Since the first spring flowers are blooming again, I was inspired to create bright and colorful spring-themed outfit!
This charonlee cardigan mesh converted by @johziii is awesome, I do really like the overall thick appearance of the mesh which is perfect to show off some of my recent knit patterns! The mesh is still a bit of a hot mess after some personal edits. I'm definitely a bit rusty, but I could not resist editing it since it's very close to what I was looking for. I did not like the original texture very much, so I lowered the contrast. With the mesh itself, I just did the bare minimum for now like removing some redundant seams and double vertices and some remapping so the texture of pants does not bleed onto the cardigan. The mapping was decent proportion-wise, but the UV pieces were much too small overall - that is often the issue with TS4 conversions. I wasn't ready to redo the entire textures, so I left the pieces as they were for now. I did put a sewn leather tag in the back instead of the fabric one, and of course gave the cardi 4 color channels. The original creator of the mesh was very liberal with polys and also added a ton of backfaces which bloat the polycount quite a bit. I think rather than spending hours trying to improve the situation, I may try to make my own mesh again, as I do feel inspired now. I have a lot of recent techniques to revisit (like baking, painting bones by hand, working with geom meshes etc.).
I can still do my Milkshape mesh workflow in my sleep, but I want to work more with geoms, which is a completely different workflow and somewhat more complicated since bulky meshes like these really benefit from manual bone assignments. But it requires specific Blender versions and a lot of little things that my brain tends to forget quickly again after some time. I'm not sure if I feel motivated enough at this time to relearn and refresh everything I need, but we'll see!
It's fun to create patterns, but I feel like I always use the same few meshes and I just want to have some cardigans and pullovers that are more what I'm looking for. We mostly get conversions nowadays, and they are often badly mapped because TS4 does not have a pattern system where it pays off to map better; and/or much too small on UV space and thus blur the patterns, and often have a baked-in texture which makes them unusable for my patterns. There really is no alternative to making my own meshes if they are to match my specific requirements and quality standards. I just tend to get stuck with a mesh at a certain point, too frustrated to continue, and I have not been able to finish one in years. I hope this pattern will break eventually!
