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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  10d ago (text post)   219 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for July 1, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Little to tinkering this week, maybe some bugfixes. How are you doing @Southkraut?

Played around with Unreal physics a bit. Scripted some semi-random physical movement. Nothing big, but just about the first time I wanted to do something with Unreal and just got it done on the first try.

Homies: Ride or Die

FINALLY got most major issues with car solved. Switched to PBR ("physically based rendering") from old school Phong-style. Really took this to the next level (pic attached).

Also the wheels now spin properly, the lighting and normal maps stay consistent, I can even select the brake callipers and steer them along with the the front wheels.

The problem the entire time is seemingly that the obj/mtl data files were garbage, and I lost several weeks worth of time using those instead of going with gltf. I cannot believe how consequential stupid shit like choice of file format is. I'm sure there are dev teams that have wasted millions of dollars from this one decision.

Anyway! I'm told the next thing I want to do is add environment mapping (having the skydome, etc reflect off the car) to really make it pop.

TRON bike lighting

Finally getting back to this. The parts arrived for the $4 PC case fan and charcoal filter and I made myself a fume extractor that impressed my daughter.

/images/17514121085223546.webp

Gotta say that looks quite cool!

You probably explained it earlier, but I don't recall catching it, is there any particular reason you're doing rendering from scratch (are you? that's the impression I'm getting)? Just to learn how the stuff works?

I originally got into computer programming as a teenager because I wanted to make video games, but I found windows insufferable and got distracted by Linux and a career in SRE.

I've since decided to try to go back to my roots, so to speak. This would all be a lot easier if I just used UE5, but what's the fun in that?

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