Archive for September, 2013

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.

Here is the second and last part of the LPM unwrapping: The charging station!

I still had a lot of room left on the UV map so I decided to pack the control panel with it too, less textures.

I’ve worked mostly at night these days, so my sleep cycle is all messed up. I only have to unwrap the charging station, which I will do today, then I can start texture work.

The shapes are complete! The 3 objects together weight less triangles than one of my pony boots and should be very L.I efficient when rezzed.

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel! Next step is unwrapping them, which might get tricky (for the charging station especially). And then i can finally attack textures and scripting!

I rebuilt the vacuum head in LPM, I”ve probably been a little overkill on the triangle reduction, SL says L.I = 2 for the whole thing, that’s way better than what I expected.

I whipped together this little wall panel to house the readouts for room status. It will show how “clean” the floor is, but could be expanded to show other aspects. I also got a lot of work done on the low polygon models for said panel and the vacuum cleaner body, these are 5-10 times lighter than the high-resolution counterpart.

I forgot to post yesterday so this is the first thing I’m doing today! I came up with a charging station design on monday and kinda followed up on it. It sort of match the vacuum cleaner design and I’m fairly happy with how it came out, considering it was a first draft. I added “connector plates” on the station and on the vacuum to give a little “this is where they connect” kind of feeling. It looks “OKAY” so far but all that really matter is how it will come out in the texture.

In the high polygon aspect of this product, only the wall control panel remains, and then I can start building the LPM mesh, unlike a lot of my earlier products, this one should be a breeze to block out, unwrap and texture. So unless something goes horribly wrong, i should be able to get to the scripting aspect of things before the end of the week.

On a sidenote, I’ve been playing a game called Shadowrun: returns which is a “modern” old-school isometric role-playing game, and they had a very interesting documentation about drawing new tiles for the game, especially how tiles should be textured, i invite you to read this wiki page, it’s very interesting stuff, and it makes me wonder about my reliance on CGI generated details in textures.