Archive for the ‘3D Stuffs’ Category

Today i made the rubber bit (pretty easy excepted I had to curve it just enough so the shanks would stay outside of the blinkers. I also did the neck strap and started on the lever strap, this one will appear and disappear automatically whether you are wearing the bridle or not.

I will also have a chin strap. This is so much work compared to regular prims, but the result makes all the difference!

For those wondering why a lot of my “in progress” mesh shots have a checkerboard texture on them, it is because I adjust the uvw map for a constant pixel density on the object and a checker texture is the most obvious way to test it.

Just a little early screen, for those who are not familiar with it this is one of the shanks that goes around the mouth piece.

The meshs are done and uploaded. The paws now have their final look, now come the slow and tedious task of preparing and uploading the textures, then will come scripting.

Here is a little something to satisfy the impatients 🙂

I thought I would post a picture to show a bit where  I’m at with the mesh paws.

• The texture look a little blurry… maybe i will bump it up a little, but i haven’t added the shadowing yet.
• I think I’m going to use plain prims for riveting otherwise it’s just using too many polygons on the mesh bits.
• SL Beta says this is 33 prims.
• I might end up using sculpts for the rings, if yes… that will make one really hybrid item, half mesh, half sculpt and half prim.

I finished the Unwrapping for the glove part and the buckle but there is a few things i still need to do on that one before i can get on with texturing.

Here is a little eye candy of the paw in secondlife with a temporary texture.

Texture wise, this is pretty much the final aspect, soo this is as good as it’s going to get, but I don’t think it’s looking bad at all 😀

Now that meshes are finally out i can finally spend some time on my favourite computer craft, which is 3D modeling. Now some of you might say “But hey Kyrah, you’ve been modeling things for SL for quite some time now, what do you mean by that!”

What i mean is that frankly, making sculpted prims is a torture, there is zero optimisation possible, it’s a compact and fast format, granted, but that’s not what i call 3D modeling.

Here is the result of a few days of work, I started a new project, a simple pair of paw gloves, for those out there who like pet play. This is a completely different challenge compared to sculpted prims, it’s much more flexible, but at the same time there is a lot more steps involved.

• The first thing is that i have to make my models twice. If you want to bake pretty highlights, you need a high detail version of your object, with all the little elements that you want to showcase in the texture.
• You also have to make the low polygon model. What’s great compared to sculpted prims, is that you can be really clever and optimize the model as much as you can, the more optimized, the cheaper to upload and the less prims it will count for.
• You have to make a proper UVW map for the low polygon mesh, this is where some people can make some great texture optimizations, such as if you are making a crate, you can assign all the sides of the crate to use the same region of your texture, while still being part of the same “face” in SL.
• You have to make a collision mesh, but honestly this is probably the less troublesome part, i tend to use simple boxes for everything that doesn’t require anything precise, because it save upload cost. But even for a complex object, the collision hull is really not a big deal. Just keep it convex.

Now if you’re making clothes the extra step is skinning the object on the avatar skeleton, i have yet to dabble into this, hell i’m not sure I want to because I was told those attachments can’t be resized in any way. Which would be okay if every single SL avatar wasn’t nearly unique.

The two first pictures are from the “high resolution” model in 3D studio max, you will never see this one in SL it’s there for texturing only because it is way too polygon heavy!

The two last pictures are from the “low polygon” version in SL white with a light shiny in viewer 3.x the little pads are actually treated by sl as a “second” prim face, the sl model is 2120 triangles at it’s most detailed lod, it’s still missing the wrist strap and buckle but it’s on the “to do” list.

I’m not sure about the polygon count, 2120 so far seems to be more than decent, the strap and buckle will probably add 500 to 1000 more, i could add much more details to the low poly mesh but I do not think that it is necessary or reasonable. (and it has nothing to do with lazyness, it’s a simplified version of the high resolution mesh, and i did that one first.)

TODO:

• strap & buckle.
• UVW mapping for both models.
• (eventually) rigging/skinning.
• Making a left copy.

For those who don’t know it yet, the regions that are on the RC list can handle mesh prims, you can see and upload them if you are using the developer Viewer , otherwise… I’m not quite sure what they look like for normal viewers. Also, for regular prim fiddlers, this viewer let you size prims up to 64x64x64, you have to admit it’s kind of handy to cut prim usage.

Here is a screenshot of the first mesh ever to enter the dead realm region.

I made all the different LOD levels by hand because the SL client really isn’t too good at preserving the original shape of the object.

The table came out with a nice 5 prims weight.

The physical shape is a simple box, at the size of the table itself, i figured it would be good enough. I had to fiddle with the final size multiplier, it seems that too big or too small makes your prim equivalence go up for some reason.

Sneak peek at my eventual new shop design for dead realm, a bit more conservative, yes but the old one was getting clumsy and crowded.