May Madness 2026

Challenging myself to make a digital asset every day in May!

[maymadnesschallenge26]

May 11th! Made some simple sketches to plan out my UI elements.

Also I didn't die lol. I took a weekend off to spend time with family for Mother's Day :]

I'll try make up for the 2 days I missed, so I'll have to do either 3 assets in one day, or do 2 assets on 2 separate days. I just got back so I kept it real easy today with some basic doodles figuring out where I wanted everything.

And yes, it is going to be one of those wolf simulator mobile game things. I figured it would be easy as a first (released) game, but we'll see how that goes lol.

A loading screen/symbol idea. Yes it's a tree of life/world tree. The world has it's own lore and runes based very loosely off of irl Norse mythology. It diverges into its own thing though.

Some doodles I made when brainstorming for the UI.

The final design will be made into vector art before it's imported into Unity, but this was a good first step. Mobile game UI is difficult because it gets cluttered fast. Every action has to be an on-screen button because mobile devices typically don't use a separate keyboard or controller to handle game actions.

Also I'm very inexperienced when it comes to making UI, so that doesn't help lol

Erm ok goodbye I sleep now

[maymadnesschallenge26]

Day 8!

I got a lil excited from my last experiment (yes, making crappy 2D grass excites me) and so I made even more grass variants and other foliage. I only used 3 of the 9-10 grass variants and 2 out of the 3 foliage types I had made.

Why are they not all pictured here? Mostly because I'm just supeer tired right now. Breaking news, food found in kitchen, I know. In my defense, I wake up, go to work, get back home, sleep, and do it all again the next day. I straight up have no time for anything else. Sometimes I eat, if I'm lucky.

I made these lil doodles on my breaks and any time I had in between getting ready for work and being at work 🫠

It's so fuuuuuuuuuuuunnnnnnnn!!!

[maymadnesschallenge26]

Today is May 7th, marking the first week of May Madness done! 🎉

I finally realized that Unity has a built-in terrain tool and it's a lot easier than whatever I was trying to do in Houdini. No hate to Houdini, but I don't need hyper-realistic mountains for this project.

I made a simple grass texture, and it isn't half bad! I plan on making some more grass variations and different foliage besides just grass.

I'm seeing the vision here. It may very well be a hallucination, but either way I'm seeing it

[maymadnesschallenge26]

For May 6th I decided to do some extra detailing on an elk sculpt I hadn't finished. It's probably cheating a little, but I was gone most of the day doing various errands and am exhausted. Cut me some slack ok? As bribery I'll give you an emoji, keep the change 👾

(To be fair I'm always tired but I was extra tired today)

I know, I know, it's still a bit rough looking. Mostly because I didn't want to go too high-poly on the sculpt. There was only so much I could do before the 3D jankyness started to creep in.

[The 3D Jank(tm) is always lurking, waiting to mess up any 3D model you work on. It's like an alligator hiding in a pond, waiting for you to get cocky and wade too far in.]

Thankfully this will also be smoothed out in the retopology process in the same way the wolf was. I know I didn't post what the wolf looked like originally on this site, but it was pretty similar.

Okay that's all I go now. Enjoy the green void

[maymadnesschallenge26]

May 5th!

Today I decided to experiment with terrain generation, because what's the point of all these assets if they have nothing to sit on top of? I can't just shove them into the void!

I mean, I could. It would just be kind of weird. Floating rocks. Floating trees. The moon, for some reason.

So anyway, I started out in Houdini, and it turns out that creating terrain has more of a learning curve than I thought it would.

People make it look so easy smh my head 😒

I imported it as an .obj into Unity to see what it would look like and then made a shader based on height for the funni colors (in hindsight I should've just exported the height map, but I'm not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree and don't know how to do that lol)

Uhhh so yeah gonna keep working on that

[maymadnesschallenge26]

May the 4th be thorth or whatever.

I decided to make some (non-space) rocks for today. A lil boring, but I had already made some rocks in Houdini before and they were very...lumpy looking.

I wasn't vibing with them, so I made some slightly more stylized ones with the limited amount of Houdini knowledge I have.

We got scattered flat rocks, Combo Rock(tm), and pokey rocks that give off Iron Lung vibes for some reason.

The great thing about these is that I can export them as a tool and make as many random, scattered rocks as I want in Unity or elsewhere without having to hand model each individual stone.

It should save both time and my sanity.

[maymadnesschallenge26]

Day 3 of May Madness! Yipeee!

For May 3rd, I decided to finally clean up this wolf sculpt I had made back in March. Retopo-ed that bad boyyyy

I still need to tweak some stuff and add back the details, but I'm tired of looking at this thing so it'll happen another day or something.

[Btw If you don't know what retopologizing is, here's a gist of it:

Long adult version: When you make a 3D model finally look the way you want, you then have to go back and make all the polygons (the building blocks of a 3D model) look nice so you can actually use it. Basically you sort of make the same thing twice. It sucks as much as you'd imagine.

Short baby version: You clean up your model by remaking the entire thing with better math shapes that computer likes but you don't.]

Retopo-ing is one of my least favourite parts of 3D modeling. Ngl maybe 40% of 3D modeling is actually enjoyable and the other 60% makes you want to chuck your computer out of a window.

But the end result is really rewarding. Lots dopamine.

Guess I'll have to keep doing it 🫠

[maymadnesschallenge26]

May 2nd!

I got out of work super late, per usual, so I went with another simple 2D asset. I made some pine tree leaf cards because I had made a pine tree before in Houdini and it was UGLY. Mostly because it was way too hyper-realistic for what I'm going for.

Second pic is how they look assembled very quickly into a tree shape lol. The trunk and fine tuning will come later.

Alright that's it. Goobye

[maymadnesschallenge26]

I'm challenging myself to make a digital asset every day in May! Feel free to join!

For May 1st I created my own 2D moon. The moon is drawn in Procreate and its shadow is a separate image that sits on top (multiply layer).

I figured it was fitting because of the Flower Moon today :)