Archive for the ‘pet projects’ Category

Not much to show today, I have written a lot of code for the past two days. I have now a fully functional (but ugly as hell) coloring HUD for the prison uniform that does about everything I might need for this product in the future: base/accent textures, base/accent tint presets and manual RGB entry and the ability to change the printed label or set it to automatic.

It has more buttons than a calculator, but I got a little carried away on the number of texture options.

I don’t really regret it, but I do need to make it look a little more presentable.

As the title says it, more colors and setbacks. I ended up re-rendering a bunch of textures THREE TIMES over the past two days, I discovered that I wasn’t using the same bump mapping settings on the pants and the jacket, and then the white color I was using was washing out everything, and finally, I had some issues on island borders to fix…

I’ve added a white version (no picture here) as well as the 4 colors you can see in the pictures. Yes that’s a lot of blue and green options, and yes, there will be a tinting option for everything else, don’t worry ^^.

Furthermore, I’ve also started writing the scripts for body hiding, applying HUD settings, and also the hypothetical “transponder”, to allow facilities to force a specific style on visitors. I’m doing it from scratch today, as a way to “clean” my head from all the modeling & texturing of the past few weeks.

A note on the transponder. The idea is that if a facility has an active transponder (it will only work if the script and the landowner match, obviously), they can effectively override the appearance of the uniform for the duration of the wearer’s visit. I’ll probably release the facility script as some form of “open-source” to make integration easy. Supposedly it should allow to have per-avatar settings, but I’ll try to avoid over-complicating the example.

Quite a bit of progress, make all the colors Kyrah!

So what is new, I did some work on the pants tucking points, I’ve massaged the pant cuffs into position, so they are more “centered” around the foot, and have a much better clearance for things like, heels (yes, I did test on Maitreya a bit too).

I’ve also added the additional mesh bits to get the uniform label in place, two of them in fact, 5 characters each. The left one is the one I intend for prisoner IDs, the right one? Well you can do what you want with it, I guess.

I’ve got a handful of colors done now, dark blue, light blue, teal-ish, red, yellow, tan, orange, and that dull green-gray that I did most of the previous pictures with.

Each color can also be used on the accent panels for a frankly boring, but potentially more generic look. I also have 4 stripe versions for the accent panels, black and white, a faded kind of gray, pale blue and also a red version. I probably should also make a white set for people to play with.

Do tell if you can think of other colors that I should make.

I should have posted this yesterday, but I forgot to do so.

Progress was made on the prisoner uniform, but I couldn’t think of a good way to put it in pictures. This week has mostly been weight painting, weight copying, redoing the sleeve  hems, redoing the sleeve tucking points and a lot of mistakes & rollbacks while doing so. I also encountered a weird issue with my devkit that required to do a weird “fix” on the wrists.

It is a little worrying for future projects.

I’m almost, ALMOST done fixing the jacket, there are still issues in how the armpit folds, but at this point I’m going to call that a compromise, as I want to keep the front/back panel relatively straight, even with the arms down.

Pants also need a second pass on their cuffs and tucking points, and maybe some slight tweaks to lower clipping in a spot or two.

There is still chest sizes, and a proper version of the prisoner ID to add, two tasks that I’m obviously keeping on the very end of the checklist.

Very busy week, a lot of progress on the prison uniform:

• Completed the final weight painting of the pants, that’s as good as I can get it, unless I tweak the cuffs a little more.
• Re-unwrapped all the parts to try to maximize what I’m getting out of the textures this is using.
• Halved the texture size on the leg stripes with pretty much no difference in quality.
• Adjusted scene lighting to make the bottom of the pants a bit brighter.
• Got rid of a moiré effect in my textures due to a nearly invisible fabric pattern I added a while ago.
• Fixed a few more baking errors on the pants, there is still a few that I’ll have to fix manually  for each color between the legs, no big deal.
• Stripe patterns on the shoulder panel is now one continuous array of stripes front to back.
• Re-baked everything at least a dozen times due to render quality issues, margin issues, etc. etc…
• Started another attempt at weight painting the jacket, it has a ton of issues, unfortunately.

Today’s pictures are all in-world tests, specifically showcasing the little “variant” I’ve made that include cuff “squeeze points” at the wrists and ankles. They look exceptionally stupid if there isn’t a cuff there. Otherwise? The effect is quite convincing.

I’ve been trying to use the local mesh feature that was just added to Firestorm, but it has some really annoying texturing glitches when it comes to materials, back to 12L$ test uploads for me…

The poles of the sleeve “cap” points keep clipping out at the squeeze points… Annoying. (you can see that on the last picture).

The prisoner ID number is just for the pictures at the moment, I haven’t set up the overlays on the uniform jacket yet. Ideally I’d like to make a little API where a landowner can “beam” to the uniform which color scheme to use and which name/number to show based on the parcel you are in. And in this case, it would temporarily override your customization HUD until you leave the parcel.

At least that’s as far as I thought about the script side of things…

Oh yeah, In other news, I’ve hurt my Achilles tendon on the left side during workout, so I’m going to be stuck on this chair for a while -_-.

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.