Archive for January, 2024

As usual, my stomach disagrees with my cravings and after struggling half of Monday with cramps, things resolved themselves with an empty stomach around 4am…

I’m sticking with “some” yogurt today.

Work wise, I have some very “minor” visual updates to the stun prod. I ended up ditching the solution I had used for the decals because it turns out that those do not come out properly when baking occlusion or normals. The floating decals were a pain in the ass in general, and I ended up re-drawing them in Krita (which I’m still learning how to use) as a simple shader mask.

I also got almost all the rendering glitches sorted. I need 3 separate renders per texture, which then have to be composed together in Krita (albedo, occlusion, metalness, roughness, normal). You could probably save time by baking the ORM texture as single step… and I might end up doing that before I get sick of fiddling with my material settings.

The stun prod mesh is about 3000 triangles and uses a single PBR material in 1024×512. The last picture of the stun prod is taken within SL… It feels a lot less glossy for some reason?

I’m pondering about replacing the electrodes by something a bit more sci-fi and aggressive than the typical “blunt needle” shape, what do you guys think?

Lastly, I’ve also included a picture of some VR avatar work I’ve been doing this weekend, just… because?

Finally, PBR rendering for my stun prod! Getting my hands dirty with the new ORM texture maps. I had to do a lot of messing around in Blender to get metallic and albedo maps baked (nothing I couldn’t handle).

The texture bake is really quick and dirty, and I’ll separate a few parts to get a cleaner set of textures.

I probably should add some discrete wear here and there, and maybe some slightly uneven shine on the black plastic?

Auto exposure makes it a little hard to take “bright” screenshots, but I’ll figure it out eventually.

I have done the bulk of the unwrapping on the stunprod today as well as some face normal cleanup (I just cannot get over how good models tend to look after I’ve done this) especially around those 45° bevels I have everywhere.

A lot of parts are going to share textures, and I’ve purposely gone for a relatively “flat” kind of unwrap to ensure that I can keep texture distortion around labels minimal.

One of the “doors” on the front I cannot mirror or even reuse because of where I’ve placed the little round LED, so I’m wondering if I should add some unique markings on those for the front and the back side of the stun prod, or if I should tweak the model to make it share texture too.

Yesterday I had some trouble putting my head into “work” mode, so here is some cool sci-fi door for the prison “map” project instead.

I was sick, so this is all the progress I could get done on the stun prod for today’s update.

The Low-poly model is more or less complete, but it still needs unwrapping. On more practical things… I was hoping that PBR would finally be available on Firestorm, but  still nothing.

I was hoping to move towards PBR-only product in 2024… Can we ever have nice things?

I’ve pulled back the stun prod rubberized grip a few centimeters because the buttons looked a bit weird with it. That also allows me to use the gray markings on the handle as a logical stop point.

I’ve also added a better (grippy) trigger and an on/off slide switch on the other side.

The free space is just enough to put the S-23 logo… It looks a bit complex for such a small decal, maybe there is a simplified version I can use?

The low-poly model is progressing well, I have my doubts here and there on where to use unconnected detail pieces and the “square thing” on the front should merely be normal-mapped or not. About 3000 triangles so far, a bit much if you ask me.

I ended up scrapping the huge LED array in favor of something a bit closer to the original stun prod from Signalis. I should be able to get by with only 3 LEDs for the “charge” indicator and a single LED to indicate empty (blinking red?) and recharging (amber?).

This is a bit reminiscent of a cheap Russian dosimeter I bought a few years back, it fits the vibe. Scratched up the painted details, to give it a bit more character.

I also made the instructions face the user, while the warning label faces towards the “enemy” 😛

I started working on a little stun prod to add to my list of “impact” toys.

It is meant to be a breath of fresh air from the latex maid dress, and an occasion to indulge in something a little easier for a few days. I originally had a spiked guard, and while I’m keeping the idea for a variant, it really makes it look like some kind of space marine weapon. Not quite what I’m going for here.

Currently trying to use Krita to draw texture masks, and it is a struggle… especially with the vector  shape tools. Maybe I’ll get used to it.