Archive for the ‘pet projects’ Category

Progression has been very slow, I’ve been asking their opinion to several people, getting their suggestions, doing slight changes here and there. I finally decided that this was enough, and really… this is as good as it is every going to get.

Now… to the next step.

I finally managed to write my own little voxel system on Torque3D. The code is extremely crude and pretty much unusable for anything but this specific example. This does give me a better understanding of how to write into a vertex buffer to create a 3D model “on the fly” based on dynamic parameters.

Good progress on the boots today, i added some details which should have been bump mapped normally, but I wanted the toes upper seam to mark the starting point of the lacing, speaking of those caps… I’m not entirely sure whether I like them or not, now they look a little too hm.. dressy, but once textured, maybe it will blend in the background and won’t pop out as much.

I’m also tempted to have a spine on the back and maybe a pull loop like on the pony boots.

It’s pretty rare that I do not already have a very clear idea of what I want to do. This was one of these times. But I’m finally getting somewhere; and past the “design roadblock”.

I promised myself that after the cuffs I would take a nice long, one week break. Well look at what I’m doing when I’m supposed to relax from making things…

Yeah… I just make “other” things…

Free set of cuffs to the first person who guess the model number. (it may be missing bits here and there, still a work in progress)

After realizing that my stitches where way too big, I redid all the textures with smaller ones. I basically did Monday’s work all over again. But here is the result in SL! The lighting is a bit extreme, in order to showcase the materials, and I’ve put the posture collar in the shot to compare them. The stitches are still slightly bigger than on the collar, but it isn’t as much of a problem as it was before.

Now that my normal maps are all nice and clean, behold!

Now to get all the textures ready.

I’ve been silent for the past days while I was finishing the unwrapping and spent last night rendering the different textures for the leather cuffs.

I also had a long hard look at the normal map… it’s not very good. I have a pair of screenshots to illustrate it, but basically the edges are scattered with “glitch streaks” (let’s call them like that) that are, I believe, due to the hard edge they are sitting on. It’s not a big deal, really but it means that I have to go touch up the normal map by hand in Photoshop to rub those imperfections out. That takes time as there is a lot of them.

I’ve been on a roll today so I’ll try to keep on going until I’m too tired (I will then post another update).

Here is another little update. I’m not really satisfied with the triangle count with the rivets and all the other metallic parts and I think the inside is still getting way too much attention. I tried something a little different this time and fused the strap to the cuff’s surface where I could, we will see if it leads to a better result.

Well, not really, Unwrapping went particularly fast today and I’m recycling a lot of material settings from the posture collar. The high-resolution model is almost done. On a side note, I’m thinking about having metallic parts on a separate texture sheet, there is no need for these to have a unique texture for each project, kind of wasteful. That’s also why the D-Ring is still missing, I already have one in SL that will work just fine.