Archive for 2013

Here is the second and last part of the LPM unwrapping: The charging station!

I still had a lot of room left on the UV map so I decided to pack the control panel with it too, less textures.

I’ve worked mostly at night these days, so my sleep cycle is all messed up. I only have to unwrap the charging station, which I will do today, then I can start texture work.

The shapes are complete! The 3 objects together weight less triangles than one of my pony boots and should be very L.I efficient when rezzed.

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel! Next step is unwrapping them, which might get tricky (for the charging station especially). And then i can finally attack textures and scripting!

I rebuilt the vacuum head in LPM, I”ve probably been a little overkill on the triangle reduction, SL says L.I = 2 for the whole thing, that’s way better than what I expected.

I whipped together this little wall panel to house the readouts for room status. It will show how “clean” the floor is, but could be expanded to show other aspects. I also got a lot of work done on the low polygon models for said panel and the vacuum cleaner body, these are 5-10 times lighter than the high-resolution counterpart.

I forgot to post yesterday so this is the first thing I’m doing today! I came up with a charging station design on monday and kinda followed up on it. It sort of match the vacuum cleaner design and I’m fairly happy with how it came out, considering it was a first draft. I added “connector plates” on the station and on the vacuum to give a little “this is where they connect” kind of feeling. It looks “OKAY” so far but all that really matter is how it will come out in the texture.

In the high polygon aspect of this product, only the wall control panel remains, and then I can start building the LPM mesh, unlike a lot of my earlier products, this one should be a breeze to block out, unwrap and texture. So unless something goes horribly wrong, i should be able to get to the scripting aspect of things before the end of the week.

On a sidenote, I’ve been playing a game called Shadowrun: returns which is a “modern” old-school isometric role-playing game, and they had a very interesting documentation about drawing new tiles for the game, especially how tiles should be textured, i invite you to read this wiki page, it’s very interesting stuff, and it makes me wonder about my reliance on CGI generated details in textures.

I guess it sort of fit for a vacuum cleaner…

I discovered a little trick that allowed me to be a little faster today, i carved out the canister cover and came up with some kind of tilt mechanism, this is just for a quick animation really, so I don’t think i needed to go THAT much in detail.

I’m still torn about the color scheme for the body. Black and red are my favourite colors, and they make everything look great, but maybe a little too aggressive…

It’s funny how a couple of basic materials and a few trims here and there turn an undefined “blob” into something that actually look man-made. I did a bunch of “cuts” and the side vents today. As usual, it took longer than I would have liked, but what can I do.

I initially wanted to make the body black, like the head, which would fit nicely with my “dark” KDC theme, but maybe I will go for a lighter tone instead, I’m not decided on this yet. It still need “something” to hook it up on it’s charging station, a control panel for the charge level and a storage tank need to be cut out of the body and modeled.

I thought that I would break the silence and post more pictures. It’s actually a difficult project for me because the shapes have to stay very sleek, even after I’ve cut all the panels and parts into it.

This is sort of a return of my chore system, or at least a more modest iteration of it.

I waited long enough for this one, I was expecting another bug to come up, but it has been long enough.

I’ took a breather the past few weeks, it was too hot to do anything good anyway. I started a new project, but there isn’t much to show yet.