Archive for the ‘pet projects’ Category

It’s pretty rare that I do not already have a very clear idea of what I want to do. This was one of these times. But I’m finally getting somewhere; and past the “design roadblock”.

I promised myself that after the cuffs I would take a nice long, one week break. Well look at what I’m doing when I’m supposed to relax from making things…

Yeah… I just make “other” things…

Free set of cuffs to the first person who guess the model number. (it may be missing bits here and there, still a work in progress)

After realizing that my stitches where way too big, I redid all the textures with smaller ones. I basically did Monday’s work all over again. But here is the result in SL! The lighting is a bit extreme, in order to showcase the materials, and I’ve put the posture collar in the shot to compare them. The stitches are still slightly bigger than on the collar, but it isn’t as much of a problem as it was before.

Now that my normal maps are all nice and clean, behold!

Now to get all the textures ready.

I’ve been silent for the past days while I was finishing the unwrapping and spent last night rendering the different textures for the leather cuffs.

I also had a long hard look at the normal map… it’s not very good. I have a pair of screenshots to illustrate it, but basically the edges are scattered with “glitch streaks” (let’s call them like that) that are, I believe, due to the hard edge they are sitting on. It’s not a big deal, really but it means that I have to go touch up the normal map by hand in Photoshop to rub those imperfections out. That takes time as there is a lot of them.

I’ve been on a roll today so I’ll try to keep on going until I’m too tired (I will then post another update).

Here is another little update. I’m not really satisfied with the triangle count with the rivets and all the other metallic parts and I think the inside is still getting way too much attention. I tried something a little different this time and fused the strap to the cuff’s surface where I could, we will see if it leads to a better result.

Well, not really, Unwrapping went particularly fast today and I’m recycling a lot of material settings from the posture collar. The high-resolution model is almost done. On a side note, I’m thinking about having metallic parts on a separate texture sheet, there is no need for these to have a unique texture for each project, kind of wasteful. That’s also why the D-Ring is still missing, I already have one in SL that will work just fine.

Now that we have a fancy leather posture collar, wouldn’t it be nice to have a matching set of soft leather cuffs? I’m going heavy on the padding for this design, not only because i like my cuffs comfy, but it also makes the process of adjusting to your avatar much simpler.

I’m reusing the same strap size, hardware and general proportions that I used on the bridle and on the posture collar, easier to match it all.

For those interested, here is the recorded session on twitch.tv

This is a little minecraft modpack that I pieced together over the course of a few months, tonight I finally got around packaging it and putting it on the Technic platform.

It’s not too bloated (I tried to keep “novelty” mods to a minimum) with sort of a loose “science versus magic” theme and a bit more survival than you would normally see on minecraft. There is a few slight configuration tweaks regarding ore generation, temperature effects on armors and a few other things. Also the presence of the “sync” mod allow you to clone yourself to cheat death, even in hardcore mode. While this potentially makes the game much easier, it doesn’t come for free and survival in the nether is much more difficult.

The science side is focused around Universal electricity compatible mods while the magic side is supported by ArsMagica2, Thaumcraft4 and Mystcraft.

If you play minecraft and have the Technic launcher, why don’t you give it a try?

So that’s one thing done, I’ve also got some texturing going on and ambient occlusion, Here are the mandatory screenshots for today.

And as a bonus, early normal mapping preview.