Me and Mustafa had wanted to do a talk for the Wikicliki exhibition inside the gallery itself, but we couldn’t do it due to the heightened phase 2 Covid-19 restrictions in Singapore at the moment. So, I decided to challenge myself to create a replica of the gallery so that we could wander about whilst speaking and look at the artwork.

The simple base model was made in Blender.

I imported the model I made in Blender into Unity and then added the materials there. I also downloaded a free Mars Skybox and threw that in the background because WHY NOT. Finally, instead of having slides, I brought in 3 tables and put all the bits and pieces on the table, including a copy of my Dream Syntax book, a hard drive that looks like a hard drive currently on my table, and some laptops which play back videos that make it look like someone is browsing my websites – so we could do a live show and tell.

How much time does it take to make a small interactive thing like this? I usually don’t have an exact number for this, as with many things that involve programming. Sometimes I get stuck on problems for ridiculously long, and sometimes I simply have a nap and BOOM I wake up and have been gifted the solution in a dream. So… for once, I have made a breakdown of the actual time I spend making these “things”.

According to Rescuetime which I use to track all of my personal devices (personal laptop, tablets, mobile phone), it took me a total of 45 minutes to make the entire model in Blender on Friday 7 May 2021 (after working hours).

Rescuetime calculates my working time to be 9-6pm, and shows two graphs for what I do during my working hours and what I do outside of working hours.

The report for that particular day also incidentally shows you where I sometimes fritter my time away when I am not working – er…. randomly scrolling on Tiktok, youtube, contemplating whether I should order a foodpanda, opening late night DM student messages on Slack, accidentally typing “FACE-” into my browser and then immediately stopping myself and closing the browser window)…

Here’s another full screenshot of my Rescuetime dashboard for the day before the talk: Friday May 28.

As it is to be expected, my teaching day job involves a lot of Zoom meetings, looking at Google Slides/Docs/Sheets, and Whatsapp communications. And to this list, I realised that the no less than 4 solid hours I spent on Zoom attending student presentations on Friday using my Work PC are not reflected!! (I guess I am a two-computer person when I am at work, mainly typing on my personal laptop as I watch the Zoom on Work laptop. I suppose if they totted up the numbers from TWO computers at once it would show me using too many hours in my 24 hour day?)

Week of 24-29 May 2021 – Time spent working in Unity
Monday – [Did not spend any time working in Unity, instead wrote and published my first newsletter on Mailerlite, declaring my intention to make a thing for the Saturday talk]
Tuesday – 1 hour 18 minutes
Wednesday – 30 minutes
Thursday – 2 hours 13 minutes
Friday – 2 hours 15 minutes
Saturday – 2 hours 17 minutes
Total time spent in Unity: 8 hours 33 minutes (8.55 hrs)

What do these numbers mean?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don’t know. I just know its important to understand how long each task takes me so I can gauge what is feasible for me to complete, or use the numbers to improve on my so-called ‘velocity’ for a project of this type, so I guess I’ll continue collecting data until I find a way to analyse this data.

Here’s an itch.io for all half-bakery items: https://dbbd.itch.io/

Related posts:

Dream Syntax: 10 years on Hayward Gallery – Art of Change Retroalimentacion (Facultad del Artes Gallery, UAEM) Quick things to do in Blender: Video Editing, Bake Sound to F-curves, VR/3D Storyboarding, Compositing 3D model into photo, and Motion Tracking “Theo.do.lites” (Institute of Contemporary Art Singapore Gallery 1, 17 April – 20 May 2013) I self-studied for 6 and a half hours to pass the Unity Certification (Unity Certified Associate: Game Developer) The Art Space as Signal Processor: Sub-monument, a digital woodcut (Lasalle Praxis Gallery, 5 April 2019 – 5 May 2019) A Shopfront in Blender and Unity: Lazy Speedrun using UV Project from View