Author Archive

I decided to start working on a small project this week which is proving to be surprisingly difficult. It doesn’t look like much but there is a lot of math and code involved to get all the letter spaces right and the text centered. It work but is limited to 8 characters (the greatest amount of faces you can have on a single text mesh). Now come the difficult part, my goal is to be able to use up to 32 characters on a single line. It’s a little overkill, but that’s the maximum length for the name of an avatar. That mean that I need to figure out how to lay my text across 4 of those textmeshs and place them automatically to make a single, seamless line of text.

I also want the text to auto scale based on its total length and have two lines. The face of the plate has a very nice normal mapp “frosted” effect. The face and the trim can even be tinted independently.

It’s deceptively simple, right?  🙂

The boots come with their own coloring function allowing you to color the boot body and its contrast stitching, the heel, sole, laces and metallic hardware independently. It also comes with a soft and hard ground walking sound.

• Check this product in SecondLife.
• On the PrimBay.
• On the SecondLife Marketplace.

It was brought to my attention that there was an issue with the permissions on the lined chrome thighs bands and all the TouchBound collars this is now fixed and they all should display modify/copy/no transfer permissions at the next update.

Sorry for the inconvenience, and please report any issues you find so that i can fix them as fast as possible.

I’ve been stuck the 3 past days on getting the shoelaces right, shaping them, making a proper bow and simplifying them. I’m almost done with the low polygon model. All I need to do is to lay everything properly on the different texture maps I’m planning to use and I can start texturing.

I’m reusing the hooks that where initially made for the pony boots, but I need to make smaller eyelets, not a problem thankfully. Lacing as usual is a royal pain to make and I’m leaving the knotting for tomorrow (if I do not just steal the knot of the pony boots). As it turns out the stitches I’ve baked into the test texture are too close to the hooks, so I’ll have to redo that, not a big deal.

I think that I did a pretty good job so far, the low polygon model is only 1950 triangles. Considering that the high polygon model was 11952, it’s not bad at all. I could probably go further down but Shigeko is going to kill me if I do. I need to the final UVWmapping but there is no hurry at the moment, whatever I have now is good enough to work with.

Next step: Adding all the hooks, eyes and lace it all up properly.

I’d like to add that bothering to make a low polygon model is not just “nice” it’s what make the difference between a good and a lazy modeler.

The high-resolution model is pretty much done, Unwrapping, stitches and I also have a hidden spine. I might add a couple of extra thing things later, but now it’s time to focus on the low polygon version.

Progression has been very slow, I’ve been asking their opinion to several people, getting their suggestions, doing slight changes here and there. I finally decided that this was enough, and really… this is as good as it is every going to get.

Now… to the next step.

I finally managed to write my own little voxel system on Torque3D. The code is extremely crude and pretty much unusable for anything but this specific example. This does give me a better understanding of how to write into a vertex buffer to create a 3D model “on the fly” based on dynamic parameters.