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Comments
My ISP is reducing its fees (for the same service), apparently there are competitors looming about and they have to compete against it. Hurrah for the free market!
Well, less optimistically to expand as fast as possible (they've been growing like crazy) so as to establish a monopoly, which would suck.
Also, my mother lost her keys to home. Back to padlocks.
Edit: Also, I know that "agrus kos" means "black bird", I know that because of this guy. Also I know the W is pronounced as something like a V.
Oh, but which language?
Well, "moroii" seems to be some sort of Romanian word for a vampire or whatever, but that's the most of it.
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kos_(ptak)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kos
This hypothesis is consistent with my anecdotal observations that, if you don't make people argue about stuff as much, they don't form as specific opinions on those things. In my interpretation, those people aren't necessarily any less informed, but rather they haven't had a need to take sides on those things (since it's hard to stay neutral in an argument).
Also I think this is contradictory.
Ideas for how public policy should work are based on assumptions/models of how humans and other systems will respond to things, but if those assumptions and models are wrong then the ideas themselves could be bad ideas.
Even so, this isn't an internet-specific problem.
In a related fashion, when reading about an interesting piece of history I often find myself wishing this inspires a fantasy novel.
In terms of history, when I was a teenager I was really into my History textbooks when they went over into WWII and so I really always wanted there to be a 2D BlazBlue style fighting game where each country was personified into an anime character.
All I can really remember is that Japan was two characters who acted as one and you could switch between them.
Needless to say there's probably a billion reasons nothing like this has ever happened.
More frequently I daydream about a Disney Channel All Stars musical rhythm game (probably a mobile game) where you'd have CG models of various characters dance to songs from Disney Channel movies and series. It would cover everything from High School Musical to Andi Mack to Descendants and so on. If I was any good at CG character modelling and set design and all that other stuff I'd have definitely made mock-up commercials at least.
I also once put serious thought about a similar concept for Penny on M.A.R.S., and I even thought about the various modes it could have (Story Mode, Arcade Mode, Collaboration Mode for other Italian properties like Winx Club).
Sort of related; I want to drive up activity here probably just via my own posts but I can't really think of anything new to spin into thousand word posts.
For some reason I wasn't expecting anime inspired characters, but that could create a fun challenge too!
Oh! Actually though I did some outlining of my Disney Channel idea when I realized that it would genuinely be insane to try and go from High School Musical to today (about 14 years worth of content).
So I decided to just expound my Penny on M.A.R.S. idea (which was still a lot), and so if I can figure out how to get VRoid to work right I might make something of it.
Plus, I'm not sure I need to contribute to the pantheon of "[anything at all] but anime girls".
VRoid is basically perfect in terms of base character creation. However,
I can't figure out how to control my character model so I can see below the knee.You danged right click+drag, obviously.But my model isn't centered, there's a lot of random free space above her.
The program also has very limited clothing options, but you can actually mess with this quite a bit. There's also some free stuff on a pixiv marketplace called BOOTH which I might end up using.
Some of it costs money, but THERE'S SO MUCH COOL STUFF. I will 100% end up spending money on 3D models.
EDIT: I'm not sure why things have to be monotone and you can't insert patterns via jpegs or pngs but I feel like this is the first step into "I should try Blender."
I may have to finally learn to use Photoshop. I've avoided it for years now but...
Does anybody know any other good "It's Paint but can export transparency?" programs. I used to use GIMP but it always gets stalled starting now at my fonts.
Wow! Even a rube like I can figure this out!
This is extremely fun.
I didn't know about Pixiv's BOOTH VRoid thing, from the looks of it there's a way to import models from elsewhere, or otherwise create them (at the very least they have to be able to adapt the underlying model in VRoid), which greatly expands what the program can do.
Also, people are making money out of that stuff. Hmmm... I'm partial to Krita, but I know there's a surprising amount of good free Photoshop alternatives out there that aren't well-known. Like a lot of things in computer graphics, Photoshop is used because it's the industry standard, not because it's that much better than the competition.
Speaking of all this, I've been looking into 3D stuff more often than usual lately, I even followed a tutorial the other day. I'm really out of touch with stuff, I'll probably go back to it full time. I definitely need a new computer tho.
Some time ago I made a Blender script to automatically rig* imported models (using an unofficial importer, as there's no official one), I've been wondering for a while if I should maybe clean it up and release it.
* To rig a model is to set up controls so that someone (most likely an animator) can easily control it in ways that make sense for what the model is (in this case a human) rather than on a per bone/joint basis.
That reminds me to try QGIS.
Seriously, you have no idea. Thank you so much.
I'm always looking at CG idols in super-cute outfits doing super-cute poses and now I can make my own!
Ah, thanks.
It is a big limitation, but I've been having a lot of fun with it. I actually created this dress by modifying the default one-piece and haphazardly slapping pngs onto the skirt area and it looks great!
I've also figured out that you can turn basically anything into a GIMP pattern and GIMP easily fills things with patterns (and fills things with gradients if you finangle slightly), so it'll probably be easier for me to create custom looks from now on.
And in other limitations, irises look great on the model once inserted, but they look terrible when you make them in a program like GIMP and you can barely ever tell what the end result will look like.
This (very helpful) VTuber says you can paint the body to create skintight pieces, but I found that trying to paint on the skin created a blurry effect (this may be due to settings on my part) and trying to erase the skin before painting over it didn't seem to help.
As far as I've seen, vRoids can be uploaded into some open-world game, and probably also other things. I wonder if they'd work in MMD...
I wish I could export short videos of the animated poses, but I'd have to figure out how to do transparency with video, which to me is basically Next Level. I could probably also add my backgrounds in VRoid and then try to export the videos that way, but you can only work with one model at a time...
But right now I'm pretty good with what I've achieved.
EDIT: I finally got around to boys. Boys have two outfits total. This is going to be a real challenge.
Thanks for the rec, but nuGIMP works like a charm so I'm good on this front for now.
Speaking of "rigging" (ohh, fancy!), I wish I could add some of the poses I've created to the preset poses, but this is probably just another thing I haven't figured out yet.
Maybe I should've posted about it earlier? It's been on my "IJBMer X may be interested in this, bring it up when it comes up" mental space for over a year.
(It's the same mental space that contains the fact that I found the pdf of a book about drawing anime idols that I thought was interesting and may or may not interest you too.)
Speaking of VTubers, when the whole VTuber thing started I thought the avatars were made out of VRoid models (they're Live2D, or at least the ones I've seen besides the one in that link.) Ahh, the problem is that VRoid (or any other 3D program for that matter) doesn't simply paint a (color) texture onto the mesh, instead it takes the texture (and probably several other textures) plus a bunch of other data and processes it to figure out what color each pixel should look like, so something can look unexpectedly different in the actual model, or even between two different shaders/materials/renderers, especially since VRoid's shader is kind of elaborate.
Unfortunately I don't know of an easy solution to that, I know Photoshop has addons* to preview 3D models but that would at the very least require recreating the shader. The Blender importer includes a material for it, but it's not a painting software so its painting tools are much more limited (you can use it to preview, but so can you with VRoid, maybe?).
The thing about blurry skin is probably different, though. It may have to do with texture sampling. Worst case scenario you can export them to some common file format and import them on MMD. There may be quirks to fix but it should be doable. Early on VRoid wasn't even supposed to have boys, it was a dedicated waifu factory.
I'm definitelly going to check the latest version when I get the chance. Presets in general weren't possible to create but maybe that's changed?
* While we're at it, another reason Photoshop and other CG stuff is used is that although they're not that much better than the competition, their addon support is much larger.
I've been watching videos, I thought one could now create presets but nope, those elaborate clothes are from crafty people painting over pre-existing presets. That said they do look good, my only complaint is that being paintings they have to be flat.
I also saw there are several tutorials to export to MMD, and there's a contrived but seemingly functional way of previewing texture changes:
I'll be checking the Unity SDK too, although I assume it can't do anything that VRoid Studio can't do except within an Unity project. Unfortunately, I don't think that's possible. You may be able to use other software and some animation file to make your model move, but there are caveats (you may need to rename bones and stuff, and if the animation is based on a model that's significantly different than yours, it'll look wrong). Though I've never done animation so I can't speak from experience.
On unrelated stuff, my glasses broke again, they're the same glasses that broke about a year or two ago around one of the hinges, I glued them back and ended up all flimsy, so although it's not surprising that they would break again, it's surprising that they broke on the other side instead.The original mending job is still there, it may look weak but it's withstood all this time. I put duct tape on the broken part.
For a while, at least.
I do actually have two sets of images lined up for DapperMan, but I've been feeling lazy about it lately, especially with how jacked up it turned out the prices for the new EverDreamerz are.
I mean, if I don't tell you guys what's cool with the 4-12 crowd then how will you ever know that vital information?
I should maybe try and focus on my CG efforts instead but those are too much of a timesink and my progress has been painfully slow...
Besides that, NVidia's 3000 series graphics cards are just around the corner and it's great, they have numbers that are higher than previous cards' numbers but the truly important thing is that earlier cards will become cheaper, the ones that I probably won't buy anyways.
I should definitely do more CG, too.
Yeah there are two stages to my feelings towards a political discussion; relief at getting the views out there, and then dread and having to continuously discuss them at length.