Around this time last year I worked on shadow cubemaps. I realized I had survivorship bias—only sharing the successes. The real lessons came from the weird glitches caused by bad matrices and wrong assumptions. So here are the parallel-universe ‘oh-please-no’ shadow realities… and the final result.

Normal maps store 3D surface direction data in a texture, letting engines fake detailed lighting without heavy geometry. A key idea in graphics for adding rich detail efficiently. And, this is what happens if you use single normal texture for all of your textures in the scene.

This is not a Gimbal lock. My buggy rig is attempting to skip world coordinates entirely by folding spacetime to form a wormhole.

Development paradigms are shifting. Today I'm testing the Gemini CLI's utility as an integrated code assistant. As a Project I'm aiming to create something useful, a browser extension for dynamic content filtering, then compare AI-assisted vs. manual development metrics.

Parallax mapping in computer graphics fakes depth using height maps — cheap and real-time friendly. Works well, but at steep angles the illusion breaks because geometry doesn’t actually move. Here is a weird inception bug that I had while attempting to implement it :)

devlog:

Implemented the UV Grid Preset to Blender playground addon, Lightbox.

Target is to preview UV test grid or Clay material with consistent naterials (mutually exclusive) to all meshes, non-destructively, Eevee-compatible.

github.com/kutaycoskuner/lightbox

Built a text-to-image tool for syntax-highlighted code blocks to share clean, consistent snippets online.

Explore it here: github.com/kutaycoskuner/project_toolkit_py

You’ll also find my other small open-source projects there. Open to feedback & suggestions!

Learned about symlinks: they’re shortcuts pointing to files/folders instead of copying them. In my use case, I symlinked my binary—content (images, gifs, videos) from my cloud folder directly into my git repo for easy organization without duplication.