Wes Log
Thursday, July 1, 2021
Learning constraints and part design with FreeCAD
Tuesday Jun 29, 2021
I've continued progress towards seed eco home visualiztion and research on the state of archviz in Unreal Engine. There are some very critical issues with the sweethome3d obj export workflow, mainly that many of the house part meshes are split into multiple submeshes and applying accurate uvs and materials is going to take a huge amount of repetitive work. The sheer number of static mesh components involved (1600+ for the home) prevents fast batch iteration in Unreal Engine, so I need to rebuild this demo from scratch using a more modular instanced and combined mesh approach.
There are currently at least two companies working towards modular architecture platforms in Unreal Engine. They are https://generatetechnologies.com/ and https://geoship.is/.
Many startups are raising funding through crowd equity sites to build modular homes (especially ADUs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_suite) such as https://www.startengine.com/boxabl and https://www.seedinvest.com/modal.living/seed eco and housing related projects seem to be trending and very successful
Friday Jun 25, 2021
FreeCAD Badge Feature on a feature. Took about twenty minutes to learn following https://youtu.be/zKPbcr6QsKs, which I think is longer than it should have.
Tuesday Jun 22, 2021
Really exciting conversations on Discord today :)
I started working on implementing 3D printer mechanics. I was also thinking more about mechanics and I like the idea of building the core gameplay based on a couple games I played as a kid on Roblox: the first is https://roblox.fandom.com/wiki/Community:Stickmasterluke/Natural_Disaster_Survival and the second I cannot find atm (but basically you could craft a sailboat with hemp and craft metal by placing ores onto a bush fire for some amount of time)
Monday Jun 21, 2021
Musings
- The most powerful global institutions are adverse to the goals of post scarcity.
- Open source hardware has not reached a sufficient accessibility, affordability, speed, or universality of replication to be more convenient or reliable for the average person compared to buying mass produced items.
Very excited about Appropedia https://www.appropedia.org/User:J.M.Pearce
Thursday Jun 17, 2021
Research on FPGAs and George Hotz
Continue work on OSE playground
Setup basis for multiplayer and create client/server builds (need help testing between two Linux computers on separate networks)
sorry for low quality, max upload size is 1mb :(
Wed Jun 16, 2021
Create playground UE project with character rig and controls
MJ sez - Seed_Eco-Home_Training_MMOG - just some thoughts on how this could play out
Wes sez - I love the team based competitive building aspect. I think all of this is possible if I push my limits and can get auxiliary dev, 3d modeling/animation, and marketing help. The main hurdle is definitely multiplayer, which can be difficult to develop and test solo, especially because the NetDriver code on Linux is not as stable as on Windows (often networked games made in Unreal only support Windows clients), improving Linux networking is something I'd like to contribute upstream to the engine so other devs can support Linux
Tue Jun 15, 2021
Create Metahuman character for OSE game and setup playground project environment
The Datasmith IFC importer plugin only supports Windows due to a 3rd party dll, but it would probably not be that much work to add Linux support
Compiled FreeCAD with CMake configuration to OpenCascade 7.5
- I've been working on exporting the FreeCAD files to glTF so we can use https://modelviewer.dev/examples/loading/index.html
Here's a couple examples of rendering in UE 5 - Archviz
Outdoors
We can reach this level of fidelity: although many of the CAD workflow/rendering features are not available on Linux yet.