and redid the pigment mapping stuff to use a color lookup table instead. And hoo boy, were there a lot of pitfalls; namely:

  • Unity defaults to loading color textures as sRGB, and does so by linearizing the color space
  • The default wrapped texture lookup causes all sorts of fun boundary conditions to happen
  • Default texture compression completely hecks up texture values which rely on precise lookups
  • Oh right, interpolation can’t solve precision issues

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Another VRChat shader revelation

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I don’t actually need the pigment map to look good in untrusted mode: I can have the material itself provide a fallback texture! There’s nothing stopping me from putting a _MainTex slot on the shader which just does nothing on the shader, but which would be used by the Standard fallback; I can use other texture slots for the pigment map and palette. So obvious.

Also, when laying out the palette, it would be helpful to group related things next to each other, which makes mipmapping play more nicely (and also makes authoring eaiser, although still not as easy as just fiddling with sliders in the Unity editor, unfortunately).

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