Archive for 2011

Back from USA

I just came back from a 2 week trip in the United States which started in New York city and then continued in Houston, I have seen many interesting things there and met with some of the greatest people I met in SL, lets just say we had a great time together.

Sadly, I couldn’t finish the pet mittens before leaving, it took longer than I expected. Even if there isn’t much left to do ,it’s still a lot of code to test and ship. I’m still jet lagged, the return trip took more than 18 hours between trains, metro and planes. I still need to deal with a few RL things. Once this is settled, I will get back into gear and make some more cool things.

See 🙂 not dead!

Vendors temporarly offline

That will teach me to meddle with things i don’t understand.

I tried to use a special .htaccess on my website which would redirect people that use kyrahabattoir.com. But it also knocked out my vendor network and all my web services for about a day -_-.

It should return to normal when the vendors self reset in about 30 minutes.

I’m an idiot sometimes ^_^.

This is taking longer than expected

I’m using GIT to keep my multiple scripts in check, to finish the paws i needed to roll a patch on all my touchbound products, well I apparently had prepared ANOTHER patch before that and it’s causing GIT to choke a little so I have to check quite a few conflicts in the script merging.

The good news is that LL introduced new bugs which I’m going to fix at the same time I’m rolling the mitts patch. So that means the black tabs of doom on the isolation headphones will be corrected. Why is there no one reporting those bugs?

The bad news is that all this is pushing me further behind my schedule and I get the feeling the paws won’t be released before November the 2nd, at which point I will be gone to visit a friend in USA.

Upcoming touchbound update

I’m nearing the completion of the code for the paw mitts, they will have a special feature that prevent the wearer to interact with touchbound products if they are on and locked. Because of this i will have to release a general update that change a couple of things in the way touchbound products interact with each others.

There shouldn’t be any breakage if you insist on using an older version but the touch blocking might be erratic.

So I highly recommend to use the update when it goes live. In term of usage it won’t change anything, it’s all “under the hood”.

Hud elements done…

… aaand mostly working, I still have some code to do on the hud and just uploaded 66 textures.

Another status update, and teaser!

The meshs are done and uploaded. The paws now have their final look, now come the slow and tedious task of preparing and uploading the textures, then will come scripting.

Here is a little something to satisfy the impatients 🙂

Status update on the beta grid

I thought I would post a picture to show a bit where  I’m at with the mesh paws.

  • The texture look a little blurry… maybe i will bump it up a little, but i haven’t added the shadowing yet.
  • I think I’m going to use plain prims for riveting otherwise it’s just using too many polygons on the mesh bits.
  • SL Beta says this is 33 prims.
  • I might end up using sculpts for the rings, if yes… that will make one really hybrid item, half mesh, half sculpt and half prim.

Low-res, texture test!

I finished the Unwrapping for the glove part and the buckle but there is a few things i still need to do on that one before i can get on with texturing.

Here is a little eye candy of the paw in secondlife with a temporary texture.

Texture wise, this is pretty much the final aspect, soo this is as good as it’s going to get, but I don’t think it’s looking bad at all 😀

 

High resolution paw pretty much done

This was fun! Now the real work can start.

Mesh based pet play control mitts

Now that meshes are finally out i can finally spend some time on my favourite computer craft, which is 3D modeling. Now some of you might say “But hey Kyrah, you’ve been modeling things for SL for quite some time now, what do you mean by that!”

What i mean is that frankly, making sculpted prims is a torture, there is zero optimisation possible, it’s a compact and fast format, granted, but that’s not what i call 3D modeling.

Here is the result of a few days of work, I started a new project, a simple pair of paw gloves, for those out there who like pet play. This is a completely different challenge compared to sculpted prims, it’s much more flexible, but at the same time there is a lot more steps involved.

  • The first thing is that i have to make my models twice. If you want to bake pretty highlights, you need a high detail version of your object, with all the little elements that you want to showcase in the texture.
  • You also have to make the low polygon model. What’s great compared to sculpted prims, is that you can be really clever and optimize the model as much as you can, the more optimized, the cheaper to upload and the less prims it will count for.
  • You have to make a proper UVW map for the low polygon mesh, this is where some people can make some great texture optimizations, such as if you are making a crate, you can assign all the sides of the crate to use the same region of your texture, while still being part of the same “face” in SL.
  • You have to make a collision mesh, but honestly this is probably the less troublesome part, i tend to use simple boxes for everything that doesn’t require anything precise, because it save upload cost. But even for a complex object, the collision hull is really not a big deal. Just keep it convex.

Now if you’re making clothes the extra step is skinning the object on the avatar skeleton, i have yet to dabble into this, hell i’m not sure I want to because I was told those attachments can’t be resized in any way. Which would be okay if every single SL avatar wasn’t nearly unique.

The two first pictures are from the “high resolution” model in 3D studio max, you will never see this one in SL it’s there for texturing only because it is way too polygon heavy!

The two last pictures are from the “low polygon” version in SL white with a light shiny in viewer 3.x the little pads are actually treated by sl as a “second” prim face, the sl model is 2120 triangles at it’s most detailed lod, it’s still missing the wrist strap and buckle but it’s on the “to do” list.

I’m not sure about the polygon count, 2120 so far seems to be more than decent, the strap and buckle will probably add 500 to 1000 more, i could add much more details to the low poly mesh but I do not think that it is necessary or reasonable. (and it has nothing to do with lazyness, it’s a simplified version of the high resolution mesh, and i did that one first.)

TODO:

  • strap & buckle.
  • UVW mapping for both models.
  • (eventually) rigging/skinning.
  • Making a left copy.
Kyrah Abattoir
Creator of BDSM and fetish content in Second Life since 2004.

Seasoned 3D artist and programmer, aspiring video game creator.

March 2024
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