Archive for the ‘pet projects’ Category

I usually try to do other things during the weekend, but this one was pretty boring so I had 3 long nightly sessions:

• I reworked the bib front to get the exposed corners on the white trim and a more starched look.
• Worked on the low poly model, which is progressing surprisingly fast.

I am not fully comfortable with a few of the elements in the geometry, I’m trying to follow the contours of the high poly fold and creases and it does some funny things. I also want to rework the shoulder seams to mark them into the model, not just for looks, but also as a conveniently placed texture seam.

Because you do not get rid of an obsession just like this, here are some work in progress shot of this week. And yes I’m considering using liquidmesh for this. That is, if I ever manage to finish it.

I didn’t want to make the cuffs a “resized” version of the collar, because I feel that the locks should stay at a consistent size for the different parts of this set. The difficulty here is to get them to look like they match perfectly, the cuffs have to be smaller, but the hinge should be as wide and as tall as for the collar since they are made from the same steel parts.

Good result so far, however the welds look slightly different, I’m getting some unwanted shadowing because the piece is rotated 90°, I might put it back vertically to eliminate that.

I’ve settled for a “circular” section (the simplest of the two) rather than an oval shape. An oval would not really be harder to make than a circle but I stuck to circle because… well circles have a certain elegance.  I’m not sure if I will stick with it, but it looks good enough for now.

I took a couple of days to try to really get into blender. While I’m fairly proficient with 3D Studio Max, i don’t think it’s where the future is. While max has a wide array of plugins available, they are almost all made by for profit entities, add to this that Blender has a much better file format support and has always been the tool set of choice for SecondLife ( all the way back to sculpted prims, then meshs, then rigged meshs and now fitted meshs), you can see why I’m interested by it.

Blender is kind of a strange beast, getting used to its control scheme is quite difficult when coming from something more “Standard”. But the tools are not very different from Max really. But unlike Max where hotkeys are there but optional, on Blender it’s almost a requirement to know a good amount of them, while most of the hotkeys have their UI equivalent, it’s not true for everything (that or i haven’t found them yet).

The new Blender rendering engine take a lot of time getting used to it. The results are very pleasant and realistic even with just a sun light and a basic sky but the tools available are… strange to say the least, and I’m not talking about the “noodle” interface, that’s not the issue. Some materials turn out to be extremely difficult to produce and what should be a very simple thing turns out to be not so simple to produce. I get the feeling that on Cycles, material creation is very close to what shader programming would be.

Ironically I have yet to touch the “old” rendering engine which might be more appropriate after all, it’s just the old reflex scanline < mental ray that you tend to have in Max.

I don’t think I can just move to Blender “like that”, I’m gonna need a lot of practice to get comfortable with it.

Finally! I was a bit burned Friday so I decided to take Saturday/Sunday off, the weather is pretty horrible here: hot and wet. Which makes it difficult to get on with work.

Two shots today, one with the large padlock, and one with the shroud adapter for small locks. Enjoy 🙂

Okay I’ve finished the shroud and the locking pin, I can’t take a picture of them right now because I’m rendering textures (again). Here are a couple shots of the collar win diffuse and normal maps. I initially wanted to use a “pearl” finish on the metal, but it doesn’t really mark the normal map, all it does is make everything slightly noisy and basically hide the rest, so I decided that I would do without it.

I’m doing the final renders for the collar, shroud and pin for the hundredth time now, but after this, the last remaining piece is the large padlock itself.

The collar is almost finished! All that remains is completing the padlock adapter and the large lock, which shouldn’t take very long. I might tweak the metal a bit but I’m not touching the model anymore.

I’m sorry i should have posted at least on Thursday but i had to restart so many renders for the different blending maps (I have no idea why it took hours to render them). There is something very strange going on with render to texture and I had to work around it.

So here is the update, as it “might” look in SL (more or less), as expected the metal is different, so I’ll have to play with the settings until it looks right, also the welds look okay but somehow are not marking the normal map  properly, so that’s another thing I’m gonna have to figure out.

As a bonus, i included a couple of mask shots for those interested.

Making machined metal objects, while fun as long as it’s the high polygon model, becomes a headache when it comes to the low polygon model, mainly because hard edges and any angle over 45° become a problem with normal mapping. I’ve remade this low polygon model from scratch at least 4 times since Sunday. It’s looking “all right” but the welds are not coming out as nicely as i hoped. Part of it is probably due to how aggressively I’ve been on the triangle count. The model is remarkably efficient tho, 700 triangles, that’s less than a single sculpted prim…

But maybe it’s a little “too” low.

I also discovered that my weathering method doesn’t work with render to texture so I am going to  try to pre-render the different masks instead of doing them dynamically like I had planned, which means that all the high poly parts are going to need texture coordinates.

From really crusty “I’ve been slammed against a concrete floor for 10 years” to “almost perfect” with some light aging on the sides and a shine on the edges where most of the wear happens.

Also as a little bonus, the look of my material window…