Sunday, June 20, 2021

Zombies and Astrobeans! (Nah...)

I’m watching Sebastian Lague blather on about rigging in Unity, not because I want to understand Unity but because I want to adapt principles of rigging, bones and skins to my walk cycle. I was considering zombies staggering around last night, a simple stick figure so not very gross, for a monkey (skeletal, even 8-) copy of a side-scroller which Nook was playing. Which is something I’ll never get anywhere with but it would be useful for stick figure astrobeans for my asteroid miner sim/DF clone (again, skeletal…). The astrobeans are a one pixel arc for their head, so 2 pixels across and some lines for the body, arms and legs. I’m sorely tempted to do this all with triangles, but I can easily turn the lines into triangles later. Also, make the head a short line? Anyway, I get (back) to that from zombies, because that’s the way I roll!

There’s my drabble, now I owe myself some actual coding butt-in-chair time, and a sketch because I haven’t drawn a purely artistic sketch for a while. I drew a lot of procedural triangle-based stick-figure zombies last night (base was two points in/on the body quad, then a the third point was somewhere away, then a point in the center of that triangle and and the 3rd point for the base of the next limb segment, lower arm or leg, to a point away, and again for the hand or foot, but the foot is a triangle pair or quad touching ground at two points).

I coded the bit which displays the points of a 3D grid inside of a sphere representing the world whose surface I want to mesh, a procedural spherical polyhedron whose triangle faces represent the surface of that world. I need to find only the just-subsurface points which are adjacent to outside points and display only them, and then animate meshing the world in triangles…

This highlights that I had and should be working from a To Do List, so here’s the list of neglected coding projects-

  1. Peeps! Definitely plural, walking around, now outside in their ‘chicken condo’

  2. Procedural Flag, waving in the virtual wind. I can do waves, just modify the z coordinate!

  3. Extrusion of 2D and 3D shapes by picking points in the canvas, such as serpentine landmass and body plans.

  4. Procedural world-building, from stars and their worlds to meshing spherical polyhedrons

  5. Critters! Procedural body plans and walk cycles, ecologies? 8-P (This list is getting pretty, so that’s it for now)


The peeps thing involves rethinking my peep-space, changing to their new outside enclosure and the ‘chicken condo’, as well as finally returning to my 3D peep object, the head, wings, legs and tail from that subdivided octahedron I made before. Whew!

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