Once upon a time, I got very addicted to this game, Sonic Adventure 2 Battle.

In fact even looking at that cover fills me with nostalgia. Sometimes you play a game at just the right time in your life.

Anyway due to uhh some choices I made around Halloween 2024…

…I found myself in possession of this green glass crystal from Amazon (or, if you’re a talking hedgehog, The Chaos Emerald™).

It catches the light in cool patterns and I liked looking at it on my desk, so I decided to go all the way and build the base from the Altar of the Emeralds™ to hold it, which if you’re a talking hedgehog makes perfect sense.

That octagonal base would be really easy to model in Blender and 3D-print. But if you really wanted to do the Chaos Emerald justice, you’d examine this “X” texture that’s visible on the faces of the stone and have ChatGPT give you a detailed height map based on it…

…And you’d apply that height map as a deform modifier to a really high-density mesh, so that your 3D model actually deformed in the shape of that texture. And you’d do the same with a simpler but matching texture for the top faces of the model.

Only if you were like really obsessed with this game, would you do something like that.

Then you’d order the 3D print and set your Emerald, I mean “Amazon glass crystal,” comfortably upon it.

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Can you feel time slippin’ down your spine?
Ooh, you try and try to ignore, yeah!