I spent some time tweaking our tree model where I left of from last time. One of the major issues I had was that there was some strange transparency issues happening when the tree was viewed from above. Almost as if two of the planes had opposite normals the transparency would combine them together and would only display tiny little fragments. The settings that made impacted the quality the most were changing the transparency mode to Alpha Clipping and disabling back face culling. Some other minor improvements I made were to disable both tree textures from receiving shadows and to make the texture backlit to avoid odd parts of it being illuminated from the sun. Overall I think it turned out quite nice

I’ve been a fan of World of Warcraft for some time now. I have fond memories of leveling my first character a warrior. I had a small group of friends that also played and we spent countless hours exploring Azeroth. I’ve also enjoyed programming since I was about 14 when my dad handed me a book on Visual Basic 6 I believe. The book was way over my head but I still remember the excitement I had when I clicked a button and a popup window appeared. Recently I have been back on the game development track with Godot. GDquest has published some nice courses on Godot development and building on some of what I have learned there I have started a new project. Not being much of an artist myself I like to use available assets when I can. Using a program I recently found called wow_export I pulled out a model of a tree from Elwynn Forest. It took a couple hours of tinkering but I was able to utilize the image to image feature of automatic1111 to create two new textures for the tree. I hooked them up inside of Blender and then sumbled a bit trying to get the transparency to work on the leaves but after a bit I was able to get it working correctly. With haste I proceeded to place the new model into a Godot scene that I recently created using a plane mesh with noise displacement. I was quite pleased to see the tree working reasonably well.

I was starting to get a warning from TrueNAS about low disk space on my NAS. I recently upgraded to TrueNAS Scale about a month ago from FreeNAS. I have really enjoyed using TrueNAS. I used to roll my own services directly on top of Ubuntu but the overhead of maintaing everything has gotten to me. TrueNAS Core has been simple and easy to work with and a nice upgrade from FreeNAS. I had been running a single vdev mirror of two disks with one spare. Once my drive and an extra sata power cable arrived reassigning the spare and the new drive into a 2x2 mirror took only a matter of minutes. Next step ill have to take on is planning the migration out to larger drives since I’ve hit the max number of drives I can squeeze in my spare PC case.

I was starting to get a warning from TrueNAS about low disk space on my NAS. I recently upgraded to TrueNAS Scale about a month ago from FreeNAS. I have really enjoyed using TrueNAS. I used to roll my own services directly on top of Ubuntu but the overhead of maintaing everything has gotten to me. TrueNAS Core has been simple and easy to work with and a nice upgrade from FreeNAS. I had been running a single vdev mirror of two disks with one spare. Once my drive and an extra sata power cable arrived reassigning the spare and the new drive into a 2x2 mirror took only a matter of minutes. Next step ill have to take on is planning the migration out to larger drives since I’ve hit the max number of drives I can squeeze in my spare PC case.

I’ve been having fun learning more about hugo.

After all of the wordpress drama I decided to take a look for an alternative. Hugo appeared to be a popular solution. I am enjoying the local development evnironment I can run. I also do not have high demands for a website and would like to start using this site as a place to put my thoughts and interests. Having this be a public place give me some sense of responsibility and expectations associated with what I put here.