Archive for the ‘pet projects’ Category

This update was very delayed, but hey… Christmas stuff happening, so here is a few texture tests. I’ve rebuilt the elbow caps proper and did some optimization/cleanup on the sleeves and pant legs. And here are a few texture tests. It turns out the weave I wanted to use is causing too many issues (moire effect), and I have some other noises in the shader already anyway.

1024×1024 for the top, and for the bottom, with an extra 1024×128 and a 512×512 for the accent stripes.

There are a lot of baking glitches I need to sort out, but other than that? I’m pretty happy with the result.

I’ve made a symmetric copy for the other leg to save time, but I still have to “massage” it into position and tweak some of the folds that differ from the other side.

It weights 8931 triangles currently, and that’s with everything included: “Not great, not terrible” (as Dyatlov would say).

Seeing the model in a “somewhat” complete state makes me a bit more confident that I might actually be able to finish this soon.

A lot remains to be done.

Modeling feel so slow lately…

Not much to say otherwise, I have now far too many edges on the front part of the leg below that weird “fold” and not enough on the back.

Progress is still progress right?

Little by little, progress is happening… But this is going way too slowly.

I was kinda dreading the part where the collar goes over & under, but I’ve cobbled something together that should survive a “glance”. I’m definitely overdoing it on what really is minute details.

Furthermore, I’ve done some quick tests to simulate a 16×48 flexible dot matrix display, potentially for a future cyberpunk-ish project?

The prisoner uniform low-poly model is taking shape!

As with other projects like this one, I really struggle working around those large folds in the geometry. The front looks quite good in my opinion, the back on the other hand is a janky mess and I hate it.

I’ll just keep redoing it until it becomes acceptable.

I’m probably not going to use symmetry, but if I can nail a nice, clean topology on the first half, I will copy it over to the second half, where possible.

I gave Marvelous Designer’s retopology tool another go and… god… it is such an awful tool.

I mean, I get that this isn’t really their specialty, but still.

The pictures I’ve included, are the results, so far of my attempts using RetopoFlow (Try it out, it is quite good https://github.com/CGCookie/retopoflow). Progress is slow, but I feel that the result is a lot smoother than when I did this completely manually.

The surface constrained smoothing tool is especially useful… (when it doesn’t snap to the underside of the original model)

Two things for today’s post:

First, I’m trying to come up with an automatic cell door design, as an add-on to the existing 3×3 cells. I’m thinking about using the open radio protocol to link the door script and the control console, with an option to make it secure, or hack-able. Probably nice industrial mushroom buttons and lights for the control board?

Second, I’ve gone through the prison uniform project (once again!) to try to solve the problems I am having with it. Back to A-pose, less extreme creasing. I’m thinking that this is as good as I can get it with my current skill level. I’ve also added a hem at the bottom of the shirt/top piece and cleaned up a bunch of issues. The sleeves could use some tweaking but other than smoothing the cuffs I’m probably not going to touch them.

It took quite a bit of fiddling to prevent my nails from clipping through the finger claws, but I eventually got it to work. The texture could be a little darker and/or more contrasted.

I’ve also painted a version with a red base which looked quite decent, more on that later.

I’m thinking of making a few “variants” to minimize the number of separate models used: both hands, left/right hand, both indexes, left/right index… or maybe index + middle finger, or something like that.

There is also the question of adding doodle & strike integration, because… why not?

I sure wish finger claws looked this good in real life 😛

Today was far more productive than I could have ever hoped. I first did all the basic contouring of the different pieces & the pentagram, which I thought was neat, as it nest perfectly below the first segment when the fingers are extended. I wasn’t sure of the rest of the design, and initially tried to make some sort of stag skull with a fancy tendril looking rack, but it wasn’t very good. The second attempt I thought about some sort of stylized scales or a cracked turtle-shell surface but completely messed it up and ended up with some, abstract and thorny vines.

I kept the idea and re-drew it all a third time, and this is where it is at now.

I also wanted something on the backside of the “nails” because of how visible they are and ended up with this sort of stippled surface that reminds me of a nail file. The KDC logo is hidden on the underside, behind the finger joint, making it more visible would look a bit… repetitive when wearing 4 claws on one hand.

I will be out of town tomorrow and most of Thursday, so feel free to give me your opinion!

Unless I/You come up with something better, I’m feeling pretty good about this one as the “final” high-poly version!

This is a bit different from the Halloween of the past few years I suppose. Ignore the 4th picture, I did some quick engraving tests and couldn’t be bothered to plug my tablet in, so it looks like something out of MS Paint.

I initially wanted to make them completely rigid, but because of how long these finger claws are, I kinda need at least one hinge point. It also adds a bit of detail, since this is all a bit bland at the moment.

There is clipping here and there because I’m only making it for the middle finger at the moment, I’ll massage everything in its proper place with the low-polygon variants.

I only have 2-3 weeks to finish this in time, pretty stressed already 😀