#the animation software i use isn't really animation software bc i don't know how to use animation software

[garden-eel-draws]

I just put in like 2 hours of work (software/skill issue--I know) to turn a picture I just digitally painted into a simple color-changing animation...only to be painfully reminded that GIF compression exists. My sprite animations have always turned out fine, so I forgot. Augghhh after figuring out the colors and frames on this thing it just looks like garbagggeee 😭😭😭

[thursdaysrain]

my experience with blender and unity, together, has been a bit of a nightmare, but separately they haven't been bad. unity i've had issues with but they always felt surmountable, like, no matter what i can work around this problem.

blender i just enjoy, it has this reputation as like a weird badly designed software but maybe that's gone away w/ recent (recent as in.. years ago) ui changes. new features have been great and there isn't much for me to complain about here, but idk what a new user's experience is like. it's hard to tell people who ask me how to get started what to work with, bc everything i learned from is out of date.

the real headache comes from the transition between the two, which has been a real nightmare for me. once i'm all done working on wormgrubber 2.0, i need to put together workflow document to reference whenever i'm working on new 3d assets for unity in the future. it's a big list and it's been a real pain to discover each problem one at a time.

first and foremost it is obvious to me now that blender is not gamedev software. when i started gamedev, i split my time between learning shaders and learning 3d, not touching animation and mostly focusing on making little model display art pieces. i did this for a couple years. rigging was always a huge pain in the ass, weight painting moreso, so i just avoided it for a while. when i brought my first fully rigged piece into unity it was a nightmare, nothing looked right at all. this kind of thing honestly traumatized me, lol. i spent so much time trying to obsessively make perfect rigs bc i was terrified by shapekeys and drivers, horrified to spend hours setting something up only for it to be useless. this was wrongheaded for multiple reasons... there are so many features in blender that are just not relevant to unity and/or don't export through the only 3d format unity uses, fbx. this makes sense if you think about it for a bit, blender has a lot of features for rendering 3d animation and art but a lot of this wouldn't work in a realtime game, it's just too intensive. but! if you spend all your time learning 3D instead of specifically learning "3d for game animation" you come to lean on things like corrective smoothing or other modifiers.

3d is a weird mix of like, destructive and nondestructive workflows. blender will often let you work your way into positions you cant easily recover from without a lot of extra work or discarding work, setups that work fine within blender but absolutely will not export to unity. things like being unable to apply modifiers to models with shapekeys, but needing to apply all shapekeys to properly export a model, etc.

unity does this thing where it has very specific ideas about how things should work and it only tells you what it's doing maybe like 20% of the time. everything else is up to you to figure out the hard way. im not sure yet if this is an fbx problem or not but interpolation settings in blender aren't exported to unity, so it just comes up with its own. unity doesn't play the last frame of an animation. this makes sense for some contexts, because an animation is an interpolation between a start point and an end point, but like, nothing in unity tells you this the case. whenever i search for these things i always find forum posts, not unity documents. and you cant really change it without clumsy code slapped on top bc so much of this is below the closed off part of unity's code.

make games this way, not that way. i used to always think that when i was struggling against unity it was a sign i was designing something poorly, but now i know enough to know it's often because unity is itself struggling under the weight of choices made years ago, or half finished projects with poor documentation. arcane rules and practices i don't know bc i didn't go to college and because the knowledge is typically split across like several different jobs in a normal large studio.

i don't know how you learn this stuff other than trial and error. maybe in a college?? i dont know how other self taught indies deal with it. tutorials on youtube/etc seem to be split between like teaching you isolated tricks or teaching you very specific workflows without telling you exactly why you can't do this or that. blender tutorials are often for non-gamedevs, and unity tutorials are about following unity's design decisions without explaining them.

i know creating tutorials is a lot of effort and it's impossible to be fully comprehensive, but for something as common as 'take blender thing and put it in unity' should be for indie gamedev, i dont get why i havent seen more grumbling about this. i feel like every major snag i've come across (ones mentioned here are only a few of them) i was completely clueless about until i started doing some digging and the only thing to save me is some post from like 2016 on the unity forums.

its been a struggle!!!! i know i'm getting closer to the end of the tunnel but like every time i think it's a straight shot some new pit opens up. still, i'm getting there. my short advice to anyone is to always iterate, if you are trying to make art for games, make some art and put it in gamdev software. see what you like about it, how your desired workflow works with the software, etc. these skills arent separate, they have to be tied together.

[dojae-huh]

Different anon but thank you so much for such detailed and thoroughly written post Huh-nim! I read every words and your inside pov from a country that having war are really eye-opening. Wars are always a complicated matter with a lot of aspects to consider, I wish people who're irrationally jumping on the hate train can read this post to open their world view, sadly I don't think they want to listen to other perspective from their so call moral-highground.

I've been really upset since yesterday, I expect this is a good opportunity for antis to throw hate at him, but it's even worse that people call them self fans also refuse to acknowlegde the facts Korean fans already point out in detail about how this campaign only run in Korea, and have nothing to do with the war. They can't buy the meal if they're not in Korea, so it's not even boycotting, they just want to throw the word around thoughtlessly. Being fans I thought they would actually more interested in finding out if the informations that're harmful to him true or not but they instead keep spreading misinfo like wild fire, ignoring the fact it's a huge contact and not like he can get out of it just bc they want him to. Now some even threaten his safety at upcoming concert and fansign, how irony huh. Online attack is one thing but I really worry about his wellbeing. Hopefully SM can make sure the security will be good enough to protect him.

Yes, MD is a franchise, what the branch in one country does isn't connected to what other branch is doing. I've looked quickly into it (I wasn't aware of the thing with the company, apparently the boycott has been going on since early October). So the Israel branch (owned by some Israely businessmen, probably) donated free meals to soldiers and hospitals (hm, helping injured civilians, maybe even those attacked by terrorists in the border villages (?) is a bad deed indeed, as for the soldiers, from their POV they are fighting to rescue hostages, and in Isralian's eyes they are their protectors). Soon after, many branches in other countries (mostly majority muslim) donated to Palestine. And Korean campaign is about helping Korean children (another bad deed).

The behaviour of these fans simply speaks for their immaturity and lack of proper education (even Cambridge and Oxford fail people nowadays, I hear). Idols are low on the totem pole, they are entertainment, not human beings with feelings even. They and their image can be smeared with mud at any perceived "danger" to a fan's "higher morality". Just remember Jaehyun and his covid and bar scandal.

I doubt those who threated Do's wellbeing are his fans. Most ptobably they are the solo-stans of other members, and they just attack him "protected by the righteousness", knowing other fans will be hesitant to fight them off, that they have the stage to themselves. It's no different from Putin preaching "we fight to protect our (religious) values and (slavic) traditions". Even a dictator uses excuses before the masses, painting himself the good one.

People, who are quick to jumping on hate vagons shouldn't read me, I fear, I'm a Russian afterall. A common age nazi. So my wise words won't rich them.

I heard a comparison recently of the world with a gladiator arena. I liked it. It gives no excuse for self-pitying or for naivette. If you want to live, you must learn how to think for yourself and how to navigate the bloodbath happenning around you.

People are weird monkeys. We are non-agressive to our kin, which allows us to cooperate, share food, shelter, etc, but highly agressive to the others, the rival tribes who potentially can take our food and other resources. We progressed technologically, but not biologically. We are still primitive animals with a grenade in hand. Civility, refinement, culturedness are all just a thin layer of late addition software atop of older software and hardware. We are stripped of them in a blink of an eye unless we learn true morals and acquire integrity.

When an idol is labeled as good, he is "ours", "belonging to my tribe of good people". Once someone says that the idol is bad, he is ousted from "friends" to "enemies" category right away. And the rules of attitude change in an instant. You can't like him anymore, you can't protect him anymore, he is "our enemy", and if you think otherwise "you are like him, you are the enemy as well". A mob is formed and starts to live by the herd rules.

Researchers from Hebrew University, NYU, and MIT explored herd mentality in online spaces, specifically in the context of "digitized, aggregated opinions."[7] Online comments were given an initial positive or negative vote (up or down) on an undisclosed website over five months.[8] The control group comments were left alone.

The researchers found that "the first person reading the comment was 32% more likely to upvote it if it had been already given a fake positive score."[8] Over the five months, comments artificially rated positively showed a 25% higher average score than the control group, with the initial negative vote ending up with no statistical significance in comparison to the control group.[7] The researchers found that "prior ratings created significant bias in individual rating behavior, and positive and negative social influences created asymmetric herding effects."[7]

"That is a significant change," Dr. Aral, one of the researchers involved in the experiment, stated. "We saw how these very small signals of social influence snowballed into behaviors like herding."[8]

Doyoung wanted to help the children of his country but in return for his kindness gets bashed by virtue-signalling people.

What can you do? Grow your own head, have a proper moral compass, gather as much information as possible before taking a stance or making decisions, and understand that people be people - easily manipulated and swayed emotional and aggressive beings.

[twinklepuzzle]

As a software developer who mostly works with web apps, I may have an answer for this. And there's two main points that I want to address: 1) why are things bubbles and 2) why is *everything* bubbles.

Why are things bubbles?

This one I don't have as much of a definite answer for but my hypothesis boils down to "it looks more modern". It looks more modern because things *used* to be all squares. At first I'm sure they were squares bc squares are easier to make (the computer doesn't have to do any math or anything, it's just straight lines), but squares look older. Side note: I think this is also part of why things aren't shaded as much (think of the old windows XP start button, how it had shading to make it look like it had volume. Now it looks "old" bc it was on windows XP which is old).

So, round == modern, square == old. Bc things used to be square and we can show off by making things *not* square bc computers can make curves now when they couldn't when computers were new. It doesn't matter if it actually looks *new* new anymore, so long as it doesn't look *old*. (Bc businesspeople, stakeholders, etc care a lot about not looking outdated. Fun fact: ppl in certain manufacturing niches *hate* things that look too modern and will reject software that looks too fancy)

Why is *everything* bubbles?

Software devs want you to be able to quickly and intuitively figure out how to use their site/app/whatever. A big way to make that easier is by maintaining consistency between sites. Consistency is why you know what certain icons mean (even when they aren't super obvious); the same icon is used for the same thing in multiple places, so you just know that's what it means (and it's confusing or annoying when the icon is used for something else). It's how kids know that a floppy disk is the save icon even tho they've never seen or used a floppy disk.

You might think "okay, that makes sense for icons and things that are actually *functional* but what does that have to do with shapes?" and that's a good question!! The thing is that because things have gotten so consistent, and people hate change (remember when Tumblr moved the reblog button to the bottom of posts and everyone was mad?), I could see the assumption being made that users will immediately notice how sharp a site is and will be disoriented or annoyed or otherwise put off because it's different. So nobody wants to break the trend bc what if it makes people reject your app as a whole? Then you've put in all that effort for nothing, and your target audience will not be reached.

So everyone wants to look similar in form to everyone else bc consistency is good. To differenciate their app, they focus on color palettes or a unique feature or fitting a specific niche, rather than interesting shapes or layouts.

Also. Just realized this could be relevant, but there's a tool/library/package that you can use on your website for free; it's called Material and it's made by google. It's easy to use, and it has built-in animations and things that seem really fancy and are normally difficult or annoying or time-consuming to set up from scratch. So it gets used a lot! And Material, afaik, makes things rounded (if not bubbles) my default (you can apply your own styling to it but I don't think most ppl bother beyond size and color).

In conclusion

It's because it looks modern, is convenient, and makes it easier to get used to an app/makes the average user less likely to reject the app on the basis of it being different. I'm not saying that those things are the views of the general public, or that they're particularly accurate, but they're based on what I've seen and heard a lot in my work and schooling (and from what other more experienced devs have said they've heard).

It isn't *necessarily* a good or a bad thing; part of it is almost certainly driven by capitalism, some of it is probably out of desperation or feeling like they *have* to in order to be/stay relevant, and some of it is just thinking it looks clean/cool/modern. I don't have any real suggestions for how to change it since it *is* so pervasive, but if you really don't like the bubbly look, be vocal about it and support things that use a sharper look!

The purpose of this was basically to infodump and maybe bring up some interesting points, give an insider perspective, whatever. I personally like a rounded look and a square look, they're both good for their own reasons.

oh the notes bubble is disgusting. get that out of my sight