aaronadams3d@gmail.com
Do People Still Blog?
Adding Pretty Sparkles to my Reel
So around the beginning of 2025, I added hand-drawn FX to my reel. I enjoyed it and got a lot of nice feedback, but I wanted to tie it more closely to CG FX. I wanted to flex more muscles and practice more techniques. That led me down a fun little rabbit hole.
I got to experiment with writing some custom solvers for particles: The particles around the word 'computer' transition from a turbulent state to an ordered grid. The grid can be artistically tweaked, and I'll be adding it to my toybox of tools. Writing a VEX-driven underline and procedural particle solvers was a fun exercise.
My workflow was: Krita for the hand-drawn animation → Houdini for FX → Natron for compositing → DaVinci for editing.
Lately, I've been exploring alternatives to the big industry software I'm used to—I want open source and free, but familiar. A big ask! I discovered Natron, a free open-source compositing software that's been really exciting to work with.
Lightmapping in emission for low load vr chat world
I’ve been experimenting with ‘lightmapping’ by just assigning color value coordinates to UV’s.
UV Map used for lighting.
It supports distant lights, point lights, and spotlights. Spotlight is goofy sometimes, though. Maybe I won’t need it too much with the stylization. The goal is to have a level done with one single material and no lightbaking. I want to keep texture lookup calls very low.
Skull Pile Sim For Props.
Trying to keep my skills up to date as far as RBD sims go.