Long time no post. Stupid real life has been keeping me busy these days, but I managed to get this out last night. The ETH gas fees are through the roof so it will be live on Makersplace at some point, but who knows when.
https://makersplace.com/midlet/flutter-1-of-1-39602/
They have a feature where you can pay the gas fee yourself, but when I looked it was around $27 so I think I'll just wait.
I've been having fun playing with these 3D scans I bought recently at https://www.3dscanstore.com/ The detail and realism you can get with them is pretty crazy although I didn't use any of that for this piece, just the loose silhouette. Just some basic displacement then lots of tweaking shaders to create interesting colors and composition.
In OCA news, @jotakrevs has officially joined the Mod team of OCA. He's been leading the charge on fighting abuse and plagiarism for a long time now, and wanted more responsibility, which I'm happy to dish out. We'll have a few others now also helping to fight abuse and Jota will be helping out on the curation report posts so we can get back on track with that.
I'm also in the process of developing a system for filtering out low quality posts. There's some technical things I need to work out, but the basic idea is that I want something run by more community consensus, vs just me and a chosen group of mods. But, if you're in OCA spamming garbage, just know, your days are numbered.
There are lots of awesome artists here who are very serious about their craft and put a ton of time and energy into their work. When that work gets drowned out by too much low effort spam or even something with high effort, but not meeting a quality standard that we as a community want to maintain, then we need a change, and one is coming.
One of the first steps in that direction is the new Curated Content page. Something I've been looking forward to for quite a while. This is a manually curated page that will be populated with OCA's best works.
I think I'll eventually make a post about this, but I think I'm over the idea of posts being sorted via upvotes. There's too many other variables, psychological, practical, financial, etc, in this system for that to work as a mechanism of determining, "this is what people like" or "this is what we should show people". At this point I think it would be better to introduce a "Likes" system and combine that with things like views and engagement, reblogs, shares etc, to determine what should be at the tops of feeds, and upvotes and tips should all just be a means of supporting your favorite authors, but be totally divorced from the trending algorithm. Anyway, that's probably a deep conversation, so I'll save that for it's own post, but that should about wrap this one up. Stay tuned for more updates! See you all in the next post.