The handOpen animations were leaving a weird particle artifact on the screen each time the event got triggered.
I passed the above photo over to Claude, and it alerted me to the source of the issue, which was an omitted Update context in one of the animation graphs. Please make that the last thing I fix before taking on the particle tuning. I’ve decided to merge my feature branch into main at this point because everything is ready except for the settings calibration.
Good news! It seems like the only thing that’s actually dragging the look of the energy ball below a satisfactory level is the tangential damping I use to keep particles moving towards the sphere’s center as the energy ball moves around. You know how it goes—fix one thing, break another. According to Claude, the fix is to only damp the tangential velocity that would make a particle miss the sphere entirely. I’m currently watching my agent work; it’s deleting a bunch of nodes and repackaging them into a custom HLSL node.
Aaaannnnddddd… it made the classic mistake of trying to give the HLSL node more than 4 inputs. I remember discovering that one a while ago. I’ll need to bake that knowledge into my VFX Graph CLI. In fact, now that Fable 5.1 is out, I ought to do a review pass on that whole project and see if it can be optimized/improved further. It doesn’t look like the dev will ever merge my PR in. I might as well create the CLI for Shader Graph too—naw. I’ll wait till I need that.
The improved tangential damping is complete and working well. I also added a falloff to the damping instead of sharply gating it off within a certain proximity to the sphere. This helps the particles continue to swirl around the sphere’s edges, which makes the energy ball more visible, especially at periods of low movement.
To finish today’s work, I removed old settings profiles and cleaned up the extra audit and handoff docs that had been mistakenly pushed. I gotta add a hook or something preventing .md files from being pushed without warning. Either way, no biggie.
I’m satisfied with my dev work today, but truly, I think the thing that pushed me into flow was my avoidance of today’s main task on my todo list: putting together an Instagram reel with footage from the Asian Heritage Festival (the last event I set this installation up at). That festival was way back in May. Oh boy. If this Energy Ball is ever gonna become well-known, I need to start putting time into my social media. Here’s to hoping I can make that happen 🍻