My goodness, back again after a looooong hiatus. When I originally got fired from my job at EDGLRD back in February, I would’ve guessed development activity on the Interactive Energy Ball would skyrocket. Thank god I didn’t place any bets on that. Mmmm. Readers of this blog know from my last post that I did a project with my new ZED 2i camera for an interactive media festival in March, but what else is new? Well, a week after that festival, I reused the camera on interactive visuals I set up for a series of shows during Miami Music Week. And after that? I got completely addicted to Claude.
Like a mechanic with a favorite car, I frequently tune and re-tune Claude. This activity has been captured in my claude-skills repo, which has evolved from a small collection of aggregated skills I created for various CLIs into a full harness for Claude Code. I’m pretty proud of it. I’ve aggregated quite the collection of CLIs too. I now have Claude driving Unity, Blender, TouchDesigner, Notch, ComfyUI, Capcut, Houdini, and more. All of this without granting Claude mouse control and computer use permissions. It’s sick.
Still, there are certain times I have to do work manually, like in the golden days of old. Those visuals I made for Music Week are a perfect example—Claude had control of Unity’s inspector, but its pesky little octopus arms couldn’t wiggle inside VFX Graph, so I had to engineer stuff myself and flex the finger muscles. In May, this happened again when I was tasked with creating particle system visuals for a private party and stayed up all night making VFX graphs. It was great to actually work again, but I had an itch to scratch—a massive bottleneck in my agentic workflow—myself.
Being unable to leverage my agent of choice in my favorite software felt like celebrating Valentine’s Day alone (Not really). I just figured it’d be dope to have help if I ever got stuck. Work had picked up again, but I promised myself that as soon as I had free time, I’d create myself a CLI for VFX Graph.
So that’s what I did. More accurately, I extended the existing unity-cli. Now that I can control VFX Graph with Claude, it can theoretically comprehend the entire pipeline of the Interactive Energy Ball. That hypothesis needs testing, and today, I finally added my updated CLI Bridge with VFX Graph edit support into the project. Updates coming soon :)
Side note (P.S.): I set up the Interactive Energy Ball at the Asian Cultural Festival at the end of May. The area they gave me for the experience was well-lit, so I became very confounded when my Kinect couldn’t seem to track anyone past a certain (short) distance away from it. After some A/B testing, I discovered that my main Kinect (the one I used at Love Burn and all the prior Frost Museum events) did not track bodies nearly as accurately as my backup Kinect did. Suffice to say, this probably explains the massive letdown in tracking I experienced at this past Love Burn. I was too quick to blame the environment instead of the hardware. Lesson learned. Now that my backup camera is my new main, I need to purchase a new backup camera.