Archive for the ‘3D Stuffs’ Category

The prisoner uniform low-poly model is taking shape!

As with other projects like this one, I really struggle working around those large folds in the geometry. The front looks quite good in my opinion, the back on the other hand is a janky mess and I hate it.

I’ll just keep redoing it until it becomes acceptable.

I’m probably not going to use symmetry, but if I can nail a nice, clean topology on the first half, I will copy it over to the second half, where possible.

I gave Marvelous Designer’s retopology tool another go and… god… it is such an awful tool.

I mean, I get that this isn’t really their specialty, but still.

The pictures I’ve included, are the results, so far of my attempts using RetopoFlow (Try it out, it is quite good https://github.com/CGCookie/retopoflow). Progress is slow, but I feel that the result is a lot smoother than when I did this completely manually.

The surface constrained smoothing tool is especially useful… (when it doesn’t snap to the underside of the original model)

Two things for today’s post:

First, I’m trying to come up with an automatic cell door design, as an add-on to the existing 3×3 cells. I’m thinking about using the open radio protocol to link the door script and the control console, with an option to make it secure, or hack-able. Probably nice industrial mushroom buttons and lights for the control board?

Second, I’ve gone through the prison uniform project (once again!) to try to solve the problems I am having with it. Back to A-pose, less extreme creasing. I’m thinking that this is as good as I can get it with my current skill level. I’ve also added a hem at the bottom of the shirt/top piece and cleaned up a bunch of issues. The sleeves could use some tweaking but other than smoothing the cuffs I’m probably not going to touch them.

It took quite a bit of fiddling to prevent my nails from clipping through the finger claws, but I eventually got it to work. The texture could be a little darker and/or more contrasted.

I’ve also painted a version with a red base which looked quite decent, more on that later.

I’m thinking of making a few “variants” to minimize the number of separate models used: both hands, left/right hand, both indexes, left/right index… or maybe index + middle finger, or something like that.

There is also the question of adding doodle & strike integration, because… why not?

I sure wish finger claws looked this good in real life 😛

Today was far more productive than I could have ever hoped. I first did all the basic contouring of the different pieces & the pentagram, which I thought was neat, as it nest perfectly below the first segment when the fingers are extended. I wasn’t sure of the rest of the design, and initially tried to make some sort of stag skull with a fancy tendril looking rack, but it wasn’t very good. The second attempt I thought about some sort of stylized scales or a cracked turtle-shell surface but completely messed it up and ended up with some, abstract and thorny vines.

I kept the idea and re-drew it all a third time, and this is where it is at now.

I also wanted something on the backside of the “nails” because of how visible they are and ended up with this sort of stippled surface that reminds me of a nail file. The KDC logo is hidden on the underside, behind the finger joint, making it more visible would look a bit… repetitive when wearing 4 claws on one hand.

I will be out of town tomorrow and most of Thursday, so feel free to give me your opinion!

Unless I/You come up with something better, I’m feeling pretty good about this one as the “final” high-poly version!

This is a bit different from the Halloween of the past few years I suppose. Ignore the 4th picture, I did some quick engraving tests and couldn’t be bothered to plug my tablet in, so it looks like something out of MS Paint.

I initially wanted to make them completely rigid, but because of how long these finger claws are, I kinda need at least one hinge point. It also adds a bit of detail, since this is all a bit bland at the moment.

There is clipping here and there because I’m only making it for the middle finger at the moment, I’ll massage everything in its proper place with the low-polygon variants.

I only have 2-3 weeks to finish this in time, pretty stressed already 😀

Yet another hectic week it seems. I don’t have much progress to show on the modeling side of things, save for some progress on “that one leg”, I’m clearly not the best at retopology when it comes to creased surfaces.

In other new, I’m also pushing a hotfix for the miniATM to correct a bug where debt entries would show “nobody” as the name they are associated with. Sorry for yet another update! I should have noticed this during tests. It should be bug free at this point.

Retopologizing the prisoner uniform has been a really laborious process, these pictures are actually the “good” take I eventually got to.

I believe that I started this over at least 3 or 4 times, I’m trying to keep a nice and clean grid, but I still have to follow the creasing when it becomes too large for simple normal mapping, I initially started at the pants cuffs and worked my way up along the side of the leg (where the striped accents are) but I kept running into problems time and time again.

I also tried to closely match the leg topology, which led to other annoying problems trying to work the creasing into it. Eventually, I ended up making the waist band first, which is the most important “seam” with the body (for the pants that is) and then “grew” the geometry out of it, little by little, trying to roughly follow the density used by the body, and ignoring nearly all the creasing at the waist.

It still need to be smoothed further, but it is the best attempt so far, I try to make sure that I have at least one crude, full polygon strip around a given area so that I do not paint myself into a corner  filling it all in.

And so far, it has been working allright. (I ended up working extremely late last night instead of sleeping, as I didn’t want this “win streak” to stop just yet)

Random bonus and social media bait, two things that stable diffusion made:

I’ve spent the better part of the past few days cleaning up the prison uniform model. I was initially going to hold off on making a blog post until I’m actually done with this step, but it is taking a little longer than I had planned, and isn’t improving the final result by a lot.

I’ve actually stopped caring about a bunch of things I did initially want to fix because… well you can’t really see it.

Furthermore, I have also played a bit with shader properties to get something more fabric-looking. You can see a few variants that I lifted from my reference photos & drawings.

There is this tiny detail that I am not sure if I want to keep: Considering that the backside of the collar uses the same fabric as the striped accent panels, I can have that fabric “peek” around the collar hem, or I can have that hem use the plain color instead. I’m not sure if this is desirable, but I have it visible, for now.

You can also “kinda” see the micro bikini panties through the pants of the uniform… In my eyes it is really subtle, but I might end up rubbing that out.

I’ve been rather busy on the prison uniform project this weekend and today as you can see 😀

I added my micro bikini to the dressing dummy, to make sure there is some “underwear space” under the pants & shirt. (and because it can’t hurt to make both compatible, right?)

A good friend suggested changing my dressing dummy to a version with bent legs and arms, to help with knee and elbow creases. It took several attempts to get it right, (the blue version), but I think I got it this time.

I also added a proper hem on the pant & sleeve cuffs, just to give it a bit more depth and “rigidity”.

It might actually be good enough to move over to Blender at this point, the pose will be a bit more complex to straighten but… We will see how it pans out.