Evilmatt's blog

I built this Lego Tantive IV kit earlier this month. It's one I've been debating getting for a while as I really like this kit with a nice replica of princess leia's ship from new hope both inside and outside with a little room in the middle a cockpit and a little escape pod complete with little r2 and 3po. Figured with the lock down now was the time to get this.

Great fun to build although I had one missing part a triangular bit on one of the sides hopefully lego can replace that at some point.

Got round to editing up some of the video I took when I was out at PAX East in Boston earlier this year. Look at all those people shoulder to shoulder none of that these days.

I expect we're all finding present times to be weird and unsettling. Generally I have as little to do with the outside as I can in normal times but it's different choosing not to go out to being required to stay inside. The fact that if I run out of something or forget something or just feel like going and getting some product there and then while I could go out for things it feels like an irresponsible and dangerous thing to do so like every one I'm just staying inside limiting my trips to shops as much as I can.

I realized putting this together that I didn't capture a lot of footage on some of the days so I padded things out with some pictures I took.

UV resin printers used to be the high end of 3d printing they had very high resolution could make prints with a variety of properties based on the resins used and could be comparable in speed to their filament/FDM counter parts. They were also expensive and messy and complicated to use. Even some of the more consumer focussed machines like the form labs form 1 were several thousand dollars to buy and the resin for the machines was much more expensive than plastic filament used in the FDM machines.

Built some more lego

Little test piece of animation I did of a robot leg doing a single walk cycle
simple modeling materials and shoddy animation as it's just mainly a test to see how I could get the armature system to drive the pistons on the leg to make it look like it was being hydraulically driven. So the bones all use ik targets and various constraints to move the parts of the pistons automatically to line up as the leg moves

Playing with blender following a few tutorials made this. It uses a combination of dynamic paint modes and the fire simulation to take a sphere and make it look like it's burning away. Came out fairly well a few odd frames in there but still quite nice.

On Saturday I went with a friend to try the Sandbox VR Startrek Discovery experience, I haven't seen startrek discovery myself but it didn't seem to matter. My friend I went with who does follow the show said it was made with people from the show and it was an officially licensed vr thingamy made with CBS.

Sandbox vr are one of the many vr experience outfits this one was in the Hilldale Mall and they had a very nice shopfront all screens nice wood and fancy lights with a bunch of tv's showing footage from games they offered.

I came across this on a list of great games from the last year you probably haven't heard of and picked it up

Proviso: It is an early access title I know some people dislike those

anyway the basic idea is simple top down 2d space shooter edges of the screen wrap you have a little ship basic thrust based movement and directional fire not quite twin sticks as you always thrust forward (for the most part some mods alter this) you have weapons shields and ship types you fight of waves of enemies and collect orbs to upgrade

The upgrades are somewhat random