It’s this time again, i will be streaming most of the day on my new project: A new gasmask 🙂

[livestream type=”twitch” channel=”kyrah3D”]

I’m sorry for the lack of news, i tried to relax the past week, but i think i still need a couple more days before i am fully “recharged”.

I believe the next project will be a new gas mask 🙂

One month in the making, finally completed 🙂

They feature my “classic” leather, in 8 colors and 8 stitching, so basically 64 possibilities, you can also change the hoof color to match the boot body (should you want to) and it has a  “smooth” and a “textured” version.

The heel can be either color coordinated or use a contrasting varnished wood finish. The laces and metal can bear any colors you may want to use (RGB selection). Finally, they are mod, so you can tweak around. The single mesh structure makes them also extremely easy to adjust to your avatar.

Check it out at the KDC main shop or on the Secondlife Marketplace.

I’m sorry for the long silence, I didn’t have anything new to show really.

Tuesday was all about getting my new displays calibrated (it takes a couple of hours per display). Today, as I was assembling the textures I realised that there was overlaps that I could never fix so I had to scrap a bunch of the work to rearrange the UV clusters so they won’t be this tightly packed.

Which means I’m rendering textures, again.

On the flip side I added a few wooden materials for the heel spine, but I still need to recover this wasted time.

This is going to be a long night -_-.

The SL model is pretty much final, I won’t touch it anymore. Texture wise however, I think the black wood is too “black” and things could use a bit of contrast, but maybe that’s just me.

The metal will be tintable, the usual way, same for the laces and the hoof, if i make a light version of the texture. There is still a couple of texture glitches here and there, but nothing major that I can see.

It’s using more triangles than what I was hoping to remain under, but there is only so much I can do with these laces, short of doing it all in texture (which is the proper way to do this by the way) but you guys would probably not like that.

What’s left:

• Getting all the parts UVWmapped.
• Making all the textures.
• Some scripting, but considering these do not lock or have any bondage features, coloring HUD and maybe a walking sound.

Another work in progress, I deleted a bunch more “unnecessary” edges on the boot itself and added the LPM horseshoes. I’m sure “someone” will complain that I’ve been cheap on the polygon count, by the look of it, I won’t be able to maintain the boot under 2000 triangles, and 3000 triangles is not far considering I’m still missing the zipper pull, lacing, hooks and eyelets. I have no doubt that it will remain under 10k triangles but beyond that?

The devil is in the details…

Fun fact: a sculpted prim is 1024 triangles.

Now that the high polygon version is ready, it’s time to work on the low polygon version, the one that will be specially optimized for real-time rendering and obviously, secondlife.

I never talked about these things, but when it comes to low polygon modeling, it’s all a balancing act. Triangles take pretty much the same time to render regardless of their size, so if you want your model to be “kind” to the user’s computer, you have to balance between quality and performances.

I could write an article about it, i have a folder full of extremely bad examples of  models that have no place in SL, yet are your typical “top seller” shoes.

As of today, SL doesn’t support normal mapping (yet), so we cannot use fancy tricks. Which means that regardless of your ability to optimize, you have to shoot for a little higher polygon count than you normally would because of the tendency SL residents have to move their camera around and zoom all the way in on everything, down to the smallest piece of jewelry.

But even with normal and specular mapping, I fear that those unreasonable expectations for high fidelity rendering will only get worse.

Sorry for the delay.

I’ve done some work on the boot materials. Now these might be a little dark, I admit it, so I included a fairly high-resolution “sample” of what the texture MIGHT look like once i’m done with it.

The “heel” is made in hardwood, I might offer a little selection for this… or simply make it tintable I guess…

Space Station 13

If you have never played any of the variations of Space Station 13 and you are looking for a humorous star trek inspired roleplay environment, I highly recommend that you try it out, specifically /tg/station13 which is open-source.

What is it?

Space Station 13 is a old-school 2D top down rpg/sandbox game on a futuristic space station, you can pick a job when you join the server which will determinate your first credentials and starting equipment.

The space station is surprisingly detailed and behave like a closed ecosystem, with power generation, air recycling, food production, medical care and much more.

The game is played in “rounds” that can last one or more hours with varied game modes, most of them being about one or more members of the station crew “going rogue” and trying to complete specific goals against the rest of the players.

Have a look here: http://www.nanotrasen.com the wiki is an invaluable help for new players.

Why are you talking about it?

Because I just released a small patch that turns the original text-based stamps into nice 2D visuals, unique for each department.

You can grab the patch (including the PSD file) here: https://github.com/kyrahabattoir/-tg-station/tree/gui_stamps