Megurine Luka

Ah, okay. I'll keep that in mind then. Whenever you're actually on yourself though feel free to try and strike up a conversation. And sorry about not saying anything after accepting your friend request last night. I had to put my laundry in the drier right after accepting it then spaced it until you'd logged off.

Lol. I always have Steam open if my computer's on even though I haven't really gamed much since January. I use it to talk to people constantly though.

Btw, feel free to add me on Steam if you want.

Yeah, it adds another layer of reflection which helps it look more like a real eye when rendering things. The base model that I'm using here doesn't have realistic eyes like that and they tend to look totally fake when rendering. They're basically a sphere which a patch added on for the iris. And since the iris and pupil both run off the same texture, the pupil reflects light too which looks a bit awkward.

The morningstar is probably my best texturing work so far and it was honestly stupidly simple. Mostly it was a matter of copy+pasting. Most of my other texturing work is for eyes but none of that is nearly as good as the morningstar. At least I can make up for lacking textures with making more realistic eyes.

Here's some examples of how the eyes are more realistic:
http://i.imgur.com/zjUzs.png
http://i.imgur.com/vlWkm.png (The eye is a lot more round than that now, that was while I was finishing up the shape.)
http://i.imgur.com/fcZR0.png
http://i.imgur.com/1S3Kh.png
Not sure how well you can tell from those but the iris actually bends inwards like a real iris should and it has a transparent cornea. The pupil rather than opening up into the inside of the eye is just a flat black surface that reflects no light whatsoever. there's no real textures on any of those yet but the basic eye setup is there and it's pretty good for 30 minutes of work.

Yeah, it had to have taken a ton of patience honestly. I'm admittedly not that great at texturing but it normally takes me several hours to make a single texture and then to get a bump map I copy that texture into a separate file and make it greyscale then to get a normal map I have to copy that and run my script. Using the script I have and then tweaking the settings until it's how I want it can take 40+ minutes on its own. So doing it by hand would take just forever...

The purple is basically the color that 3ds uses for flat surfaces. And then that other spectrum of colors it uses to know where to indent the shape and how wide the strips of color are and how intense they are determines the depth and angle of the indented area. Any purple that's enclosed within the spectrum will be at a low or higher level than the rest of the texture and will follow the same curvature of the base shape it's a part of.

Yeah, I use a plugin for porting to GMod which makes things tons simpler. It took me two hours to properly port it the first time but now that I have the plugin setup properly it should be far quicker from now on.

And you can make a normal map easily enough if you understand how one works. Although it likely wouldn't look nearly as good as one generated by a script. Basically a normal map consists of a basic purple color then a ring of a certain spectrum of colors (red, yellow, green, and blue iirc) with the different colors each representing a different direction for 3ds when rendering images.

Yeah. Although admittedly if it were in a game I'd want it to have a lot less. The textures on that thing are 4096x4096, I downsized those to 512x512 and ported it into GMod as a test and they're still actually rather high resolution in-game.

And the sad part about that amount of detail is that the textures are really simple other than being high resolution. The base texture and the bumpmap (uses some lighting tricks to give it a bit more depth) are each just two different shades of grey. The normal map (The one that makes it look all pitted and stuff) is the most complex one except I used a Photoshop script to generate that from the bumpmap in the first place.

It looks pretty good if you make things right. For example here's a close up of the morningstars at the end of my custom model's uh... Twintails I guess you'd call them since they're in place of her normal twintails: http://i.imgur.com/tSoRg.png