I took a bit of a break after Fantasy Faire, which gave me the opportunity to really explore and enjoy it for the first time in years. I got an intriguing invitation though, and while I'm still very slow in making things, I decided to accept. Vintage Fair is an event focused on items inspired by history, and anything before the 21st century goes. Since so many of my items have historical roots, it was an opportunity I couldn't pass up. I didn't have much time though, and to do the event I had to make a new item. After dressing for (and finally attending) the Fantasy Faire masquerade ball and bedecking myself in my Civetta Barocco mask with my new Barocco ear accessories, I realized the dreadful lack of accompanying neck adornment.
After spending the time designing and making these mesh pieces to play with on my masks, it's not just economical good sense to reuse them, it makes everything match! There were certain areas I felt were lacking though, especially around the center stone, so I actually ended up grabbing pieces that I had made for my demo frame, playing around with their size and position and found that they paired very nicely with the pieces from the masks. After a bit of retexturing, they look like they were always there.
I had planned to use my existing stone textures and I was actually still pretty happy with them until I tried putting them into a PBR material. Oof. It turns out my current stone textures were made in 2013, but being the data hoarder that I am I was able to access the original files to try to make them play nicer with PBR. Then I just kept tweaking, and next thing I knew I had a set of 16 new stones to play with, inspired by the colors and shading of real minerals like flourite, ametrine, aquamarine and pink sapphires. They are still very much based on and closely related to the originals, but the effect when they are viewed with high graphics settings is much more decadent.
I have been making strides towards creating HUDs and converting my items to use them. I have certainly come to appreciate that most customers expect them now, and that it's the dominant paradigm for color change. I also quite like seeing the actual colors represented and find it to be much friendlier to the international community and non-English speaking folks out there to be able to just click on options you think look nice, rather than having to guess at words you might not understand. With this necklace done I now have a much easier path towards updating other items, especially the Barocco masks, so hopefully you can see PBR and HUD updates for those coming soon.
Vintage Fair opens June 6th, and goes until the 16th
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