News and merch

Hey folks,

With the success of the last two videos, it now seems very likely that Primer has the potential to become sustainable, so I've been thinking a bit more about the long term. Here are a few updates.

I'm not taking outside work anymore

I just finished my last remaining freelance contract, so I'll be full-time on Primer for the foreseeable future. This will be a factor pushing to speed up the rate of video production. Yay!

Primer is transitioning from Blender to Unity

I've come to realize that Blender is not the right tool for Primer. It's designed primarily for 3D artists making assets for games and movies, not for defining entire complex scenes with code alone. The Unity game engine, on the other hand, is designed, for, well, games, which regularly spawn objects that follow scripts while being rendered in real time. It's also a professional tool for animated video, so visual quality shouldn't take a hit. 

Transitioning to Unity will allow me to produce videos more quickly, make a tool that's more (read: at all) usable by others than the current github repo, and publish interactive versions of the simulations with relatively little extra work. That's the hope, anyway! 

The downside, of course, is that it will take some time for me to become proficient in Unity and reproduce the functionality of code I've already written for Blender. I hate to make the next video take longer, but investments have the most time to pay off if you make them early. :)

Merchandise is coming

To make this transition to full-time work safer and hopefully give Primer a production budget other than my own living expenses, I'm going to start selling merchandise with DFTBA. I'm not certain what kinds of things people would actually want, though. If you'd like to help shed some light on that, here's a very short survey. 

Filling out the survey also enters you to win some of your preferred merch, and Patreon patrons will get 20% off.


Thanks for reading. I'm not sure I can say too often how grateful I am that you've decided to support.

Justin