It's already March!

Hi! Geril here.

Working on a new project has its ups and downs. On the one hand, fresh new ideas and goals, and on the other hand, doing things that we already did many times.

But this time we got something new. We can't say much about the project - NDA and all -, but we are now gaining experience with working with motion capture. Because of this, we were forced to learn how to use Post Process Animation Blueprints in Unreal 4, and man, we should have learnt this years ago, it makes helper-bone handling a non-issue. We used Unreal's Metahuman as the basis, so we learnt how to do it by mimicking its methods, adjusting them to our needs and changing them to fit our custom skeleton.

I really want to show off things, but we can't.

On a different note, after the massive burnout and nightmares, Lussy is finally getting back to her usual creative mode, working on a 3D model she wanted to make for months now.

Oh, and we modded a Nintendo DS Lite to output an RCA signal. We're using it with our projector, so it looks pretty nice. This pushed Lussy to finally finish Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia and play Okamiden. One day I want to print a new case for the modded DS, but our 3D printer is acting up, so I'll just have to do it later.

Also, we needed an Xbox Series controller so we wanted to buy one. I asked Lussy to choose one, but she didn't like any of the controllers for sale so we ordered a custom one - Lussy designed the controller to her liking. It has our company's name on it, so it's officially ours. The extra features are nice and all but what I really like about it is its battery life.

New 3D printer!

 Hey! Geril here.

So, we bought a new 3D printer. We already had one, but it was very high maintenance and fragile, so the new one is more limited in options, but works easier.

It's a Polaroid PlaySmart 3D printer that was only released in Europe. It's not perfect – it can't connect to any of our WiFi apart from Lussy's iPhone hotspot – but it gets the job done.

We're at the point of collecting games where we're just out of space. And it's pretty hard to store SNES, Mega Drive and N64 cartridges, especially when trying to also display them. I mean half the fun of collecting games is to have them on display.

But with cartridge-based games, that's never easy.

So we tried to solve this issue with a custom-made holder. Now, our printer has a meager 12x12x12 centimeter print limit, and an N64 cartridge is 116 mms in width, so we can't make a full encompassing case for those. I ended up modeling a small but tight holder that holds the cartridge by the plastic shielding next to the pins – but never touches the pins.

Other than that part, I also added leaning arms that help hold in the cartridges, and those never touch the front labels. Then I added little nubs and holes to the top and bottom so I can stack these holders.

The final print is pretty solid, but we'll probably have to glue it to a piece of furniture just to be sure.

Also, Lussy made a nice little guitar pick stand, too. We're trying to design objects for ourselves now that we have an easy way of creating them.

Other that the printing, we started messing around with a Raspberry Pi Zero. It's a fun little machine, we already played through TMNT and TMNT:TIT on it with a MAME emulator.

Aside from this, there's only work.

Summertime!

This month has probably been the busiest we've had yet. We'll just avoid telling you about how much we've worked, day and night, with no breaks in-between, every day of the month. It was exhausting.

So, we'll show you some good things instead! As few as they are.

First, we've been 3D printing a lot! Our most impressive prints yet, in our opinion, are two small figures of Max from Sam & Max, Season 1.

It's a rip of Max's mesh from the Telltale series that we've posed and edited for printing. We still have to figure out a way to properly remove the supports from the print, but we're getting there.

In other news, we've made this scene public:

Frey Couch Scene Sound-Test by ExceptionGate on Sketchfab

This is Frey from Fisheye Placebo, the same model from our Frey Underground fanart, lipsyncing to a voice clip by VisualRaid from their dub of Fisheye Placebo. This has been done for a while now (we participated in Sketchfab's beta for sounds), but we could only make it public after Sketchfab's sound feature was made public. Hooray for Sketchfab Sound!

Sorry if this embed breaks the whole blog. Sound on Sketchfab is still a new thing, and we've experienced problems with embedded files with sound.

See you again next month! Don't get cooked, stay off the hook!

Unreal 4.16 & 3D printing!

Hi!

This month was also very busy. We're currently working on an outsourced project, and that takes up a lot of our time, but at least we're using Unreal 4 and Substance Painter, so we feel at home. The extra practice doesn't hurt, either.

Unreal 4 got updated again! We've been waiting for volumetric lights and fog, and 4.16 finally delivered them. They will be useful for Lemniscate, since we've used fake godray effects for all the lamps, and this will make it easier and hopefully cost less in terms of hardware. It also looks cool.

In other news, we got our hands on a simple CTC Prusa 3D printer! We're still calibrating it little by little, messing up lots of prints but nailing others. Geril likes the DIY-aspect of it, and the fact that almost all components can be replaced and upgraded, just like a PC. Lussy likes it because once it works reliably, it will be very useful for cosplay.

Putting the printer together wasn't easy (it took about 8 hours), but we've learned a lot about 3D printing. We're still in the process of attaching extra cooling fans, so our prints are imprecise, but here's a bust of one of our characters, Beat!

Have a nice day!