Teach a Man to Fish

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 07:30:49 +0000

I’ve got another blog post in the queue but I’m trying to maintain a cadence so this one’s a hail mary for routine.

Workflows

One of my main goals with my Unity setup — and I wish I could share it but I just rely on way too much non-open source content — is to create a lab bench for silly little experiments. I don’t mind Asset Store content, but using something complete does take away from the experimental nature of something like that, so I’ve been looking at workflows.

I’ll write a bit more about this in the next post but, suffice to say, it’s difficult finding the sort of the thing that I can use to produce decent-looking content for someone who is decidedly not an artist.

Site Happenings

Alongside all of this, I had been near-constantly tinkering with the site and came away with what I think are some good solutions to make it a bit more interesting:

News Wall — There’s a collection of stories from sites I like and
people I follow up on the front page now and it updates using the
super complex technology of an RSS feed.
There is also a Slack and a Discord bot sharing the news out on
respective servers and it’s quite lovely.
Development Gallery — I wrote about the dev gallery already but it
has since undergone a rework and redesign and has come out all new
and shiny.

Trent Learns Software

The only downside with wanting to create more myself is that it means I need to get at least passably qualified with the various software being used. The full list that I have planned for the pipelines in the Unity engine environment I have worked out so far are:

Gaea 2 — An absolutely superb follow-up to the already great Gaea 1.
World Creator 2 — This is for a follow-up step to the Gaea 2 work and
it has plugins explicitly to get landscapes into Unity and Unreal
Engine.
EmberGen — Just top-notch software.
PopcornFX 2 — Complementing EmberGen by being the more versatile effect
creation suite that can take advantage of EmberGen (and JangaFX’s
other software). I was a huge fan and advocate for PopcornFX, but I
the node graph-based design of PopcornFX 2 is taking me some real
time to get used to (much less, get quick with).
Houdini — Houdini and Houdini Engine are the lynch pin in all of the
pipeline ideas that I want to try out and also probably the scariest
thing to think about really learning. So I haven’t yet. The end.

It’s been an absolute blast sinking some time into these whenever I have some downtime and just digging into the kind of stuff I haven’t in games in… A while. And I’ve gotten pretty acceptable with Gaea 2 so far! Now for the rest!

evidence

And In Case You're Wondering…

This is just about where I am with Unity right now, this audit window should answer some questions:

I’m not crying, you’re crying.

In Summary
Unrelated to all of this, I randomly realized while at a doctor appointment that there was no reason that I had to settle for “trent-polack.com” (with a dash) because I’m pretty sure I’m the only person with this name in existence. And, even if not, he’s probably not a nerd enough to need these so all of the following direct to the site now:

https://trentpolack.com (the new default)
https://trent-polack.com
https://trent-polack.net (hey, they offered a good deal)

Coder Legion - Recent posts tagged gaea

Teach a Man to Fish

Workflows

Site Happenings

Trent Learns Software

And In Case You're Wondering…