RRév O'Conner

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Notes from work,
life, and everywhere in between.

Notes from work, life, and the road in between.

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2026·05·13LifeTwelve Patents and an Unexpected Detour: Designing Radiator Splash Protection for a SuperSportWhat started as a fix for radiator grime ended up rewriting itself as an exercise in wheel wake aerodynamics. This is the long story of how reading patents changes what you think you're solving.2026·04·25CGIReconstructing Transforms from Baked FBX VerticesWhen Maya bakes transforms into vertex data, recovering position is trivial, scale is awkward, and rotation hides a trap that distance alone cannot solve.2026·04·25CGIKilling Fence Shimmer on Quest 3: A Custom Alpha Sharpening Function for Thin GeometryFences, cages, and wire mesh shimmer on Quest 3 in ways that no amount of MSAA will fix. The solution is a single Shader Graph custom node that combines fwidth sharpening, distance-based cutoff reduction via mip estimation, and 4-tap RGSS supersampling of the alpha channel.2026·04·18CGIPreviewing Runtime Decals in the Unity EditorBridging a plugin's runtime decal system into edit mode so artists can debug projections without entering Play.2026·04·18CGIPatching Meta SDK's Depth Occlusion: A Dual-Channel Portal System for Quest 3How we patched Meta SDK v77's environment depth occlusion with a dual-channel portal system, letting virtual objects render through real-world surfaces like glass without breaking depth tests elsewhere.2024·11·24CGITexture compression for Unreal Engine — BCn and texture packing.Bits per pixel, block compression, and what to actually reach for when. BCn formats deconstructed — plus the texture-packing decisions Unreal hides behind its named presets.2024·11·05DevIntroducing Blender UVshapekeys: Shape Key Magic Based on UV LayoutA Blender add-on that reconstructs shape keys using UV coordinates instead of vertex IDs, so they survive retopology and topology changes.2024·10·20DevIntroducing Normal Map Z Reconstruction v2.0: Effortless Blue Channel RecoveryA Windows app that reconstructs the blue (Z) channel of a normal map from its red and green channels, with batch processing and a linear/sRGB-aware path for textures like Texturing.xyz vFace maps.2024·09·10DevIntroducing a Blender Add-On: Custom Script ShelfA Blender add-on that brings Maya/Max-style custom script shelves to Blender, with copy-paste script management and panel-based organisation.2024·08·15TravelNiti Village: No Permission Required for Indian CitizensIndian citizens no longer need an Inner Line Permit to visit Niti Village in Uttarakhand. The rule changed in 2022, but most online sources still get it wrong.