Archive for the ‘pet projects’ Category

A little thing I”ve been making for the region. Not quite finished yet.

I spent all of monday making all the different LOD (Level Of Detail) meshs for the summer & winter variations aswell as the four different chest sizes.

I know that LODs on rigged meshs are a bit broken at the moment but I have hope that this will be fixed once the animesh project goes live, so good LODs are a good idea.

The dresses sit around 4000 Draw weight at a mere 7000 ish triangles and the LOD switching is imperceptible, even rezzed! pretty good I think!

I’ve also made an alpha layer for “mixed” avatars (2.0 body with system head) and “Regulation” versions (I’ll explain this in detail on the wiki later).

This post will not have any pictures so I’ll be brief.

I was considering the Shoin School Uniform project to be pretty much ready however a friend pointed out numerous issues with the shoulder weighting.

The problem was that my test setup in Blender turned out to be “inaccurate”… to put it mildly. 20 or so test uploads later, tweaking blindly, I finally got it to behave.

I just had lunch. It’s 5PM *dies*.

I don’t think I can get the skirt weighting to blend better… I essentially have to choose between uncovering the legs even more in extreme poses or making the skirt center blend better, and I can’t have both. I’ll probably fiddle with it some more however.

Regardless, I got all the chest sizes ready and I tweaked the material a little more to get a cleaner shading. I also got the shirt sleeves rigged… it’s not 100% perfect but at least nothing is clipping out anymore. I also got the fitmesh settings for the butt.

I won’t do the belly fitmesh, sorry, it’s going into the belt territory and I don’t want this area to deform horribly.

So what is left… get some advice from friends, upload all the final meshs and setup lods. And write a couple of auto hide scripts for the body.

I can’t believe I spent yet another day on weighting the skirt part…

I ended up trashing the left/right leg blend I had so I could add an upper/lower leg blend on the dress hem to have it fold over the knees when sitting and kneeling. Because keeping the hem together was such a pain I ended up doing it mostly by the numbers. I think it’s “acceptable”.

I cleaned up some stray weighting and corrected weights on the vertical strip edges (again).

I also did a really quick test rig of the short sleeve variation. Acceptable too?

I hope so, I wasn’t planning on working today because my back hurts so much I suspect I caught some weird illness over the weekend.

But it’s 5AM and I’ve done some good progress.

The skirt is an absolute mess to rig and I don’t think I can just “stop” it from clipping…

It’s a dress, it’s gonna happen, and I am NOT making a dress with bento bones, no thank you.

Or rigged, since it’s SecondLife and we have to misuse technical terms 😛

It has almost been 3 days now, I get the feeling that this could possibly be my best rigging attempt. I trashed the lower body stuff again since I’m focusing on two bones at a time. I think I’ve done a competent job at the neck and shoulders at this point. It’s not perfect yet (can it ever be?) and I can probably improve it.

I’m thinking I might tackle the skirt at this point. I will probably “hard skin” the belt because I don’t like the idea of it deforming too much.

I spent a couple of days trying to cleanup the avatar 2.0 devkits into something “unified” with reasonable precision.

It’s not that I need it for this specific project but it bothered me that things might not be as accurate as they could be on the wrists.

I don’t like showing horribly broken weight paints so these pictures will do.

I didn’t like the original short sleeves so I just remodeled them entirely, again. Much better now. I also rendered the textures for the white/summer variations.

The lighting seem a little harsh and excessive, I can fix that later.

The right side looks all right I think. The left side looks… wrong. I don’t know I think it has a polygon density issue among other things.