Archive for 2020

I should have posted yesterday but I missed the deadline. I also didn’t have anything nice to show.

I’ve been color-matching the new leather to the old pieces to the best of my abilities. I’m not gonna claim that it is identical, or perfect but it looks pretty close to the “Classic Leather” feel… I think?

This update contains a bunch general code changes that have been added over the past year, but it also contains a few fairly important changes:

• The mittens now auto play a bento “fist” pose (one for each hand).
• Added Alpha masks for Avatar 2.0 BoM (the existing alpha mask should work fine on LLUV compatible mesh bodies).
• Added an Avatar 2.0 auto-hide script for each mitten (you can modify/disable/delete them).
• Added an RLV folder auto-wear/unwear for each mitten (check the manual for details).
• Added tagplate/accessories support.

The infobox also links to the KDC Documentation Wiki which I recommend that you check for more details on the new functions.

These UVmaps have a lot of internal “blank” spaces, and while I’m not a huge fan of that, I actually tried to chop it all up further to save more texture space (as shown), but it was never enough to actually justify doing it. It will be fine.

I did a couple of test bakes (full of glitches) but I am fairly impressed by the result already, with no attempts at color correction. I especially like that backing ‘felt’ a lot.

I also did some work to clean up how my materials get mixed, (specifically specularity, environment and gloss maps) which made me to realize that there was a problem in how I was rendering the metal on the grommets. It is fixed now and I think it looks a lot better.

As usual, this is taking longer than it should, but I am helplessly obsessed with getting everything nice and straight (when it comes to UVs :P)

But look how undistorted my checkerboard texture is 😀

Only a few pesky bits to finish straightening, only because I tried to be EXTRA ACCURATE… for some reason unknown to me…

Well, “some” progress.

There is still a couple of holes I have to close, 1940 triangles so far.

Oh yeah I also discovered an annoying x-ray bug on Blender 2.90.0 which disappears when you delete/hide other instances of the same mesh. I had to work blind until I figured the solution, that’s always fun 😛

After several attempts I finally got the stitches and grommets just where I want them (featuring some node graph madness).

At this stage, it is pointless to continue tweaking materials without a low-polygon model to bake to. So that is my next step.

I think I’m “almost” done preparing those. I had to fix those pesky corners and in retrospective… (you can see a beforer/after) I should just have used a different UV projection there. Oh well.

I’m not entirely sure about it being on the tightest notch but it looks a little odd  with so much strap left if i remove the last hole.

This will officially be the second “transition” with my 3D leather work, the first one was when I migrated from 3D studio Max to Blender, with blender 2.8x officially removing what used to be my rendering engine of choice (Blender:Render), it is way overdue for me to move my leatherwork to Blender:Cycles.

I’ve been using it a lot already with all the recent “metallic” products, but the big challenge is getting everything to look close enough to allow this collar to be used seamlessly with previous leather products. This is all preliminary obviously, as the actual texture rendering will more than likely look different from those pictures.

I included a few version, but the differences between each might not be entirely obvious (unless you look really hard?)

Good progress on the new collar, I ended up ditching the weird “ribbing” from the liner and the trim on the strap (it made the strap look too narrow). I also added rivets and finished shaping the strap to accomodate for the D-rings and buckle.

This is based on a real collar but I’m trying to push it towards something that would be suitable to complete the “Classic” set, still very work in progress.

Not a big fan of those padding creases… too many too regular.