busybee

I guess it’s been a week since my last update post so here’s what’s going on with me.

One of the most poorly-defined yet critical things in configuring a VR avatar is where exactly to place the viewpoint. It can have a lot of impact on your viewing experience, especially with how the viewpoint ends up relating to the rest of the body. This becomes especially critical in systems like VRChat and Resonite where the physics of the body are directly impacted by this placement, and especially now that VRChat has built-in functionality for allowing a first-person view of your facial features (which the critter avatar calls “first-person snooter”).

When building a humanoid avatar that has proportions that more or less match one’s physical body, you generally want the viewpoint to be situated such that it’s placed at the same relative depth from your real-life view origin compared to your shoulders, as this means that your virtual head will be tracked with the same relative offset from your virtual shoulders as they are from your real ones. Otherwise, your virtual arms will seem to be the wrong length when fully extended.

But this raises the obvious question: where’s your physical view origin?

Critter v1.7 brings a bunch of new features, some of which will require some changes to your existing avatar setup.

So you’ve enjoyed becoming critter, but you want even better customization with your horns: when you’re a different material, you’d like to be able to change the sound that is made by your horns being popped off.

Worry not, as of version 1.7.0 you can make this happen!

There is a really pervasive trend in video these days where people will use (usually auto-generated) open captions (sometimes called “burned captions” or “hard subs”), where the text for the narration or the like is baked into the image of the video. This is sometimes accompanied by some attention-grabbing effects, like making the currently-spoken word jump up in size, often with a very goofy animation.

Please stop doing this.

The latest version of Logic released today, with some much-vaunted features. It’s also finally gone to version 11, after being stuck on 10.x for over a decade, even though 10.x minor version updates were often larger than the differences between major versions (and those major version updates cost a lot of money!).

I just played around with it for about an hour and put its major new features through its paces, and here’s some of my thoughts on it.

Okay so. Originally they were going to lend me a Kia Forte, which is a tiny economy car, but that was returned in unsafe condition.

Then they were going to lend me a Sorento, which would have been great (overkill, really), but that one still hasn’t been returned by the previous user.

This morning I got a notification from Kia that “the Niro is ready to be picked up. Will you need a ride here?” I thought, huh, so they’re done repairing my car? Great!

Breaking the solar wind

Today, right around when I was about to leave for the Matrix test drive, I got a call from the dealership: the loaner was available, but it wasn’t in a totally safe state due to a huge crack on the windshield. They asked if I still wanted it and I said I’d rather not.