Archive for the ‘pet projects’ Category

I initially wanted to go for stylized cat & pig ears made from simple pieces of cut and glued latex sheeting, the first version of the cat ears looked pretty good like that. Then I made those pig ears in a more…”molded” style and while I initially wanted to make the pig ears fold down, this attempt is growing on me.

I’ve remade the cat ears to match the pig ears style… but is it good enough?

I also don’t know if I want to have a “base” on each ear. Sure, It looks good, but it is much harder to place on the hood.

I started working a bit late today and had some progress from last week that I did not have the time to post so here is a larger than usual pig hood picture dump before midnight 😛

I had a cool idea of normal mapping a sort of facemask on the covered area, with a center spine and a few creases, I might have to tweak the creases a bit to get them to look better, and also decide whether to use a single or double spine, they are both nice, but the single spine create some odd shading due to the sharper left/right divide it creates on a mesh that really is just flat.

Still tempted to use “almond” eyes on the closed version to make it more feline-like (that would make it a pig/cat pack I suppose), I COULD add both versions, but I already have a ton to make…

Give me your thoughts!

“Two hood projects in a row Kyrah? Really?”

Yes really!

I wasn’t 100% sure about it initially, but it has been growing on me.

So what is this about? I’m not sure about what the final name is going to be, but the idea is to make a “pig” hood. By that I don’t mean a mask with a snout and everything, I mean one of those hoods that have one single, large opening for the nose and mouth. I guess it’s a bit of a cat burglar style too… worth keeping that in mind.

Also, the variant with the mouth covered but nose exposed is just too cute to pass.

I’ve done a few attempts at the eye shape, the almond-type looked good, but it is a bit overdone, so I’m trying something else instead.

Here is another hood progress update! There was another delay.

I’ve finished the geometry for good! Now comes the painful, task of combining all the textures into one he-he. I don’t remember how I dealt with ambient occlusion errors on the Malefica hood, but I made it on a previous Blender version and things have changed a bit since.

The second image is to help me draw some of the masking areas I need, but also to add some burned in details in the base texture, still working on that. It will be really subtle tho.

I wasn’t entirely sure about those connector “points” on the temples, but they don’t look too bad crunched down into a normal map. It fill the space.

You can also see the new forehead piece, it has some “vent” looking things too.

Not a lot to show for on the new hood, again. I’m sorry, it’s hot and there are a bunch of things going on.

I’ve reshaped the lips on my normal source to get something a bit more feminine (looks less like some retro/cybermen mask, which is good).

Ended up with lens-style eyepieces, that also look okay in open mode. Could be a bit bigger maybe?

I want to reshape the forehead bit to look more like an independent panel rather than something continuous. Not sure what to put on the temples themselves, however…

I’m in the middle of a server upgrade, so things are going to be a bit iffy on the website until I’m finished with this huge waste of time.

I’ve started some a new cyber hood project. It is heavily inspired by a Shodan cosplay that I liked a lot.

It appears to have some potential, I’m just not sure about the eye area yet. Having eye openings seem like it would make the most sense, and would also look a bit more lively than if I make it fully enclosed.

No mouth opening tho, and that is fine.

Most of the details are currently using floating geometry (even the MOUTH!). I need to practice and get better at this, it makes normal map detailing so much quicker.

The forehead need a lot of work, it would look a lot better with visible “plate” seams, but I have to keep it a latex hood. The uncovered “sides” also need to be fleshed out with surface details.

I’ve remade all the iron grip gag mouth poses properly, improved even (IMHO).

Next step is to check with other heads and make 1 or 2 alternate sets if needed.

I’ve been working on a blindfold update, a few general improvements, but the big one is to finally have a consistent and unified blinding code that (should) work with all RLV viewers.

The bulk of the last two days was fixing everything I broke previously 😛

I also have a slightly better way to select the fog/haze color now (and a few other small changes, such as LSD offsets).

I came back home mid-week… completely drained. Sorry again for dragging on with no actual progress for so long >_<

Thankfully, today was quite productive.

I have most of the code done for the heavy metal gag, including the animated bits and sounds working.

It is also completely modular, so you can actually add/remove mouthpieces, and each of them can have its own text mangling variant.

You should be able to extend the text mangling to non-Latin languages… possibly? It still uses a basic character replacement system, so that might not work so well on Chinese/Japanese…

I started the metal gag code, and I am working on some … kind of extendable approach, how can I explain this…

I’m effectively making the code that handles the different gag variants modular, which should make it possible to just “add” new ones later, or even create custom ones, I’m not entirely sure why I am doing this, other than reducing how much “snowflake code” having 4 different gags in one is creating.

This is also an opportunity to potentially code a bit better, go over old ways of doing things, using new functions, that sort of stuff. I thought I could wrap this up before the weekend, but that’s a little too optimistic.

Twitter appears to want a fairly large set of rights on any picture uploaded on their service, and I’m not sure that I want to give them those rights, so I’m considering adding some sort of watermarking, or maybe stop sending pictures to twitter entirely when posting updates. We’ll see.