Clothing hacking …
…so when you make something in Wings3D, the geometry forms a VERTEX (or 3d point) cloud. It’s solidity is comprised of polygons that are the result of the correct sequence of this “join the dots” to make FACETS that can then have visual properties of colour, texture, specularity, reflectivity, opacity and so on applied to them.
Hat polygon mesh
When you choose tools in wings to “color” each facet, it modifies the UV mapping of that facet when rendered in-world but the light model used by default (and no, for the life of me I cannot find how to change this) is a little odd – any colour you choose in wings is really, really light in-world (black looks light grey, blood red comes out light pink and so on). Wings has EXPORT as RWX, fortunately which is luck as RWX and COB are the two supported object definition formats Activewords seems to use.
The resultant RWX (object/model definition file) contains the locations of each vertex in x-y-z terms, relative to the centre point of the cartesian plane (0,0,0) where the object was sculpted, and the order these points are joined to make a polygon mesh [you will notice I have opened up the object file in notepad – geometry purists argue you do not need anything else than notepad to make objects – they are out of touch nerds who need to get a life in my opinion 😛 ]
TEXT object definition file - the RWX file
Fortunately, after breaking a bunch of RWX’s, I have stumbled across (yee gods, why does no one document this junk in a way HUMANS can read) a tweak – you can effect the overall colour and opacity of the model by defining the overall luminance – I have found 0.3 0.3 0.3 (for RGB) seems to work pretty well for most colours (except for yellow which comes out muddy and brown).
With some tweaking, my DeBono Hats finally look like they should:
iHatrack 2.0
These “player controlled” movers are worn – by clicking on them, users stick them to the heads of their avatars and they look quite cute (in a top-hatty sort of way). Punters, through their avatars adopt a DeBono thinking mode, and then you walk over and reflect on an issue using that mode – you can see in the background some kids have already started doing just that.
It is nice when an idea finally coalesces into the shape you wanted it to be (or is it just me being anal and doggedly plugging away at an unimportant detail until I am happy with it?) – prolly a little of column A, little from column B.
