Hello good [time of day] to you. I've gone a little off the rails since my last blog post. Money's gotten tighter so my expected plan of felting tons of new stuff and starting a cosplay project has all been sidelined. As you can see from the title, I've got a new obsession and I'll go into it more in a sec. I still totally plan to do more needlecraft stuff but, y'know, money and all.

On March 16, picoCAD 2 released

A day later, I bought it. Since then I have spent 70 hours with the program open. Almost a quarter of my time. So I'm a little addicted. I'd bought and tried the first picoCAD, but bounced off it before I could even finish on project. I've got a list of ideas for 2 and it only gets longer really. idk if it's much more intuitive this time or if after working on so many different creative projects I've just gotten the experience to get over starter humps. Could I do all these same things in Blender or some other 3D program with more freedom? Maybe. But I'm honestly the kind of person who gets overwhelmed by too much freedom (It's one of the main things making my writing endeavors move so slowly). The last time I remember having this much fun with creating was back when I played Call of Duty a lot and you could build custom emblems out of pre-determined shapes. It gives me the feeling of carving what I want out of a larger piece. I start with things that are close and just fiddle with them until I'm happy. But also, I understand I'm never going to have a 1-to-1 recreation and that allows me to let go of perfection. Machine embroidery would fit in this too if it weren't for the disconnect between what I do on the computer and what ends up on the fabric. Anyways I'm having fun, so expect a lot more. Let's go into some of what I've made so far.

Alice Sawyer had recently revealed another fan mascot design. A skinless cultist in robes that match well with her current look. A couple of artists had already jumped on drawing them or their own unique version of them so it seemed like a good place to start. First projects are always more about learning the tool than about a result I'm in love with. I am quite fond of this one though. The hood shape is pretty solid and transparency was really easy to do. Just paint a color you told picoCAD to make see through and it does it. This does limit the 16 color palette down to 15. If I could have more freedom anywhere, this would probably be it. Maybe at some point I'll make a full body of this Cultist but I'd likely start from scratch. Next was my attempt to "push the limits."

Sticking with Alice since she's one of my biggest influences in become a creative. I went with Lolice. She has lowpoly models already for some other outfits and I'm always biased to things that get less attention. Making a human model isn't actually pushing any limits. There's one included as an example with the program. But I had doubts about my own ability to make one that looks good.
I started with the torso and ended up with essentially a barrel. This looks pretty good from any single angle but when rotated it gets more visible and can look wrong. Oh well. This mesh goes from her shoulders down to the end of her skirt. I hadn't realized the use of merging vertices yet (and won't for a while) so I languished a lot about how many segments it should be. The shoulder area comes across overly flat if you pay attention to it. Like the change from "shoulder" to "neck" is very abrupt. The face came out super cute. The eyes are maybe too big but I don't care I like it and I got it pretty quick. I've since learned that I need to block out all parts of the hair before I start judging it. Her hair looked so bad until I actually made the sidelocks and twintails. Her bangs are still honestly kinda bad looking but it's hard to notice and fine enough. To make the hair, I copied the head mesh, scaled it up slightly, and treated it like a helmet around the head. If you've made a Minecraft skin, I did it sorta similar to how that works. The side locks and ahoge are flat planes, while the twintails are cylinders with a bend in them. The rest of her after this was pretty simple, until I decided I wanted something more interesting than a simple A-pose. Bending an arm into the right place legitimately takes me around three hours of adjusting things to get the shoulder connection and elbow to look okay enough. There's no rigging in picoCAD so it's all sliding vertices or meshes around.

There's some very simple animations built in, but I saw a post online that made me realize I could do more than slide, scale, or spin boxes. The eyes here are still essentially just doing that but the implementation is nice. I made the eye sockets transparent on the face plate, then made a plane for each eye and eyelid that I could move around independently. Starting off, it's very easy to move the pivot point without realizing it. Putting it back into place is luckily not too hard. For the mouth effect, I put two different colored planes exactly in the same place and let the texture mapping flicker between them as the camera moved. The other projects so far haven't been seen by Alice afaik. Other fans complimented me but of course it's a different feeling than if it was the person you made it for. It felt nice to make a gift for a friend. I was emboldened to make more.

This was made as a thank you to TabF5 for making a model for me. You can find it on their site on a semi secret page. I'll avoid posting it here to incentivize you to check out their awesome site. The simple design of their "tablings" made me wanna make a scene for them to be in. I'm really happy with the door animation and the boxes. I maybe should've made a larger house but I didn't want to spend too long on this. You can really see some texture warping on the floorboards here. That's because picoCAD uses Affinity Texture Mapping. Basically it draws textures how the PS1 does. I think it's fun personally, but if I wanted more control I could subdivide large surfaces into many smaller faces. The floor here is just nine faces.

My most recent piece and the one I'm most proud of. I had it all planned/visualized before I even started. The only thing I wasn't sure about was if he'd be holding these toys or a doujinshi and that was just up to how much texture space I had left. Ray recently put out a youtube video going over all the merchandise that exists of Infinite from the Sonic Franchise. He ships Infinite and the canon PC for Sonic Forces pretty heavily. Arms again kill my energy. They actually still aren't as good as I'd like, but I knew they'd be partially obscured. I called it a day after getting one arm done but once I started up again the next day I blitzed through the hands, other arm, legs, Infinite, Gadget, and all the animation in like 4 hours. Isn't his face too cute. He's got such a bright, open expression and the freckles are too good. I finally realized that merging vertices can help me with irregular shapes with this one. You can't even see where I did it here since Ray's hand covers it, but I'm eager to test it out more with upcoming ideas.
I've finished a started a few other models, but I don't wanna let this blog get too long and I don't always have a ton to say about them. I'm going to make a gallery page on my site to post them all and I'll likely include the model files with them if you'd like to look at them in picoCAD yourself. I just gotta figure how to not make you load all of them at once when you open the page.

Getting a lil more serious for a sec. Feel free to dip now if you're just interested in lowpoly modeling. dw I understand please have a good day and look forward to more. Since the start of 2026 I've been in a really weird sorta funk. Calling it depression sounds like stolen valor to me. I don't hate myself or think any sort of dire thoughts, but I feel idk muted and lower energy than I have. I've lost basically all will to reach out to people I care about and used to talk to occasionally. I've psyched myself out of asking one person (Whom I know is always open to talk and very understanding) "How's it going?" every couple of days for months. Outside of like three people, if I don't get messaged first then I don't talk to people privately. I want to. I think about them a lot. Wonder how they're doing or how some of the last things they told me about are going. I just can't build up the courage I guess to ask. I don't think they hate me or even dislike me. I'm hoping it's just some new thing I'll have to deal with in the Winter and once Spring really kicks off I'll be back to my usual self. Who knows. There's a history of depression in my family, but that's been mostly the women on my mother's side. Maybe this is textbook depression to people who've been there but it's new to me. I still get energy and great days/weeks. picoCAD put me into one as you can see and I'm still mostly in it. I'm eternally grateful to the people who've been so kind to me while I'm like this. I could talk more about it but that'll be it for now. Might be another blog post soon as I'm going to a renfair, but maybe I'll wait anyways. We'll see. Byebye~