Archive for the ‘pet projects’ Category

Because I sure feel cured from any strap making urge, at least for a little while.

On straitjacket anyway, the back is usually fairly interesting detail-wise.

If I’ve done my job well, the right side is clearly going over the left side. A few wild creases appear and I kinda like how they turned out.

I’ve also pulled the back further up, it’s starting to look a bit off-balance but some generous creasing should help explaining why it is riding so high up.

I was gonna start on the buckling straps but I need to make a reference for the friction buckles first.

Overall, I think the sleeves look a lot less like they were made like a balloon animal (Again, ignore the really terrible skinweight, I’m only posing this model to check if anything looks out-of-place). I’m especially happy with how the ends look.

I’ve separated a bunch of things to allow me a bit more freedom with the mesh topology.

I’ve pulled the bottom strap further down in the front and a little up in the back… I think it looks good.

I did some work on that shoulder to make it less terrible.

I need to start working on the straps in the back, but I might play a little with the collar shape first before breaking symmetry.

Alright, things are moving forward, I drafted the upper areas and sleeves. And this is where thing are getting a little tricky.

You can see a “funny” before/after with 2nd and 3rd, I changed the pose between the two and shaped the sleeves a bit but it still looks extremely unappealing to me…

This model “shouldn’t” be rigged, it isn’t really designed for it, but I need some kind of idea of how it will look with the arms folded.

Then we come to the 4th picture showing yet another issue: the arms and the start of the front loop don’t exactly match.

This crusade is gonna take a while…

This is going to look like “déjà vu” for some people, I figured I would include a view of the subdivision cage. Since there are straps in specific places I built the straps first and now I’m basically filling the “gaps”. It’s the easy part, but I already like it, plus I can see a few places where I can easily reenforce the “fabric effects”.

For some reason it looks very leathery at the moment…

Pretty much everything else is done, HUDs, holders, and I even made a new sound for the spade crop, but getting the riding crop marks to look right is taking some time.

Coming soon to a KDC retailer near you 😛

I’ve refactored a bunch of code on the Lady Eleanor leather crop, redundant code, unused functions, I also fixed a couple of very minor things and will be exposing the sounds.

For the longest time I’ve been referring to sounds only by their UUIDs but it doesn’t allow users to set up their own sounds, also since UUIDs are longer than your average sound filename, it uses more memory to do this.

Next step is to make strike decals  for it.

It actually looks better than I expected, but everything using materials usually looks great at DeBasement. For some reason SL refuses to go lower than 380 triangles for the lowest LOD so I’ll have to make a custom mesh for it.

After reshaping the spade to a more pleasant profile, it took me a while to decide how I was going to make the blood effect, but I’ve come up with a really nice way to do it.

It looks even nicer with some normal mapping to give the blood a little bit of thickness.

BUT… This is too much. I mean it’s a metal riding crop, not a spear!

I think I’ll make the blood overlay a lot shorter, focus on the spade and maybe 1/3rd of the stem.

A bit more “tasteful” wouldn’t you agree?