I love reading other people's WIP blogs, SL or not, seeing how stuff evolves over time and the processes involved. So I thought it might be fun to write a little post series myself, chronicling a lassitude & ennui project, and since I'm just getting started on a project with a deadline of mid february, the timing is perfect. More after the cut, if you're curious, or skip directly to
part two or
part three
I plan on re-doing the mules I made back in 2006 - but this time in mesh and with (rigged) mesh feet. Back in July / August, I made some mesh feet, and never finished them. There's a high-poly model, a little bit of texturing and a HUD that needs a lot of polish. For the shoe part, I'll just cannibalize the Selene boots, make a nice material for the uppers and figure out if I want to add a pompom, a bow or whatever. The plan is to get started on the foot first, since this will probably take me longest.
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| The foot, in all its glory. |
Sadly, I didn't work from a proper base mesh so the first thing to figure out is how to retopologize the 110k poly heavy thing into something I can actually use in SL, and that can be easily rigged. This is my first serious attempt at retopology and I end up having something useable by tuesday evening (not working fulltime on this ofc, just in my free time during evenings). I also finally decided to pick up Topogun and am really happy with how easy the retopologizing process is compared to Zbrush.
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| Retopo screenshot. No I don't know wth I'm doing *lol* |
After some tweaking to get the polycount down a bit, I do the uv mapping (with UV master, much easier than trying to figure that out by hand), fix the part where it joins the avatar and do a quick & dirty rigging just so I can upload and test the feet. (And that's skipping doing this stuff over and over again, 3 or 4 times)
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| The feet on wednesday evening |
Salvaging the polypaint from the old foot version, I end up with this. The nails are a flat color + shiny, the foot has the sad little bit of texturing that exists so far. It's an OK start, but there's still numerous issues - the pointy edge visible in the lower picture and the part where it joins the avatar, there's something off with the proportions, the nails are too short, and that bit of texture is very splotchy so I don't even know if I should re-use it or not.
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