Archive for the ‘pet projects’ Category

Now that we have a fancy leather posture collar, wouldn’t it be nice to have a matching set of soft leather cuffs? I’m going heavy on the padding for this design, not only because i like my cuffs comfy, but it also makes the process of adjusting to your avatar much simpler.

I’m reusing the same strap size, hardware and general proportions that I used on the bridle and on the posture collar, easier to match it all.

For those interested, here is the recorded session on twitch.tv

This is a little minecraft modpack that I pieced together over the course of a few months, tonight I finally got around packaging it and putting it on the Technic platform.

It’s not too bloated (I tried to keep “novelty” mods to a minimum) with sort of a loose “science versus magic” theme and a bit more survival than you would normally see on minecraft. There is a few slight configuration tweaks regarding ore generation, temperature effects on armors and a few other things. Also the presence of the “sync” mod allow you to clone yourself to cheat death, even in hardcore mode. While this potentially makes the game much easier, it doesn’t come for free and survival in the nether is much more difficult.

The science side is focused around Universal electricity compatible mods while the magic side is supported by ArsMagica2, Thaumcraft4 and Mystcraft.

If you play minecraft and have the Technic launcher, why don’t you give it a try?

So that’s one thing done, I’ve also got some texturing going on and ambient occlusion, Here are the mandatory screenshots for today.

And as a bonus, early normal mapping preview.

I’m experimenting with a new mesh creation pipeline to make buildings. I started a replacement for my manor a few weeks ago but got overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of making this kind of model in regular 3D tools. I’ve been turning my attention to a tool called Trenchbroom.

Trenchbroom is very simple to use 3D level editor for Quake that use CSG brushes (Constructive Solid Geometry). It’s different from how you would normally make a 3D model, it’s not as messy as SketchUp and it will crunch down your construction in a single mesh. A bit like SL, a bit like booleans, but different.

I might write a tutorial on how to get something built-in this tool on SL at some point.

The collar LPM got completed pretty quickly, there is an area that I’m slightly worried about (on the edge where the inner and outer materials meet) that might need further work, but other than that, it looks about right.

I optimized the straps, removed non visible faces and things like that, same for the ring anchor point. And added the mandatory KDC logo 🙂

The “detailed” model is complete… pretty much and so is most of the textures, I still need to do the slots in the straps. After that, like always, I have to build the “optimized” model for use in SL.

I couldn’t show it properly but the inside/padding and outside will have independent coloring, as usual, I’m still debating whether the lining should be the same color as the padding or not.

I got around working some more on the posture collar, mostly on the strap work really, it’s a little bulky. I decided on an “over under” style where the collar meet at the back but, I’m not so sure about the angled sides, they make it MUCH easier to fit to the avatar neck, but I’m afraid that it might look… weird for a posture collar, all the cylinder type posture collars that I found have parallel sides.

The buckle and straps are “standard sized” the same size that was used on the bridle because I wanted to reuse the locking buckles I made for it, is that too

I’m not sure on the detailing, I like a simple and no-nonsense look, but should I add side rings and/or a back ring? (the latter might be as easy as slipping a D-ring in the same leather loop as the strap retainer.

I thought of a way to have a name”tag” on the collar but there isn’t enough room anywhere to make it look right.

(The flat version in the pictures show a possible rivet placement.)

My working speed appears to vary from one object to the other, it only took me 5 hours to get this trashcan modeled, textured unwrapped and normal mapped complete with movable lid and internal bag 🙂

Monday and Tuesday where all code and no play, the vacuum is now fully functional, it charge, discharge, collect dust, and the temp attach work like a charm. The room manager works too, you can define a room as a volume made of one or more cylindrical areas, it’s not the bets method for corners but it’s good enough for vacuuming.

The last piece of the puzzle is to be able to empty the internal tank into the trashcan and we are done!

That is, the core features are complete, there is a couple of little code related refinement i might add before release, or through a patch post release maybe…

So what do we have… labels and progress bars for the control panel, fancy power and storage capacity indicators, not a lot done today but a few iterations were needed. I also started scripting some basic things, more tomorrow 🙂

It turns out I had a lot of touch-up to do in gimp to get those texture maps cleaned up. The result is pretty good! Once normal maps and specular are applied it looks a little “too much” but that’s because you aren’t ment to use complete texture maps with normal maps.

For now, I am sitting between two chairs with materials, maybe someday I won’t have to think about getting it to look ok with and without normal mapping, but i guess conversion rate is pretty low for those features at the moment.

You can see the difference, without and with materials enabled, I’ll let you guess which.