A Week In Review Of Sorts... (5/29-6/4)

I'm not sure if this is something that will be a regular thing on here honestly, some topics could probably be blogs on their own but I figured this was a week that was interesting enough to write about and do something different. I don't really have any structure planned for this so I will just write and hope for the best.

Before I begin, I will note one thing and this applies to pretty much all of my page:

I am going to omit some details and specifics that would otherwise give away the rest of my (fairly???? public facing) online identity. I made this account with some friends to have fun and post silly stuff, and I don't want the rest of my online presence to spill over. I'd like to just be a nobody on this platform :)))))

Anyways...

I got home from Momocon/Atlanta at exactly 11:59 PM on May 28th. To summarize that: It was fun because I saw my best friends. The con was ok I guess. So our story begins the following minutes of unpacking at midnight.

A lot of what I bought at the con still needs to be shipped back to me, so here's what I was actually able to bring back home with one bag: 

I enjoy collecting a lot of physical media, and this is not even close to all that I got. The 3 Melty Blood copies finish my entire collection there as well. This means I now own every copy of the game from the 2002 original to Actress Again! The music selection underneath is all really good and I enjoyed listening to them throughout the week, I also bought 3 extra albums to supplement them, being various I'VE Sound compilations.

Monday morning at work was annoying. Mostly because I had to get up early and I was nearly late... But other than that we survived that and the rest of the work week. Between that I received some model kit preorders I was waiting for and built one of them.

FUN MODEL KIT TIME

This is the Moderoid Aestivalis from Martian Successor Nadesico. Within the next week or two, I will have a dedicated blog just for my process of painting this dude. But to summarize how I feel about this model before that: I love this design, I will keep buying Good Smile model kits because they give me what I like, but this was a horrifically frustrating experience just like every other GS kit. Screw you Good Smile, but also keep feeding me.

The other 2 model kits I got are the Fubuki from Muv Luv and the other Aestivalis (the Aerial type) from Nadesico. Those will get their shot in the spotlight soon as well. 

Besides that, a lot of my time was spent preparing for a weekend of prototyping in Unreal Engine. I will not be revealing what projects I'm working on, with who, etc. and going to keep details as minimal as possible. Just know that this is all very early work and that I also mostly come from a background of PC game modding and other silly projects.

Working in Unreal this weekend was a breath of fresh air. Something I really needed after the grueling work I was doing before that. I enjoyed experimenting with things and tinkering and it was very reinvigorating. One of my favorite results of this weekend was setting up a new character model by retargeting it to existing animations. Unfortunately it didn't quite go so well because the rig on our character was too simple, leading to the most hilarious run cycle I have ever seen in my life. We all had a great kick out of it, but most importantly we celebrated because it was PROGRESS!

As this new week begins, I'm gonna continue messing around and enjoying Unreal, as well as working on documentation and design for my project. This is pretty uncharted territory for me but I've been having a blast and I'm feeling good about where things are going.

That concludes this week. Again not sure if I'll do anything like this again but I wanted to post something that wasn't a 2 second dump of word slop for once. If you actually read this far thank you or I'm sorry.