Author Archive

Don’t we all love weight painting? Just one of those tasks where no matter how long you’ve been practicing, every day feels like your very first day…

Near the end of the day I ended up testing if I could just get away with ditching the double armature conversion system and use a custom rest pose instead. It’s not too bad, it gets rid of some of the error buildup that I was getting, and since the shoulder shape isn’t critical (covered), a bit of clipping won’t be the end of the world. The places where it really matters (wrists, ankles, hips, neck) are still the same.

A lot of problems remain to be fixed, I really wanted to do some testing on the jacket, since that’s the main piece of the set. But realistically? I need to get the pants in their final state first to be able to weight paint the jacket without the two clipping into each-others.

I got the prisoner uniform pants in SL! I used the baking cage tests I did earlier on the jacket to make a decent cage for it (there is a spot between the legs that I cannot save and will have to fix in “post”) and I also have set up my “double skeleton” system for A to T pose mesh conversion.

I also got it far enough in the weight painting and baking for a quick in-world test. It is a bit scuffed at the crotch but nothing that cannot be corrected.

It is REALLY close to the leg mesh around the hip joint, so I will probably end up completely hiding the leg mesh. I haven’t tried to weight it for the fitmesh skeleton just yet.

Not too bad for a Monday?

The jacket and pants stitching phase went quickly, I did some cleanup on the panels, but it doesn’t appear to matter in the final renders.

I haven’t worked a lot over the Christmas/New year period.

I’m still trying to make the baking process simpler than my usual approach: Cut the model into separate baking scenes to go around the usual overlapping issues. The alternative seem to be the baking cage route. I found an interesting approach for tweaking the bake cage using a vertex group and a displacement modifier, and effectively “painting” the cage rather than manually shuffling the vertices directly, but it might not be enough for tight spots.

I’m going to try a few other approaches in the coming days. If all fail, splitting the bake is always possible.

I’ve achieved very little in the past few days, but I’ve updated my stitching workflow to a method that doesn’t involve making really large bump map textures and is relatively quick & fun to use. I’ve also been cleaning up the high polygon model a little so it works a bit better when subdivided (normal map baking process).

I’m leaving tomorrow to spend a few days with my family, wish me luck 😅.

Happy holidays!

This update was very delayed, but hey… Christmas stuff happening, so here is a few texture tests. I’ve rebuilt the elbow caps proper and did some optimization/cleanup on the sleeves and pant legs. And here are a few texture tests. It turns out the weave I wanted to use is causing too many issues (moire effect), and I have some other noises in the shader already anyway.

1024×1024 for the top, and for the bottom, with an extra 1024×128 and a 512×512 for the accent stripes.

There are a lot of baking glitches I need to sort out, but other than that? I’m pretty happy with the result.

I’ve made a symmetric copy for the other leg to save time, but I still have to “massage” it into position and tweak some of the folds that differ from the other side.

It weights 8931 triangles currently, and that’s with everything included: “Not great, not terrible” (as Dyatlov would say).

Seeing the model in a “somewhat” complete state makes me a bit more confident that I might actually be able to finish this soon.

A lot remains to be done.

Modeling feel so slow lately…

Not much to say otherwise, I have now far too many edges on the front part of the leg below that weird “fold” and not enough on the back.

Progress is still progress right?

The (almost) completed prisoner uniform jacket low-polygon model clocks at about 5300 triangles. I’d like to push it lower, but it appears to be on part with the school uniform I did before, so there probably isn’t a lot to remove really. The elbows still need some work and so does the bottom edge of the jacket (where you can see below it).

Or so I thought! Looking at the parts of the pants I had completed, the two aren’t quite matching, so that’s another thing I need to fix if I’m going to have any hope of the two layering neatly on top of each others.

There is always something, isn’t it?

Little by little, progress is happening… But this is going way too slowly.

I was kinda dreading the part where the collar goes over & under, but I’ve cobbled something together that should survive a “glance”. I’m definitely overdoing it on what really is minute details.

Furthermore, I’ve done some quick tests to simulate a 16×48 flexible dot matrix display, potentially for a future cyberpunk-ish project?

I wasted almost two whole days sorting out issues with my brand-new internet access (FTTH yay!). I think I have almost every issue squashed. Now I’m just waiting for a replacement Gigabit Ethernet adapter.

I’ll post a modeling progress update as soon as I have more to show.