See it here or read on.
Scale Model Hall and VR Grab Lab each got a thing! Various fixes also abound.
- Proconsul walks on a big branch into the scene! I took the rhesus monkey and conformed it to Proconsul proportions. It was probably a bit easier than making it from scratch. Challenges: the rhesus polygons were rough with some ugly shapes around. They especially held back re-posing since the polygons were connected to each other awkwardly. Improvements: ear and eye details enhanced from the earlier appearance. Proconsul-specific challenges: There are a lot of opinions on how to classify proconsulids, including changing names for fossil specimens up to the genus level. I went with a larger Proconsul, P. nyanzae, and kept the Proconsul name due to my taxonomic lumping tendencies. Another challenge is that Proconsul is kind of plain? It is a notable prehistoric primate so that’s why it’s here. It is always presented walking on four legs on a tree branch because that’s what its traits are adapted for. A later change to the model was to add a little interest by giving the model a slightly twisted mid-step pose. I used other quadrupeds, especially baboons and mandrills for the pose reference.
- The New Guinea human femur dagger I promised a while ago is now in the Grab Lab. It was a quick conversion from the original model using just normal maps. Thanks to Dartmouth College and Morphosource for making it available.
- The Grab Lab tables now have a border of “interaction orange” for UI consistency.
- Jamestown church picture replaced with another that showed the grave site better. The previous picture will be repurposed.
- Re-render of the rooms to include Proconsul shadows. I also learned how to de-noise the baked texture in Blender so the shadows and highlights are a little more crisp with a little pixelation at the edges.
- Woops, the first credits page, the one with my name and stuff, was invisible because the text wrapping was accidentally set to zero. It’s back with new info on the Creative Commons and open source nature of the models and code.