Archive for 2014

I’ve finished modeling the edge of the sleeves and the bottom of the dress, I also made the underside “caps” for it (to prevent the outfit from looking one-sided), I also had to do some fixing on the left sleeve, I had forgotten that it wasn’t matching the high-resolution model at all because of the mirroring. I also marked the “T” seam on the shoulder, on each side.

I did a very quick texture unwrap on the section of the mesh that contains the… “side boob”, shoulder, and sleeve just to see how it’s done and to have a go at baking textures. Blender makes this step a little strange, but not entirely unpleasant. It’s a different workflow from 3DsMax. You can see the result in the “textured” picture, the bib is still the HD version, and you almost cannot tell the difference, beside the apparent pixelation.

A while ago, when I started this blog i used to rely on a couple of plugins to perform a few basic functions: Visitor statistics, Spell checking and a couple of other things. At some point down the road most of these got merged into “Jetpack”. Jetpack is kind of an official “megaplugin” that gives you access to a bunch of excellent features and let you piggyback on some services provided by WordPress.com. But there is a catch:

It’s extremely slow.

What you’ll actually use is in the glove box.

It might not matter on a professional, high capacity server, but the reality is that this is not what i have access to. I can “barely” run an unmodded Minecraft server. Jetpack introduced a huge latency both for visitors and for me when publishing, yet some of its features (Stats, automatic social media publishing, spell-checking, contact form…) where invaluable to me. Followed several years of damage control, trying to optimize the site’s response time with all kinds of caching and preloading voodoo.

Today somehow was the last straw, I say goodbye to Jetpack and hope that i will never have to come back. Now for those who are curious, here are the plugins i now use in replacement (subject to change), and YES it’s still faster.

• WordPress Contact Form Maker
• Google Analytics Dashboard for WP
• NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster
• TinyMCE Spellcheck

Fuck you jetpack

As it turns out, when you try to use Twitter/Facebook and other social media APIs as an individual, without using any kind of intermediate service/company, the procedure goes from mildly annoying, to utterly impossible: Google for example doesn’t want to hear about you, Facebook and twitter both want your cellphone number, Plurk was by far the most convenient so far… but who use Plurk anyway?

I took a week away from modeling and SL stuff in general, I needed it.

I closed the back of the dress and made the “chest pocket” that I plan on animating (well… the alpha kind of animation really) to reach the locking mechanism, fusing the dress and the apron in the back was a little tricky because of the long over/under areas where the apron end.

You can also see the locking post poking out of the apron in one of the shots, but the post and lock will be 100% alpha when the “chest pocket” is closed.

There are a few “problem areas” where the body poke through, I will fix those later once this draft model is finished and I can start cleaning it up, ideally, I want to get as close to the avatar mesh as possible, it will help with rigging.

I usually try to do other things during the weekend, but this one was pretty boring so I had 3 long nightly sessions:

• I reworked the bib front to get the exposed corners on the white trim and a more starched look.
• Worked on the low poly model, which is progressing surprisingly fast.

I am not fully comfortable with a few of the elements in the geometry, I’m trying to follow the contours of the high poly fold and creases and it does some funny things. I also want to rework the shoulder seams to mark them into the model, not just for looks, but also as a conveniently placed texture seam.

Because you do not get rid of an obsession just like this, here are some work in progress shot of this week. And yes I’m considering using liquidmesh for this. That is, if I ever manage to finish it.

Enjoy 😀

As usual you can find them at the KDC main shop on the Secondlife Marketplace or on the Primbay

Remember to report any bugs if you want them fixed!

I didn’t want to make the cuffs a “resized” version of the collar, because I feel that the locks should stay at a consistent size for the different parts of this set. The difficulty here is to get them to look like they match perfectly, the cuffs have to be smaller, but the hinge should be as wide and as tall as for the collar since they are made from the same steel parts.

Good result so far, however the welds look slightly different, I’m getting some unwanted shadowing because the piece is rotated 90°, I might put it back vertically to eliminate that.

I’ve settled for a “circular” section (the simplest of the two) rather than an oval shape. An oval would not really be harder to make than a circle but I stuck to circle because… well circles have a certain elegance.  I’m not sure if I will stick with it, but it looks good enough for now.

I took a couple of days to try to really get into blender. While I’m fairly proficient with 3D Studio Max, i don’t think it’s where the future is. While max has a wide array of plugins available, they are almost all made by for profit entities, add to this that Blender has a much better file format support and has always been the tool set of choice for SecondLife ( all the way back to sculpted prims, then meshs, then rigged meshs and now fitted meshs), you can see why I’m interested by it.

Blender is kind of a strange beast, getting used to its control scheme is quite difficult when coming from something more “Standard”. But the tools are not very different from Max really. But unlike Max where hotkeys are there but optional, on Blender it’s almost a requirement to know a good amount of them, while most of the hotkeys have their UI equivalent, it’s not true for everything (that or i haven’t found them yet).

The new Blender rendering engine take a lot of time getting used to it. The results are very pleasant and realistic even with just a sun light and a basic sky but the tools available are… strange to say the least, and I’m not talking about the “noodle” interface, that’s not the issue. Some materials turn out to be extremely difficult to produce and what should be a very simple thing turns out to be not so simple to produce. I get the feeling that on Cycles, material creation is very close to what shader programming would be.

Ironically I have yet to touch the “old” rendering engine which might be more appropriate after all, it’s just the old reflex scanline < mental ray that you tend to have in Max.

I don’t think I can just move to Blender “like that”, I’m gonna need a lot of practice to get comfortable with it.

New face slappers will mute themselves after you get slapped twice by the same person and will not display the emote message for half an hour. Hopefully this will make the tool less intrusive.

Send me an IM if you want the update!

As per request from a few dear friends, the ankle version of the classic leather cuffs is now out, enjoy 🙂

As usual, you can find it in the KDC main shop on the SecondLife Marketplace or on The PrimBay.