I’ve added some extra seams from the hawk/falcon hood to the faceless hood to compensate a little for the lack of details and added the same alternate color patterns.

I’ve also started a more normal hood style. The objective there is to make a version that is a little less threatening than the one I initially made, a more “submissive friendly” look. The eyes are doing the job. The mouth seems a bit… odd.

I finally got something that I like. Funny enough, I used a falcon hood for reference…

I also made two extra patterns for it, because why not?

As expected (well, almost) the nose shape is proving to be a pain for the look I wanted to achieve.

I’ll try moving the hood “point” lower and lower along the nose until it looks less “wrong”.

Oh yeah covering the eyes better would be a plus too. I need more appropriate seaming too but that will come later.

It seem to be one of the most requested styles.

I had to put the edge of the hood a bit “low” under the nose but if it’s any higher it starts to creep up on the nose mesh.

Sidenote, it’s really terrible with the “open mouth” mesh. Another confirmation that this part is going to need another pass.

Now that most of the problems are fixed, here is the style I’ve made today.

Sorry but not sorry. I can’t get enough of the appearance of the skull.

This style did make me notice that the mesh needs a little bit of tweaking because at some angles you can still see “outside” the hood.

This is a test mesh anyway, so I’ll fix this issue before uploading the final version.

I’m only showing you the result here but initially when I STARTED working today I only was going to crease the top of the hood. I ended up going for a high-poly solution rather than painting. Creasing is still something that doesn’t really come naturally for me…

Once I was happy with the results, I upload my textures, fairly confident that everything was fine, and somehow there was a visible texture seam in the normal map!

Only visible in SL, in Blender everything is completely seamless! Thinking that I made a mistake during upload, I re-upload my models, re upload my textures, try all kinds of tweaks and tricks. Without success.

In the end I got around the problem by toning down the normal map along the offending seam. The result is… Okay I guess, but there goes another day.

The good news, is that I’ve done some progress on the hood and worked another style.

The bad news is that somehow I deleted a portion of that creasing around the zipper from saturday so I’m gonna have to redo it.

In retrospective, I should have spent two entire days working on this, but it was just so tempting. Now I have “some” form of protection for “official” hood skins that doesn’t prevent adding custom skins.

Skins can also trigger RLV muffling (whisper) and blindness.

I think I’m also going to stop trying to auto detect RLV/RLVa clients in products that need it and add a configuration flag (as I’ve been doing for a few products now), something along the lines of:

• cfg_ScreenEffect=Off
• cfg_ScreenEffect=RLV
• cfg_ScreenEffect=RLVa

I wrote a good chunk of the script to swap between the different faceplates of the hood (lets call them that), it works a bit like a ghetto “filesystem”. Now That this is done, I should probably populate it with actual options 😛

I pulled an all nighter, don’t ask me why and did a ton of work. In fact I suspect that I did more in a single sitting today than I did in 3 weeks!

Quick summary:

• Finished unwrapping.
• Finished textures for the metal parts.
• Made repeating texture for the zipper.
• Reworked the “classic” (let’s call it that) style glue seams, a bit thinner, and added two more on the sides.
• Added creasing (some of it).
• Made an open mouth version (needs some refining).
• Uploaded another test mesh & test textures .
• Wrote some of the code for open/closed mouth detection & mesh swapping.

I need to put my thoughts in order and break down the different textures I need to make for the variations. I also gotta decide which will be built-in and which will be addons.