I tried to make a version with wider straps but I’m told that it looks a little off. Which is kinda true I suppose.

I’ve reshaped the collar once more and gave it a new, smooth edge instead of the hard fold I had there initially.

I still don’t know if I want to make this an actual product.

Some unusual japanese school uniform I found online (http://www.shoin-jhs.ac.jp).

I’m not even sure that I’m gonna use it for anything…

…but I had to try making one. 😀

I’m pretty happy with this new release, it’s the first item added to the HeavyMetal serie that was made in Blender and I think it turned out quite nicely.

It functions pretty much like the HeavyMetal collar, only with the HeavyDuty lock placed in front and with the addition of an overhead suspension which I think looks brilliant 🙂

As you would expect it comes with the regular fingerprint padlock and a HeavyDuty set and all the standard accessories.

You can pick it up from the KDC Main Store in dead realm or from the SecondLife Marketplace.

I’ve rebuilt the high-poly version of the padlock adapter, made the final uv map (128×1024 + 512×1024), made the degraded versions of the model for the LOD system, rendered the texture maps and I have everything pretty much ready for scripting in world.

I still have a couple of animations to make but I should be done with this item sometime during the next week!

I’m not sure I’m even going to USE those masks it took me so long to create >_<. I mean this looks nice already.

The two first pictures are a before/after using data transfer, look at those nice and clean rounded edges and those smooth welds 🙂

I’ve done some unwrapping on the low polygon mesh, it’s missing the logo, the lock adapter, and frankly it’s really not there yet.

I also made several attempts at auto unwrapping the high poly model, but due to some really bad seams, I guess I’m gonna end up unwrapping it manually :(. It is a bit of a pain because the model is a bit too dense. Live and learn I guess.

Last picture is a closeup of the low-polygon lock adapter, it looks already very nice, even without a normal map.

Story time

Yesterday I received a mail from my ISP informing me that they had blocked my port 25 due to a spam problem. After checking my mail queue it appears to be filled with HUNDRED of delivery error emails failing to deliver to some remote mail server.

Yeah that’s not supposed to happen…

It took me the entire afternoon after troubleshooting every single part of the server (postfix, dovecot, spamassassin, postgrey,… ) to figure out what was actually going on.

I started believing that my mail server had gone rogue as the offending email would reappear on its own even after the mail queue got cleaned out.

I use fetchmail in a cron job to recover mails from some old addresses that I still occasionally use for confirmation emails that come from server that are unable to deal with postgrey.

As it turns out, one specific mail in that mailbox was being consistently rejected by postfix’s policies, generating a new error email every time and sending it back to fetchmail with a “couldn’t deliver” error message, which caused fetchmail to re-attempt delivery of that email every time.

Conclusion

Sure,  it allowed me to review my mail server configuration and to correct a few oddities but what a waste of time.

Not bad at all for today, it’s still almost 10000 triangles which is bothering me quite a bit, and that’s without the lock adapter or back ring which aren’t exactly free.

Solved the problem that some of you encountered where the “NO_IM_BLOCKING” configuration flag wouldn’t work.

I’m really not a fan of Cycles render when it comes to baking textures.

Yes, it looks absolutely amazing, yes it’s a lot fancier than Blender. But the PBR aspects means that I get much less control on the baked result, especially for shiny materials or when I want the baked result to look a certain way that isn’t necessarily realistic.

At least I did not spend the entire day on this and also got some low poly modeling done.