So I decided that editing 3D objects with a trackpad is non-optimal. I sprung for a super-fancy professional-grade mouse. Or, I picked up the first decent-looking cheap Bluetooth multi-button mouse on Amazon, because it could be delivered the next day. It came today, and seems to work well enough. I haven’t used a mouse in years, so it’ll be an adjustment.

I tried setting up a new Project, replacing the stock First-Person game with my own stuff. Really, I just deleted the initial obstacle-objects, and then started building a new space within it. Primitive, but I’m getting better. I need to figure out the rendering settings, though, because they seem to go from “Quake II” to “Cyberpunk” and I can’t figure out how to properly set it so it will play at a decent framerate on my M2 MBA.

Back in March, an article was published in our UCalgary News describing a collaboration between one of our librarians and an instructor in SAPL (UCalgary’s School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape). The project involved students designing possible future library spaces, and they came up with some really interesting ideas. I immediately thought “hey - that’d be cool to try with a focus on learning spaces!”

I reached out to folks in SAPL to see if they were interested, and got connected with Matthew Parker. We talked about this, and decided it was worth exploring further. He teaches ARCH 700 - a work-integrated learning course for senior architecture grad students to work with client organizations to research and design architectural solutions. We pitched using the Taylor Institute for Teaching & Learning as a “client”, with students working with us to design possible future learning spaces.

I created another new project – this time using the Game – First Person template, with Starter Content. I make some cubes, resize and rotate them, and kinda-sorta have an idea of how to do this. But I have no idea how to do booleans to remove chunks to add doors and windows. I’m sure that’s easy.

After reading some documentation and starting ANOTHER new project (Game – Blank – with starter content), and watching part of a youtube video (about using boolean brushes on Cubes to cut windows and doors out of other cubes – but that didn’t work), I have a prototype space built with starter content primitives and some Cubes and textures. Very cool. I think I can make this work.

Maybe there’s something funky with the .FBX files? I’ll try importing them into Blender to create new ones.

Download Blender.
Remember how to use Blender.
Import the .FBX files for both first and second floors, match them up, join them, and export a shiny fresh new .FBX file that hopefully doesn’t have any issues.

Create a new project in UE5, with starter content.
Test it in playback mode. It works great.
Import the new .FBX file and poof nothing works and my laptop begs for mercy.

“I have these Revit-exported .FBX files of the Taylor Institute. How hard can it be to import them into Unreal Engine 5 and build some learning space mockups in them?”

Took maybe 30 seconds to figure out how to import the files. It’s built-in.

I started with the Architectural starter content, and tested that it worked first. It works great and I can navigate around in playback mode. Cool. I can move around and explore the space in pretty impressive realtime rendering.

My dissertation explored the connections between the design and analysis of video games and our design and understanding of teaching & learning. Much of that work was shaped by a conversation I had with one of my supervisors:

Figure 1.2: One of the conversations that shaped the direction of this dissertation. AI-generated character portrayal provided by Stable Diffusion.

After working with Matthew to finalize plans for the architecture studio project, I figured I needed to refresh my own 3D modeling skills – and I want to do the project myself. I started dabbling with the default content in UE5 Architectural mode. Managed to get a model set up and running well on my laptop. I’m not sure “Architecture” mode is what I want, despite the project being architecture-focused. I may want to switch to building in “Game” mode – but what’s the difference? So much to learn. UE5 is huge.

I had a random thought, triggered perhaps by the tinnitus that is constantly eeeeeeee-ing in the background of everything. What if there was a Mastodon bot that just replied to every toot that mentioned it, with a string of eeeeeee’s of the same length as the message?

The second semi-random thought was that I had no idea how to even start to build such a thing.

The third obvious-in-2023 thought was that I’d bet ChatGPT could help with this somehow.

I’d intended to quickly write this post to reflect on the session, but it’s stayed in my drafts pile for a couple of weeks now so I’m going to share what I can remember. I’ll likely be misremembering some of the details of the session, but this should hit the highlights at least.

Recently, I had the absolute pleasure to be invited to co-present at the 67th Annual Association of University Architects Conference, conveniently hosted this year in Calgary, and even more conveniently having one day’s sessions housed within the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning. Our Vice Provost Teaching and Learning, Dr. Leslie Reid, was invited to share her experience in leading the Taylor Institute, and she brought in Dr. Natasha Kenny and myself to round out the session.

I’ve been seeing a lot of energy online about bringing the old web back, or bringing the humanity back to the web, or just trying to make some art, dammit. So, here’s my part. This blog is my corner of the World Wide Web. Of the non-corporate, non-monetized, non-advertised, non-user-tracked, human-scale online experience. I haven’t been blogging, partially because I’ve been holding back due to Not Having Anything Profound to Share™. But that’s not how the blogosphere works, so I’m going to make an effort to post more. Maybe I’ll start up the weekly recaps or something, too. Who knows? I have been pretty good about the daily photos thing though…

In Obsidian, I use a folder of notes called “Collections”. Inside Collections are various folders that act as buckets of info, in a quasi-Zettelkasten notes-as-personal-wikipedia kind of thing.

My Collections currently include (in alphabetical order):

• Articles
• Committees
• Ideas
• Institutions
• Organizations
• People
• Profiles
• Topics
• Vendors

Some of these have subfolders to organize notes into smaller buckets. For example, Topics is organized by folders for:

• General Tech
• Higher Education
• Information Technologies
• Learning Spaces
• Learning Technologies
• Misc
• Pedagogy
• Processes
• TI Projects
• UCalgary

The folders change and I add to them and reorganize as needed. I’ve only been using Obsidian for about 4 months now, so I figure things will continue to settle as I get deeper into it…

Rambling blog post alert: there isn’t a simple, straightforward way to tell the story of how I use Obsidian. This is going to be a bit of a winding post as I start to describe my setup and workflow. And there will be gaps because a) I don’t have time to write an omnibus description of this and b) you don’t want to read that anyway. I’ve been meaning to write this for awhile, but kept getting stuck by the scale of what was needed. So, forget that, here’s a first and incomplete blog post to get it started…