April Updates 4/10/26

It's been almost a month since my last blog post, so I figure it's time to write a little update post, talking about what I've been up to the past month!

Speedrunning wise, I have been gaming I think. I've been focused a lot on bingo, but I've been doing some RTA stuff as well (which helps with bingo lol). A few months ago I created a big wheel which contains pretty much every Majora's Mask item/mask/song/etc. RTA, as well as a few additional category extensions (and ILs) I thought might be fun to do one day. My original plan for that was to spin it once a week at the end of Monday Night Bingo, and then just do a single run of whatever it landed on right then. I did that once and decided that I wanted to try a different approach lol. I'm going to be treating them in much the same way that I started doing IL runs, which is I spin the wheel at the start of the week, and have a week to do runs of it, while trying to optimize and improve my consistency at everything in the run. And also try to do daily no reset runs (at least 5 for shorter runs). I think the no reset runs just help keep me sane tbh, as grinding resets on these short runs is very draining. Although I'm not going to force myself to do runs for the entire week if I end up getting a time I am happy with. The first run I got while doing this was Kamaro's Seal RTA, which I thought would be incredibly boring, but I ended up finding a new trick just for it to save 3 seconds, so it was actually pretty interesting to do.

Bingo wise, I mostly have been starting to route some of the goals that I have always been unsure about, such as getting Mask of Truth with only items you would have at the very start of bingo basically, or Ocean Spider House routes when you don't have Zora/Hookshot. There definitely are some more goals I should look into, but I am pretty pleased with how those turned out, and will be very useful for the upcoming anti-bingo tournament we are hosting in a couple months. We are also going to start practicing for Bingothon soon, as we plan to do a team exploration blackout race, which I think will be super fun!

Now for modeling, I have actually done a few things this past month. One of the bigger project of mine was to create a model of Miku from the music video for Static, which I think turned out really well. It was also pretty popular on tumblr lol.

After that, my friend actually commissioned me port over a SM64 player model they had of their OC to VRChat. I learned a lot about who SM64 handles its models, so that was cool, although it was annoying searching for information on how to properly get the model to a more normal state that modern game engines would like (such as Unity for VRChat). But, I did eventually get it all figured out. I also ended up basically recreating the textures from scratch, as SM64 handles them in a way that VRChat basically hates more than anything lmao, but that really wasn't very hard to do. I even added extra things to the avatar, such as switching between the different hand models SM64 would use by doing hand gestures while in VR, and facial expressions using different face textures. Very cool and useful to learn about doing all that! Model below!

Finally, I think the biggest project I have been working on is actually re-creating my bunny avatar. I have been wanting to do this for a while, since I got more familiar with Blender, as the original model was created in Blockbench, in basically the worst ways possible lol. The textures were very jank, and the model was hard to work on since I wasn't using Blockbench anymore.

So I basically ended up re-creating most of the model, as well as all of the textures, converting them into just one single texture which is much easier to work with and more optimized. I also managed to lower the models triangle/poly count from 22,000~ to around 9000~, which was a very long process lol. The main performance hog was actually the eyes and mouth, if you can believe it, because I created them through Blockbench's texture extrude feature. That feature is intended for pixel art, to create Minecraft items. It basically just extrudes every individual pixel into a 3d object, which as you can imagine for high-res textures would be terrible, lol. So I ended up "re-drawing" the objects in blender, using vertexs to create much more optimized faces which I could map the eye/mouth textures onto. Obviously, it would've been easier to just create planes, and map the textures onto them with transparent backgrounds lol, so I could still create blendshapes for them for blinking/talking animations, but VRChat really hates transparent textures, so that wasn't really an option for me lol. Also, to optimize VRChat avatars, you have to really only have 1 texture, or else your avatar will suffer a performance ranking penalty, which hides your avatar from people unless they manually turn it on (annoying lol). Anyway, I also made other changes to my avatar as well, such as adding functional paws, instead of just animal crossing style nubs lol, and also a bit more detail to the hair. I think the end result turned out really well, with the eyes and mouth looking pretty much exactly as they did too (which is what I wanted), but with much greater performance.

I also setup a way to use this model as a VTuber, through VRChat, so no more PNG Feli...

And I guess that's everything I have been up to, at least as far as my own projects go! Yesterday was also my 1 month anniversary of starting my stronger HRT meds as well, so that's cool (4 months total on hrt so far)! Thank you for reading if you made it this far, lol! See you all later!