Archive for the ‘pet projects’ Category

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.

I thought I would give her a little kudo about her Windlight settings for second life that you can read all about here.

I built this earlier today and it looks pretty nice with those settings.

Here is a little teaser for all the SL rubberists out there 🙂 I’m sure you will find it interesting.

I’m pretty much done making the textures of the pack and preparing the script add-on, it will come in the 15 classical KDC colors, so as usual it will perfectly (well nearly perfectly) match all my other latex products, with independent base and details, hell you can mix latex with the canvas or leather if you have the corresponding packs.

It’s also a slightly tweaked version of my latex, which, I believe greatly improve its look. I will be using this variation from now on as i believe it’s more subtle and realistic.

Now this isn’t really a product but I’ve been optimizing some more prims in Dead Realm and replaced all the ugly boulders over the tunnel with a few of the sculpts i initially made for floating islands. I also added one or two more trees. Only 3 sculpts were used instead of 10 spheres, so that’s a few more prims to spare and a much better looking mountain.

I completely forgot to update this mod for the past few versions, this is now done:

Version 1.1.2

• Applied the changes to NPCs brought by the Bison Steeve quest version 1.6

You can grab it here.

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.

I have been doing a couple of things this week-end, nothing major, but i though i would share it with you.

I rebuilt those metal shelves I’ve been using for years by homemade sculpted ones, that’s 7 prims shrunk down to one. Icing on the cake, they now have cross beams on the back, for no extra cost.

I am wondering if I should sell those once i get them properly textured or maybe i should make them a freebie.

Winter Ventura and myself are doing a joint project to get her collar and cuffs converted to the TouchBound system, that also means we converted her fancy little padlocks to it and they will work on every TouchBound products.

This is a little project I wanted to try myself at for a while, this object is managed by two scripts, one could be considered the “CPU” as it contains the actual logic behind the program and the other the “GPU” as it only handle buffering and displaying the information the CPU provides it.

It’s at a very early stage but it’s the only “unix style” SL computer that i’ve seen so far.

The next step is to write a somewhat more refined “keyboard”, currently I’m passing commands to it through a chat channel, I would like to either use a web-based form, or a sort of virtual keyboard that only allow one user at a time to enter commands.

I am working hard on a layout reflow of the asylum so the entrance face the city center

This is the new reception lobby  and security checkpoint.