Look, a finished project!

Hi! Lussy here.
Realizing that we haven't posted yet this year was kind of a shock.

Many things happened this year. I had an ankle surgery during winter, which slowed things down considerably, and we went through several family emergencies. Rough year so far.

But on the bright side, I finally finished a personal project! I 3D modeled Hyde's (of L'Arc~en~Ciel, VAMPS and The Last Rockstars fame, and he's also active solo!) custom guitar.

Gibson Les Paul Junior - hyde (L’Arc〜en〜Ciel) by ExceptionGate on Sketchfab

(no, it's not a typo. hyde writes his name lowercase for L'Arc, and uppercase for his other bands and his solo project.)

The model and textures were made by me, with Geril assisting with fixing various issues and figuring out the normal baking process, and then he did most of the setup inside Sketchfab.

I started the project pretty much as soon as this article was released about the guitar. The end of 2022 was a nightmare however, and things went downhill for a long time, and I can't even say we're fully back on track right now. But we did have enough energy to complete this, so that's something!

The model itself was done pretty quickly. There was a lot of photo hunting, and watching live performances frame by frame to see if the image was sharp enough to reference, and figuring out what custom parts were used for the guitar. I went as far as to look up the details of the stock Les Paul Junior model and use the exact fretboard radius. I went hard. I have a full gallery of totally non-psychotic guitar closeups now.

What took the longest was the art plate. I couldn't find a photo big enough to get a 4K texture off it, and some parts were always obscured, so I had to improvise for some of it. In the end I redrew the whole thing, even the parts I could sample off of photos, because the resolution varied so much and I couldn't bear having inconsistencies. So I sat with my tablet for hours at a time, over the course of months, and it slowly came together.

I'm happy with how it came out, and it was nice to work on something not for profit or recognition or whatever (although I did post it online, so this is a bit hypocritical), but just because I could. It's not like I'm going to use this model for anything, it's not playable, it doesn't physically exist now, it just looks pretty. And I think I really needed that after working in 3D and games for so long.

I am considering other projects like this one - I considered modeling Hyde's microphone as well, because it has a crazy art plate similar to this one, and apparently I like torturing myself with that, but time will tell if that is going to happen, I guess.

And now to figure out what to do with all this unreasonably in-depth guitar knowledge I gained.

2020!

Happy Holidays!

It's Geril.
This was a stressful end of the year for us, but at least we had a few days to chill a bit.
Lussy got a shiny new guitar and I got two buckets of bubble tea pearls for Christmas.

We haven't yet talked about it much, but we actually like making music. I play the blues harp – you can hear it as the background, ambient music in our project, Project Contrivance – and Lussy is playing bass and electric guitar in her free time. So when we work on our own pet projects, we're probably going to make our own music for it.

Oh, and we played Mass Effect 3 again. It's still hard to start it up on the Xbox One, but we finally got to the Citadel DLC, and wow, it's awesome!
Like, this is what was missing. Some humor, creative writing, characters and yeah, some fan service. I mean, seriously, this is the final game of the trilogy, they've got a lot of awesome characters, why not use them?
We haven't done the house-party part of the DLC yet, but even now, we're just happy because of this expansion. I mean, it feels like an expansion, rather than a DLC.
Best DLC ever? Maybe.

We're also upgrading most of our old consoles' video cables to Packapunch cables. These cables are awesome. I had no idea that an original SNES can output this sharp of an image.
So we now have scart cables for the GameCube, the SNES, PS1-2 and a RadX for the N64.

For a Non-CRT setup, these kinds of cables are a must and can add a lot to the image quality. We can't recommend them enough.
Now we only need a Framemeister or an OSSC.

And we also had time to assemble the game boxes.
We still want to print out more N64 and SNES boxes, but they are bigger and harder to print efficiently, so it takes a bit more time to create them.

And hey, it's 2020. We started working on this blog in 2013, seven years ago. GTA 5 and The Last of Us were the big titles that year, and we played a lot of Link Between Worlds, the shiny new console was the Wii U, and at the end of that year, the new generation of consoles – the PS4 and Xbox One – got released. So 2020 will have some similarities to 2013.

We have learned a lot, had some hard times, some good times, and overall we are now inside the game development industry.
Not really as Indie developers though.
We'll change that later. For now we'll work hard, and who knows, maybe in 2020 we'll post more about game development, and less about... everything else.

We're looking forward to the new decade.