Archive for the ‘pet projects’ Category

Getting towards the finish line on the Morgiana collar! Textures & LOD models are ready, I also got most of the code done. You can also see what it looks like without the studs. I’d love to do a release right before June rolls in, and I might actually be able to make it, but the release will most likely be sometime next week.

We’ll see what happens, right?

I swear this is one of the last times I’m taking pictures of the Morgiana collar high-poly model. I added all the dings and dents, punched the holes for the back ring (let’s hope it will show up in the normal map), finished the Low polygon model and unwrapped it (1024×1024 feels overkill, but I could not use 1024×512 efficiently like I did with the cuffs because the flat sections are much longer and would end up with a lower resolution, it also needs its own duplicate of the ring mesh, so there is that too), oh yeah and the logo is in place and on time (usually I forget).

I can always drop the resolution & repack if that’s too much.

I resumed work on the Morgiana collar, The second half is modeled, but I had to redo some things on the first half (just to satisfy my mild OCD).

I also spent hours over the weekend putting together a (personal?) variant of the hired help uniform, not a big fan of using 2K textures, but it does look quite nice with all the stitching I added to it (also those are patch attachments, don’t ask).

Lastly, I don’t think I posted anything yet about the new brainwashing propaganda entertainment system I’ve installed in the Second Life Cell Block D-5, it is still a little rough around the edges. I will make better models, textures and more diegetic scripts, I hope ^_^.

I ended up having something like 3 recording sessions before I ended up with a chained walk sound that I was happy with. I did not want to use a stock sound, just to make my things a little more unique, and it took a while to get something that works.

Update on the Morgiana ankle shackles: the new sounds are in, the tiptoe variant has a foot-lock animation, they open & close and the ring sways to the side when you do (came up with a fancy little piece of math to limit the drift on that angle, despite the fact that the ring angle can be adjusted by the wearer). The tiptoe variant is effectively rotated 90° with a bunch of chain links going under the heel, it will be the user’s responsibility to adjust/add/remove links to fit their specific feet/body.

Furthermore, I have drafted some of the code required to give bolts a PBR-friendly appearance, but that will come in a later update (the bolts being non-PBR is not ‘that’ noticeable). Eventually the chain sound feature will also be added to other ankle cuff sets.

Unless you think I’m forgetting something very important, I guess the Morgiana ankle shackles are ready for release?

I waited an extra day just to make sure everything rolled over properly.

A quick summary:

Last week was incredibly rough, ethernia.net expired on Monday despite the fact that I renewed it on time. Contacting the registrar led nowhere, the phone was disconnected, the contact email wasn’t getting relayed. During the night, while I was sick from food poisoning, a friend managed to get someone on the phone, and we all discovered that the one person that ran that registrar company had died about 2 or 3 weeks ago.

Harsh. This is where I got my very first domain name, and I stuck with him for more than 20 years…

I had to engage into a lengthy process to recover the domain name, this part isn’t quite finished but at least it is paid up for the next year and functional.

Everything should be back in order, DNS servers can take a little while to update, but it has now been more than 24 hours and the new information should have propagated everywhere. That means deliveries, updates, and all the other dead realm systems should be back up and running.

Shackle stuff

Finally, a picture with decent lighting.

Work wise, I had to make new bolts for the Morgiana shackles because, after everything was done, the original ones didn’t actually fit. I also started the wrist low-poly, it shouldn’t take very long. The code for the ankle cuffs is mostly functional at this point, but I haven’t found a moment to set up my recording area those chain sounds.

There is a good chance no one will read this post for a week or two…

I’m currently getting an issue related to the primary domain name (ethernia.net), the blog can still be accessed through kyrahabattoir.com for the time being, but quite a few things aren’t going to work right while I get this all solved:

• deliveries
• updates
• documentation wiki

I’d recommend you do your purchases on the marketplace for at least a few days.

Oh, yeah I’m also super sick, for unrelated reasons (but the stress is definitely not helping), and couldn’t get anything done today, we still have some progress from Monday and this weekend, so here is some more in-world tests:

Yesterday was my birthday, so things for a little busy, and today I think I’m getting sick from something, so there is that.

Despite that, the show must go on, I’ve completed the low-poly model, with optional chain parts and the ring (they both have a split since, again, we are going weld-free here). I did a very brief in-engine test too.

Most of the unwrapping is done, and it might actually all fit inside a 512×1024 (proportion-wise). Now, where should I put the KDC logo…

After several around of experimentation, I feel that I am learning new tricks to add to my Blender skills. It appears that you can use the “UV Warp” modifier to manipulate texture UVs after a mirror modifier, without having to apply the mirror modifier (I prefer working in symmetry whenever possible).

In this quick example, the body of my character has a full central symmetry, including all the texture UVs, but I was able to select the UVs of the right arm and offset them to make the tattoos vanish, without touching the left arm of the pelvis. And likewise, the doodle on the belly rather than mirroring at the center is “unfolded” into a left & right half.

I know; This is really easy to do “by hand” if you apply the model’s mirror modifier, but the entire point of the exercise was to avoid doing so, and to see what kind of Texture UV operations are possible using non-destructive modifiers.

… Success?

Morgiana shackles progress

I spent some time on a bit of “feature creep”…

That’s just a concept I’ve always liked: forcing the wearer to walk on tip toes by having a section of chain wrapped under their feet. I played with a few ideas, but given that this can’t be weight painted (rigged) without getting some terrible deformations, the best I can probably do is to include it as a variant to the ankle cuffs, extra anchor bows on the cuff surface, and a few sections of chain (1,2,3 links maybe?) as well as an animation to freeze the foot position.

I will most likely make one for my Ai High-feet, but it should be easy to adapt to just about any “tiptoe” feet on the market, with a little bit of in-world editing.

Product updates

I’m pushing yet another update to the Meat Market Collar & Cuff set!

• A bug slipped in during the last round of updates, causing locks and chains on the mobile shackle to remain once the shackle has been removed.
• The collar had some clicking issues, the usual “object changes sometimes not sticking” once I put them back into my inventory, hopefully it will stick this time.

Moving along on the Morgiana shackles low-poly, somewhat slowly.

I’m having some weird baking issues on these but I’m not gonna focus on it just yet. And for some reason I did half of the collar low-poly before realizing that what I really should have started with is the ankle set. Distraction I guess… There was a lot of that this week.

I wonder if i should add an optional piece of mesh chain that wraps around the underside of the foot, as an extra little gimmick. Just not sure how to make it work with bodies, but also make it adjustable though.

I’m seriously sleep deprived so I’m probably going to stop here and get some much needed rest.

I’ve done quite a bit of work on the shackles, or more specifically, the

shackle & collar set.

I might have gone a little overboard with the collar, dimension-wise it it’s not quite as imposing as the meat market collar, but I’m still sticking with the “very loose fit” aesthetic, as long as the skull can’t get through, it works as expected, right?

Initially I was gonna use some round-head rivets on the outside for decoration, but the little diamond-head studs looked so much better. Problem is that on a collar that doesn’t use any welding, the only way to attach those is as rivets, or press-fitting them into the holes…

Which means that something sticks (at least a little bit) on the inside, and at this point I might as well make those into dull spikes. I know already that not everyone is going to like that (feedback told me this much) but I’m curious about everyone’s opinion on the matter.