Archive for January, 2018

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.

Monday, I finished the welding of the different parts, I didn’t have much time to work so I haven’t done much else.

I have no idea how I am going to proceed with the next step, making a material dynamic enough to take in account all those surface details. Back on 3D Studio Max I used a neat little plugin called “richdirt” which produced really nice masks for that.

The last time I’ve actually done any welding was back in the 3DsMax days, completely different method here but the results aren’t too bad.

Sorry for the picture dump.

I ended up ditching the mouth gate because I don’t think it will look right with cage bars going all around.

I’ve also offset the hinge so it makes more sense mechanically and added a ring to it. I’ve re-imported the lock and padlock shroud and they fit just right (with a few minor adjustments).

I’ve also toyed with various designs for the ring on top of the cage since it is ment to work for suspensions. A popular vote decided that the last one was the one that made the most sense.

I started this today, I spent a lot of time on the collar section to get it close to how I’ve made my metal collar so that the heavy-duty padlocks will fit the same way. There is a bit of a clearance issue if I want to keep the cage bars dead center on the collar piece.

I kinda want this little mouth gate but I’m not entirely sure how functional it is actually going to be, unless I cover the entire cage with a light bar mesh. I mean the wearer could just shift the cage around to an unobstructed set of bars, unless I make it so tight that your nose prevents you from doing that. But then that’s gonna cause issue with hairs…

Nothing is set in stone yet…