iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 17h

#devtober day 15, more buildings textured Had an in-law volunteer to babysit for a rare dinner+movie with wife, so not much time today either but enough to finish the materials for Melrode's main buildings. Will start on the terrain and descent from monastery tomorrow.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

#devtober day 14, starting exterior materials Short day today, started grouping materials for the outsides of buildings. The original roofs in Melrode have an almost rainbow effect from top to bottom, so I want to incorporate that into the appearance somehow.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

#devtober day 13, interior decoration. I started assembling some close-enough models to do the Melrode home interiors, but a few things will probably need to be made manually.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

#devtober day 12, replacing cozy with hand-rolled day/night lighting I'd used Cozy 3 for this in the past, but it's always felt like overkill. I spent some of the day replacing it with a simple set of gradients that I can snapshot during play mode + interior versions etc.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

#devtober day 11, adding fences/walls to placement tool Kinda gloomy out today and my motivation is low along with it, so I just expanded the little cliff placer tool to include support for fences and small Brian-height walls.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Was nice to see that kronnect's volumetric lights play nicely with transparents to do a glass effect though. I'd commissioned a version of the spirit ladies mural in Melrode Monastery and it's nice to be able to use it here, even if the style and look deviate a bit from original.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

#devtober day 10, interior lighting confusion Much of Quest takes place indoors, with the Grand Abbott's room very first thing people see. It's a monastery, so it feels like they'd have more windows for light, but without darkening then the higher areas on the walls feel bad.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

#devtober day 9, projectile fixes Noticed the scaling issue a few minutes after posting yesterday (zzzz), also wrote an importer to take landmine's nice spell data sheet and write SO's for the spell graph to use that original data instead, so things feel much more familiar now.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

#devtober day 8, wind cutter 2 problems To me, the Wind 1/2/3s are the most iconic spells in quest, so I want to make sure they feel ~identical to the original. Matched a bunch for the decomp after work, but I'm still missing something that makes mine converge much less.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

#devtober day 7, fixing circle checks I'd borked up the encounter check awhile back and never noticed until recording yesterday, so resolved that and checked how foreign a store asset looked for Skelebat (very). Wind 2 motion was waiting on decomp, so that might be tomorrow.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

#devtober day 6, working out a cave approach Trying out the spline mesher tool's cave example to see how much work is ahead of me for lighting something like Cull Hazard. Despite being extremely mint chip colored, the original has a very clean look here which will be difficult.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

#devtober day 5, improving terrain tools Pretty slow day as I tried to clean up some of the editor stuff for composing stuff alongside the unity terrain. I was able to get a pretty crisp edge for the descent into the Limelin yard, so maybe explicit shapes are better here.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

#devtober 4, waterfall layering Still using Limelin to work out the environment tools since it has a bit of everything, the stylized water 3 library comes with a few nice particle presets for doing waterfall effects. Brian's leg is in hell atm and I couldn't figure out why etc.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

#devtober day 3, terrain drops Quest has a lot of sheer faces for its world geometry, which do not play nicely with unity's "ice cream" terrain. Started integrating @_staggart_ 's nice spine mesher + edge fusion + my terrain alpha brush as a solution, but up close needs tuning.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

#devtober day 2, foot ik sinking Added a small sink range for Brian's model to help align him with the terrain. I was always bugged whenever he moved around a slope and had a visible gap between his shoes and the ground, since his stubby legs couldn't snap at that distance etc.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

#devtober day 1, outsourcing the terrain blending. I've tried solving this myself a few times, so I wanted to try kronnect's nice edge fusion library. Works well but takes a bit of setup, and still getting some artifacts. Less free time this year 👨‍🍼but enough to be productive.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Had an idea over the weekend for an alternative to unity's sharp tile-based terrain gaps (which are funnily incompatible with quest's sharp geometry). Got it working this morning and started integrating the new staggart environment libraries. Still working on this, just busy o7

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 31/01/2026

Spent this afternoon writing a preprocessor to recognize and animate certain phrases in the Quest dialogue, without needing to add style info to the dialogue text explicitly. Also, I joined a studio and now do unity stuff for a living, but I'm still doing this too dw.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

I'm slowly getting into the habit of laying out the UV stuff in terms of importance for the model, with faces becoming larger parts over the last few times I've tried this. Eyes are a total mystery to me and I keep using recolors of the nice eyes that Shannon's commission came with.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

Last Melrode kid, Todd, and 8/53 for the number of NPC models up to Solvaring. Todd's 2 original animations were both pretty energetic, so I wanted to save him for last and learn with the first 3. Adding small root offsets really helped out with these.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

3/4 Melrode kids done, just one more for the gang. I think whoever made the "just make it exist first, you can make it good later" should win some sort of award. It's been fun getting into modeling and knowing that things will look goofy but that it's ok.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

Tried the 2nd melrode kid today and had a lot of trouble with his weird head shape and odd expression. Each of the kids also has their own super exaggerated running animation, which only plays when they turn towards you, so I think they were probably meant to run around town.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

Starting the Melrode kids, tried Pete today since he only seemed a little more complicated than a stationary treasure chest.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

Started learning how blender's texture painting stuff works. Chest came out alright, but I probably redid the UV stuff like 4+ times.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

I am not great with art or getting a clean circular shape into a UI thing, so I tried to use a shader instead. I used a similar one for the chest + spirit interactions to give a slight glow, with the goal of not needing to match their coloring 100%.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

So instead of the HUD that quest 64 shipped with, I'm trying to use one from earlier footage where the compass is on the left of the bars.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

Started playing with HUD ideas and working on the interaction popups. I'd like to keep as much color and charm as possible, without falling into the "white bars + small text remaster UI" meme, but it's hard to get the quirky shapes and fun fonts to look reasonable in higher res.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

Been going through for the last week or so and getting the blocked vertical slice building and ironing out the issues, it's slowly becoming almost playable.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

Animation is pretty new for me (minus very minor edits to accentuate an impact or release), so all the scaling particulars about getting from blender into unity were driving me insane lol. The little 100x scaling between fbx and blend formats kept weaseling in and turning man eater into a planet.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

Trying to do the Man Eater from scratch, minus some bone models and a ground texture. It's turning out alright, and this will hopefully help my confidence when starting the NPCs.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 27/11/2025

Used some of the "between jobs" time to work on the enemy model silhouettes. The original commissions were very good imo, way better than I could've hoped for after providing low-res emulator screenshots.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

Fan remake project! The decomp results are sometimes converted into c# and incorporated into things like cameras and movement. To give an idea for the maps, I am starting Holy Plains right now actually and the first step is to overlay exported lua data as a sort of guide when blocking things out.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

Used some of the day off to finish blocking Dondoran's interiors. If you've been following this project for a while, this may seem like reverse progress, but I wanted to go back and redo some areas to sure the general feel and muscle memory came through.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 09/11/2025

The goofy system I've been using to block the dondoran building heights -- moving brian until he's on the roof.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

Started blocking out Dondoran yesterday, also fiddling with the door exit animations to use root motion. It does bring the autowalk doors much closer to the original though.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

#devtober day 31 - Shannon blinking Wanted to finish with something visual, and luckily I found a nice tutorial on how to implement blinking with blendshapes by @evepaints_ -- linked below. The Shannon model was a commission last year from k_catz on fiverr, briefly shown to the Quest 64 discord.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

#devtober day 30 - easier ik look for npcs There were 2 previous attempts with this with the newer Rigging system, but I learned today that there is just a built-in function for this on the default animator object. Way simpler and just takes a few seconds to set up.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

#devtober day 29 - more blocking and camera work The stairwell areas are blocked with the lua data, and the stencil issue was just a typo somewhere. The last camera issue is handling collision and closeness, and figuring out why the npcs now talk to you while pouting.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

#devtober day 28 - blocking and door issues Adjusted the animation / IK stuff to play nicely with doors and the new 30 fps sim stuff, but the denser layouts are inviting problems with the stencil door trick from last year.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

#devtober day 27 - better map data from lua Finished the map data exporter with landmine's help, adding npcs and doors between areas. A common question is "how far do you want the project to get", and every tool like this helps that answer extend further out etc.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 26/10/2025

#devtober day 25 - starting magnet rock About 20m in, I remembered why I kept skipping this one. Added a rock dissolve shader and updated the particle event stuff to take a scaling coefficient. The rolling rock dust is too aggressive atm and overall colors feel mushy.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 25/10/2025

#devtober day 24 - fiddling with magnet rock ideas The decal thing from magma ball would make it easier to do a dirt trail from the original's sliding rock animation, but the current placeholder has grown on me. Maybe there's another place to use this one.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

#devtober day 23 - spinning I guess Spent the majority of today's time matching brian's rotation to the fps vs. the original 30 fps sim, but then realized that recording this would not show anything -- "rtx on" etc. So instead I tied the animator to the sim, and it now does the spin thing.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

#devtober day 22 - magma ball visual arrangement This was one of the trickier ones to date, and was the first to require 2 unique shaders -- a wobbly lava one and a decal to let me partially "reveal" a lava texture in the travel path. Also thinking of doing an october recap vid, lmk if interested.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

#devtober days 20 + 21 - starting magma ball The color profile of this one has been odd, with the streak things being a mix of red, yellow, and pink. I have a semi-functioning lava shader, but I'm not sure if it's needed. Complementing it on bare ground always feels hard.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 19/10/2025

Yeah definitely, I've learned a lot from studying how their prefabs are set up. Not sure what the non-URP version is called, but the one I'm using on the pillars is "URP_Blend_TwoSides".

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 19/10/2025

#devtober day 19 - fire pillar 2nd iteration Sped up the main motion after being surprised at how fast the original animation is. Agreed with ratdev's comment yesterday about it looking more like lava, so I added some of the fire 1/2/3 trail sprites and adjusted the color some.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 18/10/2025

#devtober day 18 - fire pillar attempt 1 Trying to use the particle system as much as I can, along with a pretty versatile shader from the Hovl kits for the base pillars. Cutout feels to aggressive atm.

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schooliedee.bsky.social @schooliedee.bsky.social · 18/10/2025

#devtober day 17 - studying fire pillar Recorded and studied the Fire Pillar visual today and I will probably end up doing a fully scripted visual for this. I think without the little shuffling motion it does in the middle, Unity's particle system could get pretty close though.

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