Archive for March 24th, 2025

I spent a bunch of time doing some weekend Blender work the past few days.

The first project of the weekendwas to see if I could build a kind of “body cage” that would be weightpainted to the body itself. Main issue was whether I could make the joints look somewhat believeable. As it turns out, the answer is “no, not really”, the knees are somewhat okay, but as soon as I get anywhere near the hip joints it quickly turns into a jagged mess. I know that hand painting the weights could solve some of those issues, but I sincerely believe this is one of those projects where the cage would have to be a static mesh that matches the body once it has been posed into place.

The pose I want also required fully weighted toe bones… Not something for today but I’ve learned a couple of new tricks.

Since the Second Life cell block keeps being a popular spot, I’ve resumed working on the “large” prison map with a new self-contained unit: The prisoner’s mess hall.

Like every other room I’ve done in this project, it’s meant to be relatively small compared to a more realistic one. Each cell block only has room for no more than a dozen prisoners at most. In my mind, one door is the entrance, one door is the exit, and the “kitchen” is on the other side of the wall where there would be an “Automat-style wall of small doors where prisoners would retrieve their tray. Not sure where the tray “return” should be.

At first, I thought of putting the table around a “light well” but I decided against it to keep in theme with the oppressive feeling: Windowless and a single table with a divider. The previous version only had 8 seats but we figured that prisoners don’t need that much elbow room and added an extra two. I might use the light well feature for the guard cafeteria or something.