From a cis male's perspective, I think you pass well! Both on initial impression and even critically.
Dreams is an "all-animation" version of Procreate.
They built a new engine for it, and it's very scalable, but unfortunately the new tech means that many of the great features from procreate aren't there yet. They've put out a road map to let people know the features they're working on, but it will take some time.
As an animator, even with major features missing, I still use it all the time and don't regret my purchase. I am excited for it to improve, though.
Same for me!
I teach a college-level animation course and try to work a showing of this in every semester. It's such a raw example of high quality animation, with just enough story to keep it on task. Love this film.
Hello! I'm on mobile and bad at organizing my thoughts, but I thought I'd attempt to tackle some of this.
You can experiment with different types of models and bring them into Cura to see what the results will be yourself, but typically your focus should be on creating "water tight" meshes, where the normals of all polygons face outwardly from the mesh and there are no deleted faces or holes between them.
Individual polygons don't have any thickness on their own, so if you delete faces on a primitive cylinder and bring it into Cura, when slicing it will attempt to "close" the hole left behind in order to make the mesh water-tight.
So, say you wanted to make a cup. You generate a cylinder in Blender of the right size, then delete the faces on one of the caps to create a cup-like shape. When you bring this object into Cura, it will not be able to see the back faces of the polygons inside of the cup, because it's reading the normals on the outside of the cup for those polygons. They can't serve as both the inside and outside, and they have no thickness. So, Cura will try to close the hole at the top of the geometry, basically just giving you the cylinder you started with.
You could fix this by just extruding all of the geometry from your cup version of the cylinder, which will create a perimeter of faces on the top edge, and will leave you with inside and outside polygons. That is what Cura will read to create your shell.
On that note, printed models are made up of effectively two components: shell and infill. The Shell is made up of the outermost layers, which are the strongest. The infill is a pattern that supports the interior of meshes. If you printed a sphere, you likely wouldn't want it to be made of 100% solid plastic because it would be a waste of materials and time. So infill supports the shell with a pattern, kind of like a honeycomb, that is just meant to make sure the inside isn't empty but is strong enough to withstand some force. On average, this is usually only about 15 to 30% density.
There are many great articles and YouTube videos out there about the process, and I'm sorry that I don't have anything to point you towards right now. If you have any questions about anything, I'd be happy try to help as best I can.
I'm hyped as hell, but one of the things that has me especially excited is that I have a few friends who work at Insomniac and even THEY are excited for it. They are all super proud of the work they did, which felt worth sharing.
I know a few people who work for Epic games, and generally they are treated incredibly well. Good pay, good benefits, still able to work from home... Their experience has been pretty much all positive.
However, Epic has been hemorrhaging money for a few years now. As successful as the Unreal Engine and Fortnite are, they've aquired half a dozen companies over the last few years, and offer an insane amount of free content between the Epic Games Store and the Unreal marketplace. They they acquire exclusives for their platform, they host tournaments with prize pools in the millions, and they have been trying to build a strong reputation as a service for gamers and developers that treats them well. It never seemed to balance out though, probably because people just were never really into buying games from them.
I truly don't get the people that outright hate them though, even for their exclusivity grabs. I also might be mildly biased since I know how much worse devs are treated at other companies.
The article goes through some of the available data and doesn't make hard conclusions, nothing that many of the accounts with no followers or posts are likely lurkers, amongst the bots and others.
Actually, it's funny you say that since I am colorblind and have always seen it as black and blue. More to the point, the dress is actually black and blue.
I'm on lemmy.zip as well and have been happy. Gravitates towards tech, recently defederated a few extremist instances (by a vote), good uptime, and run by some seemingly cool people.
Which is fine! The FOSS options are solid.
Personally though, I had tried most Lemmy apps on Android before Sync came out, and found the experience to be lacking. Honestly, I was close to bailing on Lemmy entirely, assuming it just wasn't for me. Sync was exactly what I needed in terms of UI and organization, and I'm happy to pay the dev for the work they do on it.
That's more of an exception than the rule.