Archive for the ‘pet projects’ Category

The “HD” model is more or less done so I began the tedious task of unwrapping the parts that require it, that means the steel cable (to insert an helical pattern along its surface, you know… twisted steel wire.) and all the leather parts. I don’t think the plastic parts will need actual UV coordinates as they will only receive a basic matte finish. Metal parts don’t need UVs as my metal material doesn’t use them.

The leather parts on the other hand need a full unwrapping to allow me to texture them properly.

For those interested, this awful checker texture on the collar is commonly used to check for distortion during the unwrapping process. Long story short: you want the checker tiles to look as straight as possible.

More goodies! I’m not really sure about that cable tho…

Inside the box when the lid is open will be the radio crystal slot and the bark on/off switch. I’m almost done with the High resolution model. Texturing soon!

I like where this is going! The method I settled on to attach the shock box to the collar is a bit rivet heavy, but I do like the apparent bulk of it. The shock box itself is kind of a placeholder until I come up with a satisfying way to make it open/close/lock and where to place the status LEDs. I initially thought about doing a heavy padding on the inside, like on the classic leather cuffs, but I still have electrodes to add, so a bulky padding is probably a bad idea.

I’m also tempted to put the KDC logo directly on the shock box rather than in the back. but it might be a little too much “in your face”.

Literally! I started working on that shock collar project I’ve had in the back of my mind for so long. There is now even more things that I like with blender I have to say. I’m hitting a design issue however… I’m not sure how to integrate the shock box, I have this idea in mind that it should have a little lid that can be opened, but it has to be visually locked shut when the back collar padlock is in place, without using a second padlock. I’m not sure how to get that to work.

I thought i would post a quick update. I believe that the skinning is done (unless I find yet another horrible glitch) it’s not really good with the belly slider at extreme values but i do not believe that i can make it work any better.

I started on the textures but they take a lot of time to make.

And yes, I actually HAVE something to show that isn’t a horrible auto generated mess. Well it’s far to be perfect, it’s still a work in progress and is full of little errors, but i already like it!

Oh and the stiff shoulder edge look great! It’s almost like a business suit… if business suits had aprons I guess… The skirt is a bit on the narrow side, with the usual issues that this kind of thing create tho.

I just made a nice bow! And spent a lot of time doing it… not too comfortable with Blender’s spline tools but it’s getting there.

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.