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I'm running MinistryOfFlat.com and I have made 7 figures this year. No investors or co workers. No marketing beyond my 2k twitter followers and a website. Solve

I'm running MinistryOfFlat.com and I have made 7 figures this year. No investors or co workers. No marketing beyond my 2k twitter followers and a website. Solve a very specific and hard problem and the right people will find you.

spectramax 7y ago
This has to be one of the most astonishing and remarkable work I've ever seen in recent times. Holyshit. UV mapping is a royal pain in the ass and I can't believe it can just be automated away. Many big studios tried - from Houdini to Maxon to large open source projects like Blender. You deserve huge returns, kudos! All the best! Nit: you need a SSL cert on your website :)
- quelsolaar 7y ago
  Thank you very much! Its pretty good but its not even close to as good as the version I have in R&D.... SSL is coming, thanks for reminding me.
  - codesternews 7y ago
    Could you tell us more about yourself and project. How would you able to do without any coworkers when many big companies tried.
    - quelsolaar 7y ago
      I kind of did it by accident. It was a side project that people started getting in touch over. I think I'm very suited to solve this problem for a few reasons. I used to be a 3D artist so I know what artists want. I'm a C programmers so I can make complex things go fast, and I have done a lot of procedural 3D stuff so I know a lot of mesh processing tricks. The complexity of this is substantial. its currently around 1.5 megs of source code, not counting UIs loaders and savers or any of that. So I would say many long hours and being very focused is key. You can find more of my work at www.quelsolaar.com and @quelsolaar on twitter
      - sr3d 7y ago
        Your work is amazing. Great job! I'm super impressed. I used to do a bunch of 3D stuff but then I switched to web/mobile dev and that was it for 3D. I can see why your software is successful because it solves a very exact pain-point that is very costly and time-consuming.
      - spectramax 7y ago
        For some reason, I was pondering over the problem (with really no background in mesh/geometry algorithms) - it feels very NP-complete-like problem. It just feels hard. Could you expand on some of the details of the algorithm in terms of how these 30 algos scale? Do they scale in polynomial time or do these algos scale in non-polynomial ways but the problem space is small enough for it to compute the solution quickly. Perhaps some epoch threshold has reached and the algos bail out?
ivalm 7y ago
That'a pretty cool work; I've worked with UV mapping a bit and if this works this is beast. Side note, the top/hero video crashed mid animation for me (chrome/win10/modern hardware); everything else works fine.
- quelsolaar 7y ago
  Thanks! There are a lot of things that I could improve on my website but I don't think any of it matters that much. There are a lot of people in the startup community talking about metrics, marketing and having the right color on the download button, but its all kind of BS. It matters on the margin, but what really matters is delivering for your customers. Spend your time making the core offering good and if you do it right people will come no matter how ugly your webpage is. Its like a restaurant with amazing food doesn't need a good location of fancy interior design, it will always be full.
  - spectramax 7y ago
    I think good design/presentation and solid approach towards attention to detail on everything you do - it only adds and it doesn't take away from the core functional aspects of the product or service. Uber-functionalism, which is what you seem to be obsessed with, has its drawbacks. Imagine if Apple didn't care about design or aesthetics or presentation of their products. At the sametime, I see some contradiction to your philosophy - there is just so much pizzaz in the product you've built. It goes against the grain of what you just said - all those animations, futuristic aesthetic of your product, giant clock with Tron-like fonts, etc...all those things are unnecessary. You could just sell the command line tool, you know :)
    - quelsolaar 7y ago
      I'm a graphics nerd so that stuff is just fun for me, and most of it is part of existing toolkits I have already written for things like font rendering and UI. I used to think that quality was attention to detail and polishing everything, but now I think its a hump you have to get over. People stand in line for hours, in the rain and cold, and jump through a lot of hoops the stuff they really want. As a creator your goal is to make them want it that much, rather then worrying about the rough edges.
rodolphoarruda 7y ago
What is UV? It's everywhere in the website.
- quelsolaar 7y ago
  When you do 3D graphics you first build a 3D shape and then you wrap an image around it to give it surface properties like color, reflectance, and transparency. In order to do this you need to "unwrap" the 3D shape so that it every XYZ point also exist in a 2D UV image space. This unwrapping step us usually done more or less by hand and is both tedious and time consuming.
errantspark 7y ago
I haven't really done any serious 3D work in a few years but my impression was that there are already a few popular UV auto-unwrappers and techniques like Ptex that avoid UVs entirely. I was looking at the maps produced in the demos on your page and they're definitely not like anything I'd produce or want to paint by hand. I assume that's not the point, but rather to use tools like Substance Painter or Mari right? I guess I'm just surprised that this niche is worth 7 figures. That's awesome.
ricardobeat 7y ago
That is amazing! Love was so ahead of it's time, and has been an inspiration since I first found it maybe a decade ago. Happy to see you make a comfortable living in a related space. Cheers!
MH15 7y ago
This is easily the coolest thing I've seen on HN this month! I'm a computer graphics and animation student/hobbiest in conjunction with my CS studies so this is very interesting to me. Any plans to incorporate your software into the content creation tools themselves by means of an addon?
Jack000 7y ago
Just read through all your stuff, the UV unwrapper is very cool. Do most people use it with 3d paint tools? It seems the small disconnected bits would be hard to paint by hand. some thoughts/questions: - Do you use a library for packing? This alone is a lot of work. Since you write in C, are you using boost polygon or CGAL for the computational geometry algorithms? - Have you thought about a data-driven approach? Unwrap and packing are geometric operations, but seam marking/segment classification may be amenable to an ML-based method (specifically the spectral graph CNN that came out recently). This seems like the largest hurdle to more "human-like" unwrapping but I'm only a hobbyist so this could be way off base. I'm almost tempted to create a competing product, but alas I already have a startup in a different domain : ]
- quelsolaar 7y ago
  I don't use libs for anything. I write everything from scratch. Not having any dependencies is a huge win for many of my customers. You can find some of my source at gamepipeline.org
quikoa 7y ago
What kind of license (one time fee/monthly subscription/???) and how much does it cost?

spectramax 7y ago

This has to be one of the most astonishing and remarkable work I've ever seen in recent times. Holyshit. UV mapping is a royal pain in the ass and I can't believe it can just be automated away. Many big studios tried - from Houdini to Maxon to large open source projects like Blender. You deserve huge returns, kudos! All the best! Nit: you need a SSL cert on your website :)

quelsolaar 7y ago
Thank you very much! Its pretty good but its not even close to as good as the version I have in R&D.... SSL is coming, thanks for reminding me.
- codesternews 7y ago
  Could you tell us more about yourself and project. How would you able to do without any coworkers when many big companies tried.
  - quelsolaar 7y ago
    I kind of did it by accident. It was a side project that people started getting in touch over. I think I'm very suited to solve this problem for a few reasons. I used to be a 3D artist so I know what artists want. I'm a C programmers so I can make complex things go fast, and I have done a lot of procedural 3D stuff so I know a lot of mesh processing tricks. The complexity of this is substantial. its currently around 1.5 megs of source code, not counting UIs loaders and savers or any of that. So I would say many long hours and being very focused is key. You can find more of my work at www.quelsolaar.com and @quelsolaar on twitter
    - sr3d 7y ago
      Your work is amazing. Great job! I'm super impressed. I used to do a bunch of 3D stuff but then I switched to web/mobile dev and that was it for 3D. I can see why your software is successful because it solves a very exact pain-point that is very costly and time-consuming.
    - spectramax 7y ago
      For some reason, I was pondering over the problem (with really no background in mesh/geometry algorithms) - it feels very NP-complete-like problem. It just feels hard. Could you expand on some of the details of the algorithm in terms of how these 30 algos scale? Do they scale in polynomial time or do these algos scale in non-polynomial ways but the problem space is small enough for it to compute the solution quickly. Perhaps some epoch threshold has reached and the algos bail out?

ivalm 7y ago

That'a pretty cool work; I've worked with UV mapping a bit and if this works this is beast. Side note, the top/hero video crashed mid animation for me (chrome/win10/modern hardware); everything else works fine.

quelsolaar 7y ago
Thanks! There are a lot of things that I could improve on my website but I don't think any of it matters that much. There are a lot of people in the startup community talking about metrics, marketing and having the right color on the download button, but its all kind of BS. It matters on the margin, but what really matters is delivering for your customers. Spend your time making the core offering good and if you do it right people will come no matter how ugly your webpage is. Its like a restaurant with amazing food doesn't need a good location of fancy interior design, it will always be full.
- spectramax 7y ago
  I think good design/presentation and solid approach towards attention to detail on everything you do - it only adds and it doesn't take away from the core functional aspects of the product or service. Uber-functionalism, which is what you seem to be obsessed with, has its drawbacks. Imagine if Apple didn't care about design or aesthetics or presentation of their products. At the sametime, I see some contradiction to your philosophy - there is just so much pizzaz in the product you've built. It goes against the grain of what you just said - all those animations, futuristic aesthetic of your product, giant clock with Tron-like fonts, etc...all those things are unnecessary. You could just sell the command line tool, you know :)
  - quelsolaar 7y ago
    I'm a graphics nerd so that stuff is just fun for me, and most of it is part of existing toolkits I have already written for things like font rendering and UI. I used to think that quality was attention to detail and polishing everything, but now I think its a hump you have to get over. People stand in line for hours, in the rain and cold, and jump through a lot of hoops the stuff they really want. As a creator your goal is to make them want it that much, rather then worrying about the rough edges.

rodolphoarruda 7y ago

What is UV? It's everywhere in the website.

quelsolaar 7y ago
When you do 3D graphics you first build a 3D shape and then you wrap an image around it to give it surface properties like color, reflectance, and transparency. In order to do this you need to "unwrap" the 3D shape so that it every XYZ point also exist in a 2D UV image space. This unwrapping step us usually done more or less by hand and is both tedious and time consuming.

errantspark 7y ago

I haven't really done any serious 3D work in a few years but my impression was that there are already a few popular UV auto-unwrappers and techniques like Ptex that avoid UVs entirely. I was looking at the maps produced in the demos on your page and they're definitely not like anything I'd produce or want to paint by hand. I assume that's not the point, but rather to use tools like Substance Painter or Mari right? I guess I'm just surprised that this niche is worth 7 figures. That's awesome.

ricardobeat 7y ago

That is amazing! Love was so ahead of it's time, and has been an inspiration since I first found it maybe a decade ago. Happy to see you make a comfortable living in a related space. Cheers!

MH15 7y ago

This is easily the coolest thing I've seen on HN this month! I'm a computer graphics and animation student/hobbiest in conjunction with my CS studies so this is very interesting to me. Any plans to incorporate your software into the content creation tools themselves by means of an addon?

Jack000 7y ago

Just read through all your stuff, the UV unwrapper is very cool. Do most people use it with 3d paint tools? It seems the small disconnected bits would be hard to paint by hand. some thoughts/questions: - Do you use a library for packing? This alone is a lot of work. Since you write in C, are you using boost polygon or CGAL for the computational geometry algorithms? - Have you thought about a data-driven approach? Unwrap and packing are geometric operations, but seam marking/segment classification may be amenable to an ML-based method (specifically the spectral graph CNN that came out recently). This seems like the largest hurdle to more "human-like" unwrapping but I'm only a hobbyist so this could be way off base. I'm almost tempted to create a competing product, but alas I already have a startup in a different domain : ]

quelsolaar 7y ago
I don't use libs for anything. I write everything from scratch. Not having any dependencies is a huge win for many of my customers. You can find some of my source at gamepipeline.org

quikoa 7y ago

What kind of license (one time fee/monthly subscription/???) and how much does it cost?