Spinning Wheels (Not in a Good Way)

So, today feels a little bit like a nothing-burger, but I did prosucute a lot of _failed_ experiments...

First up, can I get the robot to follow terrain? This seems to point to some useful stuff if I can figure it out: https://threejs.org/examples/?q=terrain#webgl_geometry_terrain_raycast I, also raised him up half a metre so that he'd be on the surface.

I wanted to try to attach the camera to behind and above the robot (third-person view) so the user's field of view is restricted a bit. I tried using a supposed threejs utility function for detach/attach, but it couldn't be imported. Later it turned out that it couldn't be imported at least partly because it didn't exist. Whee.

So, then I tried just changing the camera parent. That sort of did something, but then I think the orbit control ganked it. There's some stuff I can do about that, but I don't want to lose the orbit control just yet.

Finally, I found a nice looking example at https://codepen.io/Fyrestar/pen/WNwMWZV?editors=0010 which seems like it gives me most of what I want. I'm going to have to transliterate to Urlang, but otherwise, it looks pretty good. Will try tomorrow.

So, I also wanted to control the placement of NKI's (and kitten herself) by painting vertex colours on in Blender. Gah. This was a pain. I did finally get the vertex colours painted on, so that worked. Then I exported and it seemed that they didn't want to show up in threejs??? Then I (finally) realized that it must have been using a cached version of the object. One hard reload later, I had my vertex colours. Nice? Well, now I have to figure out how to access them, which doesn't seem to have a built-in way to do, especially if you have your object broken into groups...

I got the bright idea of exporting my vertex painting as something other than a vertex colour, some kind of per-vertex custom attribute, which I used to do like falling off a log back in the PRISMS days. Well, not happening here. I've got a thing set up in the Geometry Nodes where I'm getting the vertex colour attribute, I'm removing it, I'm making a new custom attribute, but... I can't turn the extracted vertex colour into anything that will get plugged into my custom attribute.

I definitely need to speed things up. Time to start shedding some of my visionary baggage and just get some basic stuff working. I should concentrate on that tomorrow.