Archive for the ‘pet projects’ Category

Sooo… I have figured out  a “method” to turn my “A” pose outfit into a regular “T” pose and did a quick rigging attempt. Since I did some tweaking to the model, I also remade the textures to match (they still have some horrible issues because I cannot be bothered to do a multi-pass render just yet.

It all looks quite promising!

I finished unwrapping the crop and got some preliminary textures out, took me quite a while to figure out what was going on but Darien helped me to get things to look right. I’m not sure about the proportions to be honest, especially the “shaft” length in relation to the rest of the crop. While it’s a detail, I think that a little bit of stitching would look nice on the tip, I only need to figure out the “right” way to do it in Blender.

For some reason, the blender colors are… different from “normal” colors, I need to figure what’s up with that. But in the meantime here is another little update! I got most of the details I wanted in and even managed to get a metal that looks similar to my usual one. I thought making the inner side of the tip red would be a nice touch too.

I wanted a small project that could be completed fairly quickly to get more experience on Blender, so I thought that since I’m always lacking interesting props, I should make a nice riding crop. So here is a bunch of work in progress pictures 🙂

I have started designing a better delivery/update server for KDC products. I have a few reasons to do that now:

1. Security: The current system is probably better than most vendors out there, but it’s not “great”, I can do better.
2. Reliability: The amount of mangled deliveries that my system does is worrying and is mostly due, i believe, to the way the current elements communicate with each-others.
3. Messiness: The new system will require you to be in the dead realm region to get a delivery, this way you will always get a folder, and not items given one by one scattered in multiple folders.
4. Non forced updates: Don’t you just hate how the current system dump the updated items on you as soon as it’s available? Yeah me neither.

Bottom line it should be better for everyone

I’ve been nicely asked to add a cyan option to the KDC PonyPlay tack, so I thought “why not, this will be quick”. Well I spent my entire Monday on it, it’s Tuesday noon and there is still a lot to do. I’m also using this “return” on the pony tack to do a little bit of polishing that I’ve been meaning to do, I’m starting to wonder if I should redo all my product pictures as a result…

So there we go, cyan and …. *drumroll* materials.

Don’t get excited! It’s not properly textured, it’s not skinned, there is still a lot to do, but I wanted to see what it would look like anyway 🙂

Blender keeps surprising me, I haven’t found any really archaic tool yet. The auto unwrapping functions does a pretty good job and I don’t think I will have to fiddle with it much. I merged the entire model as one and marked the seams, Blender pretty much does the rest.

I’ve finished modeling the edge of the sleeves and the bottom of the dress, I also made the underside “caps” for it (to prevent the outfit from looking one-sided), I also had to do some fixing on the left sleeve, I had forgotten that it wasn’t matching the high-resolution model at all because of the mirroring. I also marked the “T” seam on the shoulder, on each side.

I did a very quick texture unwrap on the section of the mesh that contains the… “side boob”, shoulder, and sleeve just to see how it’s done and to have a go at baking textures. Blender makes this step a little strange, but not entirely unpleasant. It’s a different workflow from 3DsMax. You can see the result in the “textured” picture, the bib is still the HD version, and you almost cannot tell the difference, beside the apparent pixelation.

I took a week away from modeling and SL stuff in general, I needed it.

I closed the back of the dress and made the “chest pocket” that I plan on animating (well… the alpha kind of animation really) to reach the locking mechanism, fusing the dress and the apron in the back was a little tricky because of the long over/under areas where the apron end.

You can also see the locking post poking out of the apron in one of the shots, but the post and lock will be 100% alpha when the “chest pocket” is closed.

There are a few “problem areas” where the body poke through, I will fix those later once this draft model is finished and I can start cleaning it up, ideally, I want to get as close to the avatar mesh as possible, it will help with rigging.