Captain's Log: Stardate 78258.8

In the last couple of days I got a lot of work done on making the 3D appearance configurable, in terms of the skybox, lighting, and also the 3D models used for the instrument itself.

Currently the environment configuration has all the options I want (for now) and is completely working. Environment presets are very simple .zip files containing all the necessary files to render the skybox and indirect lighting. These files can be made by anybody with some simple instructions that I'll publish at some point, using whatever .hdr or .exr skybox you want. There will be a bunch of environment presets that come with Anukari, and you can also pick custom presets that you made or were shared with you. For maximum performance, you can also set the skybox to a simple solid color like it was before. Here's what the environment config looks like now:

I haven't made the instrument 3D models configurable in the GUI yet, but behind the scenes they have also been converted to a simple preset file. Again, it's just a .zip file, and it contains a .glb file for each of the 3D assets used by Anukari. Anyone with Blender could completely replace all of the 3D models this way. Anukari will ship with at least a single preset (the models we've all seen already), and possibly others. But the main thing is that a determined user could completely replace the 3D visuals. (Or you could pay a 3D artist to do it for you.)

Eventually I'd like to do some more advanced stuff with this. Currently Anukari doesn't support 3D model animations. I'd like to replace all the hard-coded animations with animations in the .glb files themselves, at which point even the animations could be customized. This isn't going to be super hard but does require that I finally get to paying a 3D artist to redo my assets (I don't feel like learning how to do animation).

Today I bought a ton of commercially-licensed skybox assets, and over the next couple of days I plan to audition them and hand-pick which ones will go in as presets. I also need to clean up some of the new code, fix a couple of edge case bugs, etc, but then I hope to get a pre-alpha release out with all these new visual customization features.