Archive for 2015

I’m running out of ideas for catchy titles, can you tell? 😀 . Good progress today, the low polygon model is fully unwrapped and tightly packed on a single texture sheet.

Which means it’s texturing time 🙂

For some reason I’m second guessing myself constantly these days. I completely fused the collar and the shock box, simplified a bunch of areas where they meet (maybe too much…) it STILL weight 4898 triangles for some reason, and frankly, I do not see anything that i can safely remove anymore. I will blame the fact that it’s a complicated model with moving parts and internal elements.

I could probably have gotten away with a less aggressive polygon reduction, I can still change my mind and go back to an earlier version obviously.

The server was a little on and off today, sorry about that, I had to roll out an update that was long overdue and it didn’t go quite as planned.

I should have posted this yesterday, but thursday became friday before I noticed it…

Because I’m clearly the kind of person to follow my own advice, I spent more time on material tweaking, and stumbled for a while on an issue involving the value to normal filter not quite behaving as I thought it would. I also made the low polygon model for the “collar part” of this project, it is hovering around 2000 triangles which is probably way too much but I haven’t reached a point where I am going to care about optimisation too much… yet.

The shockbox is more or less the last part of the high poly model that I really need to finish at this point. The reason I was pushing it for later was that I was not completely sure of what should be inside it, what would look good and be easy to identify as the frequency crystal on one side and the on/off switch for the bark feature on the other… I’m still drawing a blank on that one.

Quite a bit of work done the past two days. Even if you consider that I did a major fuck up Monday and basically saved over 2 hours of work by accident…

The creasing function in blender allowed me to cleanup my models instead of having multiple edge loops to create hard edges, I fixed a small issue on one of the belts and added a ridge that follow the border of the collar, like I’ve done on the classic leather cuffs. I have all the stitching done and it looks just right I believe and also got some early materials done. Sadly it doesn’t look anything like the existing products, but color/material matching will have to wait until the low polygon model is complete.

The “HD” model is more or less done so I began the tedious task of unwrapping the parts that require it, that means the steel cable (to insert an helical pattern along its surface, you know… twisted steel wire.) and all the leather parts. I don’t think the plastic parts will need actual UV coordinates as they will only receive a basic matte finish. Metal parts don’t need UVs as my metal material doesn’t use them.

The leather parts on the other hand need a full unwrapping to allow me to texture them properly.

For those interested, this awful checker texture on the collar is commonly used to check for distortion during the unwrapping process. Long story short: you want the checker tiles to look as straight as possible.

More goodies! I’m not really sure about that cable tho…

Inside the box when the lid is open will be the radio crystal slot and the bark on/off switch. I’m almost done with the High resolution model. Texturing soon!

I like where this is going! The method I settled on to attach the shock box to the collar is a bit rivet heavy, but I do like the apparent bulk of it. The shock box itself is kind of a placeholder until I come up with a satisfying way to make it open/close/lock and where to place the status LEDs. I initially thought about doing a heavy padding on the inside, like on the classic leather cuffs, but I still have electrodes to add, so a bulky padding is probably a bad idea.

I’m also tempted to put the KDC logo directly on the shock box rather than in the back. but it might be a little too much “in your face”.

Literally! I started working on that shock collar project I’ve had in the back of my mind for so long. There is now even more things that I like with blender I have to say. I’m hitting a design issue however… I’m not sure how to integrate the shock box, I have this idea in mind that it should have a little lid that can be opened, but it has to be visually locked shut when the back collar padlock is in place, without using a second padlock. I’m not sure how to get that to work.

I just pushed a small update that adds an (S) variation targeted at small chested avatars, the regular version has been renamed with the (L) tag. It’s on the auto updater and existing buyers should receive it shortly.

Enjoy 🙂