Curation

Wherein I write about the specific pieces for inclusion, the philosophical/aesthetic perspective of the show, and especially the taxonomic potential for exhibiting these kinds of works (models, animations), with things like animation, speed, scale, lighting, rotation, translation, and so on.

Spaces (Started 29 July 2026)

Day 1 (29 July 2026)

I need to think about the flow of the rooms now. I fired up a keynote as a way to do that and got stuck here:

Not stuck but just tired? Laying out the rooms together and thinking about how they will or won’t work together is hard. It made me think the base man deserves a huge room full of him… I think that would be appreciated. It made me think I would want a big “pictures” room but then I worry it won’t actually be tenable because the pictures look so kind of horrible stretched and so on? They’re so tiny by default though and so boring if they’re all just laid out in a grid?

And there’s just the classic linear versus hub and spoke kind of stuff around the spaces. Do I want to just lead the player through a sequence or should there be “hub worlds” where multiple rooms are accessible? May feel more interest, but also necessarily makes the place feel kind of sma… no does that make sense?

Anyway it’s a moment and I’ll address it further tomorrow.

Day 2 (30 July 2026)

First thoughts

Made another sketch:

In making it started to think again about questions of trajectory. For instance I was just looking at the Pizza room in editor and though of how it does make sense to have it near the Pictures room, but also the idea that it could feel nice to walk through the Pizza room with the pizzas to the side like a transitional space. But then how the thin room doesn’t allow that door configuration which is frustrating.

I’m worried just a bit that the spaceship is a bit too boring to start with, not spectacular enough. But I do like that thought of a really “normal” beginning turning weirder.

Linearity?

A lot of the rooms don’t really admit of you passing through at the moment, but they could. Rooms that can’t really have an exit would be Pizza… maybe that’s all. I think Dead Man probably can’t either because it makes the space not feel claustrophobic enough.

And once you have a couple of non-transitional rooms it may make more sense to go hub. Current I think have the Apocalpypse space leading you out to the creature to the desert which… I think that kind of works. In fact the Apocalypse Space is probably the one place where casting a shadow from the creature into that space would be fine. But maybe also just not very noticeable?

Here is an essentially linear version:

Assumes I can install the pizzas in a very large room which… maybe I can more in the style of the giant sculptural form leaning against the walls, perhaps just two of them. Assigns THREE doors to Dead Man which makes no sense at all.

Stairs

Starting to think about stairs. Thinking about Apocalypse-to-Desert as a smart choice that makes sense… let me assume I could make stairs (NOT a safe assumption) and see what that would be…

Hmmm… with stairs I’m running into the linear problem, notably with Dead Man but also a bit with Pizza. Maybe Dead Man could just be super uncanny, a break in the general nature of things? Easy to miss though? Ooh or I suppose you could do the thing where you go in and then come out a different door? But could get weird. But worth a thought and try.

Weaving

I’m thinking about weaving back and forth through a single floor? Linear but curving. Use that Dead Man trick in there somewhere.

Something like:

Or maybe something like:

The second one to move the pizza earlier because it feels odd to have it so late. Entering the base made from the side means you won’t get a big preview as you turn in. Going from Dead Man to Creature is nice because it would be almost a “jump scare” in the right way. Creature to Apocalypse to Desert makes sense as well.

So y’know what… that might be the layout to pursue for realsies. It’s even a fairly convincing building shape?

Gift shop

I’m thinking about a gift shop with miniature versions of all the models that would take you to the website for that asset.

Works (Started 15 July 2026)

I think it’s time to just think about what works to include. (Also about the idea of not fussing too much about rooms, just have a set of rooms, one per work, and install them in a way that I like.) I think in terms of the works to include it should almost entirely be things that I just think are interesting themselves, less about the sweep of Maksim’s career/approach and more about the act of contemplating the work of a single person, not necessarily trying to “solve” it but to invite questions and comparisons from the audience. I don’t think I need a “perspective” that I’m bringing to this necessarily - the project is the selection and installation of the work and what emerges out of that, the conversation with materials under these specific constraints ideally revealing itself in interesting ways? (I should write another why.)

Short list of curation (✅ is installed to some extent)

PBR Pizza ✅

PBR Pizza on the Asset Store

It’s a 13.1MB pizza from 2018. Looks like a pepperoni. Comes on a circular serving board. Has no bottom faces. Nine reviews, generally five stars.

I had imagined installing this pizza in three forms, one on each of three walls of a small room, scaled up to be like a large canvas. One regular, one with no albedo, one with no bump either.

Increasingly unconvinced by the value of that (though I should try it in that specific format), but do like the idea regardless of the pizza handing, very large, on a wall like a painting.

Why did Maksim make a pizza? It’s the only food item in his entire collection of works. Why this pizza? What’s the deal with PBR in general and in this case specifically?

Desert Night

Desert Night on the Asset Store

It’s a 51.6MB desert landscape specifically set at night, including a skybox. It’s 8km x 8km so it’s pretty huge. From 2016.

It’s the only terrain in Maksim’s collection so I guess it stands out for that reason, though he has a couple of other “environments” (a sci-fi level, the gamer gerl room, the barracks place). It’s kind of naturally beautiful, and it’s striking he chose to set it at night. What makes it be at night other than the suggested lighting exactly?

Whenever I’ve worked with it so far I cannot get the lighting right so it always looks weird. I’d like it to appear moonlit, but so far so bad.

As I’ve said elsewhere, I’m attracted to the idea of the player walking out of the museum at the end into the desert and finding that the museum has vanished (maybe it can explicitly pop out of existence in a Lynch kind of way) and that now they’re just out here in this big empty world. Lately I’ve been looking at having the cargo ship out there with them as the only thing, so they would probably make their way toward that and then the game would just quit to keep the mystery.

Not 100% clear on whether this will work, but I think there’s something here.

Why did Maksim make a desert and why is it important that it’s a nighttime thing? What’s the story of this particular desert - is it a real place? Completely imagined? How was it made?

Humanoid Creatures Pack

Humanoid Creatures Pack on the Asset Store

Five creatures at 420.4MB (aka huge) from 2020. Freaky sea-life based monsters I suppose. I’ve leaned towards the one with a mouth in its centre, eyeballs embedded in its carapace. They look like they’re meant to be people who were human and became deformed. Maybe some sense of the Pirates of the Caribbean sailors from the Flying Dutchman?

These still seem like they’re decently representative of his “creature” stuff, the “horror” angle that is major in his work (alongside the kind of sci-fi/military thing). They’re appropriately “high quality” so I wouldn’t feel so bad if I didn’t end up including another kind of fancy fancy asset. (And of course I’m conscious that they’re a very serious resource suck if I do include them.)

I’ve thought about the question of having a kind of “wing” where there’s only this creature done in multiple ways as a sort of showpiece and I could imagine doing that still. Animated, not, ragdolled, moving around a space, gridded, albedo removed, and so on. Or that but just in a really big room (but that will of course not have the same kind of scary effect – though do I need that?)

Oddly this is one of the tricker ones because I keep oscillating between just displaying it simply versus having it be a focal point, just because it has a kind of weird emotional significance to me through v r $4.99? It’s a central question.

Base Man ✅

Base Man on the Asset Store

A naked man of 43.7MB from 2021, recipient of the great review:

I enjoy how straightforward he is on the one level, but he’s also very obviously like a ripped white man. Very generic facial features, etc. Who is he? (Who are any of these people? How does Maksim think about the character behind the mesh I wonder? How much is he injecting versus leaving to the next person in the cycle?)

How do you display a naked (no penis) man in a room in a way that’s interesting, not evoking just looking maybe at an anatomical “thing”? Maybe an idle animation? I had a sculpture with him on a barrel I was quite fond of, but I think it’s headed in a different direction there. I also had him ragdoll-fallen onto a sofa and his head would rock back and forth which was quite intriguing. Have also thought about have a whole bunch of them rangdolling in a pile and then freezing that. Or even something as mad as them all fallen “down” onto a wall and freezing that. I wonder. Anyway his ordinariness is probably an opportunity to display him in a strange way.

Increasingly thinking I don’t need/want to go the route of trying to display things to their “advantage” but rather to display them in an “interesting” way and to rely on the player/audience to look at them as a part of that… in a way to make the strangeness of the setting be something that causes you to want to look at them more closely, or to acknowledge the artificial while also making room to have a feeling about it.

Stalin Statue ✅

Stalin Statue on the Asset Store

Five Stalin busts in different materials (bronze, dirty bronze, steel, wood, marble) at 18.2MB from 2018.

Part of Bugrimov’s statue stuff, a definite thing in his work, the closest (obviously) element to literally being a sculptor, which maybe is worth asking him about, even the relationship between meshes and wood for example. Also most obviously there a connection between Burgimov being from Russia (well I assume) and Stalin. Feelings about Stalin represented here? What is this statue for? Where would it be?

And for me how do I deal with Stalin myself? Just making “a really big Stalin” seems kind of weird. A pile of them in the centre of a room could be kind of appealing/interesting. Could also display them really traditionally more early on as a nod to that kind of “normal museum” thing. Could have him “fallen” over on his side, large in a room to reference some of those “torn off heads” like I saw at the Monuments show at LACMA? Hmmm, there’s probably something to that. Face down? How do I address the political reality of Stalin. Large/human scale but facing the corner? But that’s kinda weird because he’s not a naughty schoolboy.

Well, we’ll think and try.

Marine cargo ship

Marine cargo ship on the Asset Store

A very big ship at 34MB from 2018.

It’s really big. Originally I’d thought I would put it inside a room. Quickly became apparent it’s far, far too big for that at its basic scale. Thought about scaling it down (and still could) but there’s something sort of weird there. Thought about having it lying foundered in the desert right at the end. These are all options or maybe it cannot be done or maybe you wander the desert until you get to the cargo ship (in my mind I’m wondering about a sort of narration that starts as you step into the desert ABOUT the desert, then switches to the cargo ship when you get near enough etc… hmmm)

I do like having something of this massiveness involved I will say.

Pictures ✅

Pictures on the Asset Store

Two religious pictures, each one angel type person and another person (maybe they are both the Annunciation?) at 9MB from 2017.

It seems imperative to have “paintings” in a gallery/museum. They make a lot of sense in the context. My thought was to have an “okay sized” room with the same two paintings scaled to different sizes and hung all over the place. Not necessarily scintillating but also completely reasonable and appropriate. Could be an “early room” if I’m thinking about the idea that things get potentially stranger as we go… but I don’t know if I buy that as much as I did.

Hmmm… I mean I think I should just hang them and see how successful they are or not.

Pipe(r)s and Barrels

Pipers on the Asset Store is some pipes at 1.6MB from 2016 and Barrels on the Asset Store is some barrels at 4.7MB from 2016. Both from the general sort of “apocalyptic wasteland” kind of zone.

These are the things I’d felt I could block a room up with. There’s a radioactive barrel you could imagine evoking Dark with by stacking barrels in a room, maybe blocking a doorway as I’ve suggested elsewhere? Pipes don’t really fit into that vision, but don’t necessarily need the pipes. Could make some sort of weird environment with vertical pipes you have to navigate around in? Could try something.

Dead Man in the Bag

Dead Man in the Bag on the Asset Store is a dead person covered in a plastic sheet at 2.3MB from 2017. Very much in line with a horror aesthetic.

Crucially this one reminds me a lot of that Gregor Schneider work called TOTER MANN (DEAD MAN) from 2001. That one is a person in a bin bag with their legs protruding so they’re very different too, but I do like the relationship in name and appearance given v r 1 and my general enjoyment of Schneider’s own creepy horror aesthetic.

I kind of like the idea of maybe not being able to quite get to the man? Like he’s behind a corner or something? Not quite accessible?

Spaceship ✅

Spaceship on the Asset Store is a strangely cartoony spaceship of 16.7MB from 2017. The description is just “Spaceship model.” so I’m not sure how to interpret it. There are a few of these more cartoony models in MB’s set, including a weird cactus character and stuff. I find it hard to imagine why he makes something like this in amongst his more dominant focuses, and I suppose I’d want to ask him that.

As with v r 3 of course there’s always that “what game would this be in?” question you can ask when you look at an asset which is fun.

Funnily enough the spaceship is one of the most kind of “normal-feeling” assets in here. I wasn’t really thinking seriously of including it, but maybe it’s actually a fun starting point in a way… not very similar to the other stuff, does work as a kind of pop sculpture sort of thing in a room (maybe the starting room).

So I guess I’m leaning to inclusion of this in a really kind of banal way? But I’d like to know from MB what the drive is to make this sort of very stylistically different thing. What’s going on etc.

(Also as I write that I find myself wondering what his work setup looks like, for example… it would be kind of awesome to include a photo of that, thinking of the magazine profile thing I was part of.)

Apocalypse Pack

Apocalypse Pack on the Asset Store is a set of buildings, a bus, some lean-tos, a giant cargo ship (the one from above), etc. at a total of 324MB from 2018. I’m already using the cargo ship but it’s interesting to think about using some of the other stuff…

I put (I think) the “boiler room” inside the standard gallery room and immediately felt something. I suppose it was the “hey there’s a building inside this building” feeling you get with that kind of art - thinking of that Michael Parekowhai moment as one example of that, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it done elsewhere. It’s funny how trivial it is here of course.

The buildings don’t seem to have interiors which would have to be navigated in terms of whether or not to give them colliders, whether to let the player go “inside” them to see what is not really a considered interior space, though they do have interior faces for some reason. There are a lot of things in this pack, any one of which could be exhibited on its own.

The fence I used for a little bit to block off a space and I could imagine making a maze out of those for instance. There’s some sort of hangar shaped thing which is pretty huge (I don’t think it would fit in the space). Going by the image on the asset store the rocks are actually kind of interesting and appealing now that I think about it… exhibitable. Curious about what the “concrete shelter” is specifically as it may have more of an interior quality to it I’d like the option to explore. Hmmm yeah I think I should spend some time placing these things and seeing about them.

I suppos I’m curious about Maksim’s thoughts about the idea of the apocalypse, what it means to him, why this particular set of elements were what he put together. Concrete canopy is really kind of nice nice tbh. I’d like that to be in there in some capacity. The “construction” that is a tin shack is also quite nice. The checkpoint is nice too. And the tank is nice too. Some of these things will be far too large for the space.

All I can really do is try them out.

21 July 2026

Occurs to me right now there’s maybe the opportunity to build a sort of “environment” in a large enough room where the player can kind of navigate through a few of the things from the pack (that aren’t too insanely big) in a sort of clearly-artifical thing with corrugated iron leaned against the walls and so on… so it’s sort of like/reference/is one of those total installations inside a gallery like we saw at Venice. I’ll try it.

Is that enough?

Is that enough? What is enough? I don’t know, but I think the above is a more-than-reasonable place to start out.

Feelings (Started 13 July 2026)

I address this a bit below, but something “missing” in a lot of this more taxonomic and philosophical thinking is feelings. I was watching the Brian Eno documentary this morning and he says at one point that all thinking begins with feelings, which I at least like enough to fold some kind of version of it into this now.

So what I wanted to write down was essentiall images I see in my mind (well, as much as I personally see such things) that I like the idea of, regardless of whether they serve the current version fo the Why. (Which I should take another stab at soon.)

Worth continuing this process? I don’t mind the idea of maybe an intersection of imagery I would like to see of assets in this space with the specific assets by Maksim, with attention still paid to looking at them as assets

Pieces and philosophies (Started 13 July 2026)

Not sure why I wrote “especially the taxonomic potential” above, but I suppose its just what I was excited about doing at the time. I return a new man who is also interested in answering to the question of which works to include and what the premise for inclusion (and exhibition) is.

What is this about? (Philosophy)

Assets as craft

Fundamentally it’s about showing the work of Maksim Bugrimov as art to whoever will look at it. And if not as “art” then as “craft” or whatever, artisinal something, that bit doesn’t matter(?), it’s about

  1. Showing the work at all (he made this, and this, and this)
  2. Showing the work in detail (look at this eyeball embedded in the chitin of this creature)
  3. Showing the work in variation (is it? I’m just trying that out)
  4. Showing the work in situ (is it?)

Which is kind of to say it’s about creating “views” (viewings?) of the work that allow it to expand out of the standard monster-in-a-videogame situation where, as I’ve said ad nauseum about water for instance, it gets kind of subsumed into the gestalt of the game and you don’t really see it (and again going all the way back to Chad and the bush he admired in Alan Wake).

So it’s about “well, how can we see Maksim’s work as his work, as work?” And the answer is you put it in a gallery and you display it in ways that make the work apparent.

The taxonomic stuff gets a little bit at what that work actually is in terms of things like textures, normals, details and scales, animations, etc. And it also gets at questions of how to show the work as well (lights, positions, spaces).

The curator is present

There’s another bit I haven’t noted above because I’m sort of tempted by thinking of this as a semi-scientific expedition, or more of a “natural history” thing, but there’s my personal preferences that could easily play into this, for instance

I love

I’m curious about

I don’t really end up caring much about

Which is not to say I shouldn’t have things I don’t love, but it’s a way of thinking about it that I shouldn’t discount

There’s this odd way in which all my love for Maksim is pegged onto the dancing of those creatures (the improbably nature of that, the joyful nature of it) and the correspondence (for me) between Dead Man in the Bag and Gregor Schneider’s work (and my love of the title itself). So that when I actually come to make a whole show of it I find… well, that it’s mostly just not my thing.

But on the other hand it gives anyone (myself included) a chance to reflect on quality and beauty in assets as well as just the strangeness of assets.

So it’s possible that Maksim is… not incidental, but not necessarily the most important feature of this, but rather a kind of organizing principle, a corpus of materials from which to make a show about assets? (I think there’s something to this.)

What other factors are there (Pragmatisms)

Here are some other factors for you

Categories

The categories of the work, e.g. if I go through his storefront right now I see 398 assets divided up into, roughly speaking:

Other notes:

Do I want to represent his preoccupations? What he thinks will sell? His thematic areas? One thematic area?

Chronology

Looks like Ancient Statue is the earliest work. Quite a lot of statues over the starting period, literally “working in stone”! (I have the horn and the celtic cross from this period)

Then we switch to more characters and creatures. Somewhat cartoony. Horror inflection coming in with an early Creatures pack, heads on spears pack, … some more cartoon experiments

Then continuing with monsters and into the apocalyptic environment. (A sci-fi environment popped in here?) He has a desert!

We pretty much settle into creatures and horror and military and weapons from here? (But then you’ll find a pizza… why?) Things get progressively more realistic and accomplished? And huge. Almost exclusively bodies and hands at a certain point.

Do I want to represent his trajectory? How he has developed as an artist?

Money

A lot of this stuff is really expensive for what I’m doing. I don’t madly want to drop a ton of money on this specific project. I’d quite like to contemplate getting one of his fancy new ones for the “single asset” part of things… it would make sense to have a recent thing that’s representative of where he is at with things now. (The Humanoid Creatures Pack I have is now $40 which is interesting in terms of showing something considered valuable. It’s from 2020.)

Megabytes

A lot of this stuff is just huge. The Pirate I have (which was free) is 191MB on his own for example. From 2022.

I’m not looking to make another v r $4.99 thing where it barely loads and almost nobody sees it. My dream as I’ve said is to have a version of this that would cram into a webGL build.

At the same time obviously MB cannot be the driving factor. It’s funny though… it’s easier/cheaper to put a container ship in the gallery than to put a really high rez pirate. Spatial space isn’t the issue, MB space is. Oh funny that he’s MB and I’m worried about megabytes.

And so?

Well it would be nice to represent all these factors in the curation (categories, chronology, value) in some ways, but it gets pretty obvious that I can’t really capture the whole thing.

That said if you definitely had:

(Do I want to make a sculpture - like the base man on the barrel but moreso?)

You’d be getting somewhere with that… you could “get away with” like eight pieces really, if you just wanted to rep the idea.

What should I include to reflect that? (Pieces)

Taxognome (Started 9 July 2026)

Big questions

File Size

We have some curatorial constraints potentially around file sizes. If we want a web build, we have to be judicious about which assets to include. The Humanoid Creatures take up 50MB each which probably blows our size budget almost immediately. How big is too big? The Pizza is 13MB. Good value.

Translations / Rotations

This is a big one, but fundamentally any of these assets can be positioned anywhere in space because it’s digital. They can float in the air, be attached to the ceiling, a wall, blocking a doorway, lying on the floor, etc.

I could adhere to traditional museum translations and rotations by having the assets behave like statues (generally on the floor, vertical) and paintings (generally on the wall, vertical). That would keep things extremely vanilla and I suppose there’s a worry in me that it ends up so dry that it’s not really worth it. But am I being silly not having faith that a more traditional presentation gives the audience room to contemplate the assets as statues and paintings?

In the end this is one of the really key decisions, particularly around the three ideas of: traditional (asset on a plinth), physically possible (asset lying on the floor in a corner), impossible (asset floating in the air)?

Part of the “answer” is almost certainly to make three (or more) rooms and just to try displaying the same asset in multiple ways to see what works, aka prototyping.

Scales

I think this is a surprisingly powerful one. Changes in scale immediately do a few things:

The big display opportunity here is around scaling things up to allow you to see details, and scaling things down to allow something very large (e.g. a huge ship) to fit into the space.

And there’s a difference between the actual act of scaling and asset and the sense of scale you get (again I suppose this is more the below), but I’m particularly thinking of that idea of having the tanker fill an entire room.

(Spatial) Relations

This is getting really big, but of course you don’t translate/rotate/scale (TRS) something in isolation - rather it’s about what that means relative to the surrounding environment. Examples being

And so on - it’s kind of infinite. If the project is first of all about display MB’s work then the spatial relations should be supportive of that. But even that is kind of a two parter:

So there’s a philosophical decision to make about the nature of museum. One that I can probably find through a combination of thinking about intent (things like writing the Why a few times) and “in the room” by trying different configurations to see what strikes me as correct.

Albedo / Bump map / Other texture stuff? / Materials

When I put the pizza into the museum at one point because Felix and I thought that would be funny I did a version where there’s a pizza with no albedo (and I’m realizing now should have had a pizza with no bump as well - trying it now).

This seems like a must for at least one asset (the pizza works oddly well, but I should try on a bunch) where the point is to illustrate the difference between the mesh/model and the different elements of texturing. It’s a part of the craft the museum can reveal. Maybe an animated thing is even better because there’s something about seeing it still “alive” that’s maybe nice?

Lighting / Shadows

There’s a lot of potential light stuff, including selective light per room, per asset, …

Lighting is important both in terms of showing off the craft - different kinds of lights impact the way we see a model. A creature or bodybag in the darkness reads differently to one that’s well lit. A spotlight asks you to look differently to just a room (point) light versus daylight versus moonlight and so on. They can all be tried out. I do like the idea of a moonlit room through the skylight.

How the fuck do we stop the shadows cast by the ceiling which looks horrible. Most obviously with no directional light but then how to do moonlight or standard room light? Area light in that position maybe? Looking into whether I can even use Area lights though since maybe not compatible with the render pipeline I can use for webgl which I am still clinging to… hmmmmm. Trying it out now to see if I can get a nice red area light baked and working in webgl. I think it’s the “obvious” solution and so long as almost everything is static it’ll be ok as a solution for some rooms? That or I need to close off the ceiling.

So most of all I should think about things like room lighting in terms of whole room, and then the question of whether some spots or that kind of thing make sense in the museum context?

(I have these little flashes of… should the whole exhibition be of a single asset or is that a different project? It’s different and worthwhile. Added to my game ideas list for later on.)

Lighting, as ever, is kind of huge, but if I keep to the question of how to show off the stuff we should be good.

Increasingly I suppose there should be some kind of balance between the craft element (showing off mesh, albedo, bump map, animation) and intended experiential (horror lighting and environment) and then maybe some playful stuff (cargo ship in a museum space).

Just noticed that the ceiling windows are emissive and that’s part of the scene’s lighting! So maybe that’s the other way instead of an area light? Though seems pretty expensive though… maybe that’s fine or maybe an area light kind of does the trick better that a ton of small emissive ones which seems ultra expensive? Turned off the emission and we’ll see what the result is.

Sounds (lack of)

Right now we have footsteps and nothing else. I don’t necessarily hate that, though better footsteps (and reverb) for the space would make sense to me? I don’t think I want to get into sound because MB doesn’t do sound. Unless I want a single room with sound that’s in line with the potential feeling stuff where you could have something ominous sounding (Shepherd Tone?) in a space with a body bag or something. Blurring into the “horror museum” stuff but it’s possible that’s still reasonable.

(How many rooms is this thing? I think I don’t want to get too out of control in the end… there’s a lot of intricacy to think about here.)

Animations

The creatures (and presumably other assets) are animated and presumably MB made (or at the very least intended) those animation. There are a lot of animations too - the creatures have something like 40 they can do. There’s merit to the full cycle to point at “animation” but then also to singular animations to allow/encourage closer examination (which gets to the idea of slow motion applied to those).

I’m particularly into the question of animation. If I am eventually to have a separate thing that is just one asset I should save some ideas for that. I’m seeing some similarities here though with v r 3 in that you could imagine a series of spaces that’s just one asset in many formats, and a different series where it’s different assets in one format.

I think I’d like something more playful/freeform right now though, less rigid, with the “one asset” thing later on, so I’ll save hyper-formal repetitions with variation for that? Or that’s my operating idea.

There are more “world-facing” animation ideas like a creature walking around in a space which are worth contemplating because they represent an experiential level.

Interactions

I have a feeling this “goes too far” but we could imagine an aspect of the museum being an interactive thing where maybe you could even “fight” a creature, say, and have it react. Which is a part of the intended experience of these assets (presumably that’s why those animations exist - implied interactions and responses) but… gosh it’s a deep dive?

Combinations

All of the above could well end up being combined! So that you end up with an asset with no albedo lit in a specific way playing an animation in slow motion, say. And there’s the argument (as with v r 3) that the combination is meaningful and impactful. And that it’s very much connected with what it means to use assets in a game.

I find this kind of exhausting - it’s something I could address in a more formal museum/exhibition, but maybe not here? Unless v r solo includes that idea as well which… it’s just starting to sound too big to me.

Variations

Consider the Humanoid Creature(s) and their set of 41(!) animations. In v r $4.99 I displayed them chained as a dance, so that’s one way (variation over time). But you could also have 41 instances of a creature (in one room?) each demonstrating an animation. Or you could have a “living” creature that’s reactive and simulating more the intended use. (Which is also situations/combinations.)

Situations

This kind of gets at the point that these assets were created to be used in a game not in isolation and that that’s part of their meaning. So you would ideally want at least some display situations where you’re at least pointing to that idea.

It occurs to me that one way is things like the musical dead man in a bag stuff above. Also the idea of maybe a tableau with a creature towering over an asset of a person (looking scared? I don’t think they do but that’s funny in another way, like a crash test dummy). So that’s the kind of Museum of Natural History version.

As I write this I’m also thinking… it would make sense to have some real language around what I want to say with a given room either in a kind of audio trigger or written down (audio trigger is appealing but takes up space… but maybe really ratty quality?)

Infrastructures

The question of plinths and frames and stanchions. Given the specifics of the environment stanchions seem reasonable, but plinths get hard because how do I make them? (Just made a little plinth and chucked a wood material from the museum on it and… looks totally fine. There’s also a white wood that looks quite nice. Creature in a t-pose on the plinth definitely has something.)

The question of didacts and wall texts and general interpretive/informative language. Which I was getting to in Situations - I think I want didacts with everything just to point to where they come from (either in the world or separately) but I’m increasingly drawn to maybe an audio file per room that would trigger and give a sort of story of the curation/idea behind it? Adds a kind of personal element to the story…

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