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My Tron Build, Part 3 The Live Event

 

Decorative image: A duck in sunglasses with vampire teeth. Text: Hubs for Halloween, Friday October 31 at 2:30 pm EDT
Made in Blender and Canva!

The Live Event

I launched this build to celebrate Halloween. Not because it is in any way scary, but because it is dark. 

Hey, that's as far as I go with Halloween. 😑

But I did add a twist for my planned live tour of 3 scenes.  The story line for the experience would have a beginning, middle, and end. It was not just about visiting and looking around.


Scene  1: Start in Flynn's Hideout. A wall is hiding the full city. I will play the music because without Behavior Graphs at this time, I did not know how to otherwise time the wall to descend at the same time as the "Tron" aspect of the song arrives. I invited folks to look at the fireplace for something to do.

Capture from spawn point into Flynn's Hideout. A glowing white room has a fireplace, table and chairs, and a view (that is an image) of Tron City.
Tron arrival view. Notice the "Tron City" is an image on the wall.

Scene 2: Explore Tron city (The Grid).  It's really fun to turn your movement speed up to 2.0 and zoom down the main entry road.  I did it nearly every time I visited the build while working on it.

Capture from Tron City in Hubs. A light cycle zooms down a city road.


Scene 3 (an actual other whole Hubs scene):  I switched scenes once everyone was comfortable.  

The center building was replaced with a "5th Element" style duck (IYKYK), everything now purple monotone for Halloween, and eliminated Flynn's Hideout. The sky changed from black to a purple/orange gradient. Inadvertently, the navigation mesh which I only flirted with in Blender, worked.

Collage of ideas of making a purple Tron City just for Halloween. Duck elements are seen as those are associated with the Hubs WebXR platform.

The Bummer

Unfortunately, no one who showed up for the Halloween event knew the Tron movies.  So all of my work adding in references and allusions was for naught at the time. 😔 Hopefully I'll be able to show this build live to a real Tron fan someday!

The Video 

Because I knew I was launching this space on October 31 at ~3:00 p.m., I prepared all of my social media in advance of the event to be able to submit it to the show-and-tell Hubs Discord channel for October.




Other inspirations

I would like to point out some other inspirations that I used because this build took me about 8 weeks. 

I heavily listened to this music mix, Tron - Psybient, Progressive Psychill, Cyber Sci-Fi Ambient Music Mix and Quantum Polarity by MyNoise.net

The Tron font generator was brilliant! Another happy accident was getting the purple neon Hubs in Tron font work well in the Hubs space.

Capture from Tron City Purple in Hubs of a neon-like sign with text Hubs in Tron font.
Combination neon from the Tron font generator with Hubs bloom.

I did not know that Disney was releasing Tron: Ares but I did notice that Tron red clips started showing up in my YouTube searches. Tron: Ares released on October 10, 2025 and did very poorly.  My build released on October 31, 2025 and was completely unrelated!!  Cringe!

I did attempt some UV scrolling but in the end, I didn't like the effect inside of the build; it was too flashy against all the black. The neon bloom was already enough.

Early on, I collected a few Sleeping Beauty images because I've been intrigued by the angular branches on the trees in the background.  These didn't show up in the build but I'm keeping those ideas for the future.

I did not make a Recombinant. Thought about it, because it is very basic geometry (it makes the Solar Sailer look very complex).  But decided not because in the Tron lore, it is sorta a bad guy.

Easter egg hidden: I made a back door and garage where the Light Cycle starts it's straight line run across the city. The door does not open until the wall opens, but I figured that I could direct everyone to look towards the city and NOT see the door opening behind them at the same time. That way, that Easter egg would stay mostly hidden until I pointed it out.

Collage of varied inspiration images for my Tron build. Different computer cities, furniture and one non-matching image from Disney's Sleeping Beauty.

Lessons Learned

  • Keep Blender source files for everything.
  • Keep a Project folder in my browser for images, fonts, music, anything. 
  • Plan the experience - I liked my 3 scene narrative plot.
  • Make the social media early. It is stressful but it did work.
  • Write a blog post, perhaps, as I go along. 😏

I hope you did not miss Part 1, Lore, Textures, and Basic Shapes and Part 2 Light Cycle, Solar Sailer, and Avatars of this TRON series. 

Would you like to visit this TRON scene?  You have to ask me for the link (and I've not made my contact info easy to find...yet).  Stay tuned.

 

 

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