Pig’s House Is Back (Pig Will Follow… Someday)

Pig’s house is back.

Pig herself is not—yet. She’ll need a bit more time while I rewrite her AI.

The new Pig house is back in the world, and I really like it.

If you remember the old model, this one feels much more like a home. I can easily imagine Pig living inside, hopping around happily, with Bunnies coming over to visit and play.

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About Art

Making my own 3D models is slow, but important buildings need to be original.

I looked through asset stores, and while those models are fine as background props, they all share familiar styles. Once a character has personality and preferences, their environment needs to reflect that.

Bunny houses are square and practical—bunnies choose the safest way to build.

Pig’s house is different. It’s unique. I tried many designs before settling on this one. I can imagine Pig bouncing happily inside her home.

Her house, like Pig herself, is free-spirited. The curves are irregular. She loves flowering fruit trees, so her home blends into the trees. From inside, she can watch the big tree bloom.

Creation means walking through every possible direction.

I often don’t know what I want—only what I don’t want—until I explore enough paths and see real results. Sometimes inspiration doesn’t come at all, and all I can do is wait.

3D modeling is still troublesome and requires many revisions. Sometimes broken data forces me to redo everything. But for me, it’s still easier than traditional art.

When I studied art, anything that required hands-on drawing was extremely difficult for me, no matter how hard I tried. Pencil, watercolor, acrylic—there’s no Ctrl+Z. You need precise muscle control, and even colors must be mixed by hand.

Later I switched to drawing on iPad with Procreate, but even then I relied heavily on undo. Simple drawings still needed many revisions.

I redrew things obsessively, over and over, and still couldn’t match my classmates. For a long time, that felt hopeless.

When I moved to coding and 3D modeling, something changed.

If I couldn’t do something, I practiced a few more times. If the result wasn’t good, I adjusted parameters and tried again. Eventually, it worked. That reduced a lot of my insecurity and frustration.

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About Code

Some features take a huge amount of thinking to design.

Then, after finally implementing them, I realize they slow the game down too much—and I delete them.

For example, I once tried to determine whether an object was on the island using Raycasts. I worried it might be inefficient, especially with many grid cells. I considered precomputing all grid keys and storing them in a hash set—around sixty thousand keys.

I thought about this for a very long time. Eventually, I figured out how to collect all the data.

Before I could proudly show it off, I realized it caused noticeable stuttering and performance drops.

So I deleted it.

From happiness to disappointment, instantly.

The optimistic takeaway: next time, I should remember not to do this.

This is part of learning programming. A mature engineer would know not to go down that path.

I only learn after falling into the pit.

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Recently I noticed Blender has upgraded to version 5. It’s much better now.

Features I once wished for are suddenly available.

It feels like the whole world is moving forward at full speed:

(“沉舟侧畔千帆过 病树前头万木春”)

“Beside a sunken ship, a thousand sails pass by;

before a withered tree, ten thousand trees bloom.”

That’s about it.

Thank you for being my player.

I hope you like Pig’s new home.