I am afraid that it is more a matter of being tenacious and making long hours, than of talent.
I am still not entirely happy with the eyes drawn by the Tube tool. The mapping of the tube surface onto an 80% x 80% area of the diffuse/normalmap sometimes causes very poor resolution in one of the dimensions. Especially in designs with long legs, such as Spider or Octopus. It divides the entire height of the maps over the sum of all the lengths, while each tube can use the full width of the map, no matter how tiny the tube diameter. I already improved the situation a bit by allowing parts that need little detail to be vertically compressed, to make more room for other parts, but this doesn't help enough, and can still result in eyes being drawn with very poor vertical resolution.
What is really needed is to keep track of the ratio of the total tube length (along the surface) and the maximum circumference. If that gets extreme (say > 3), it would be better to map it to a rectangle that is 4 times higher than wide, and split that into an upper and a lower part, which are then displayed side by side to fill a square. The maps nor also always leave room for a disc in the upper-right 20% x 20% to which a cone segment can be mapped, even if no such segment is used. (And I hardly ever use it...) Without the disc the map could be structured as two side-by-side 50% x 100% areas, and even with a disc the left part could be 50% x 100%, and the right part 50% x 75%.
It would probably a bad idea to have discontinuous mapping of a single tube onto the maps, but very long tube length typically occurs because there are multiple tubes in the design. So it can roughly split the tubes into two approximately equally long sets, one going into the left part, the other in the right part. It might also be useful to make it pay attention to the diameter of the tubes. Those with very small diameter, such as the Spider legs or Octopus tentacles could be mapped into a narrow area on the right. Perhaps it would in general be better to not split the width of the map 50-50, but 70-30, mapping the narrow tubes onto the 30% half.
I will take a look at Minjiku.
There also is the issue that I amended the rules of Team-Mate Chess here on CVP with the possibility of a 'double promotion' to a pair of inverted Silver Generals. And that the Jocly implementation still uses the old rules. This would require extra code. While Team-Mate Chess so far was the only variant I did for Jocly (and therefore did first) that didn't need any code modifications.
I am afraid that it is more a matter of being tenacious and making long hours, than of talent.
I am still not entirely happy with the eyes drawn by the Tube tool. The mapping of the tube surface onto an 80% x 80% area of the diffuse/normalmap sometimes causes very poor resolution in one of the dimensions. Especially in designs with long legs, such as Spider or Octopus. It divides the entire height of the maps over the sum of all the lengths, while each tube can use the full width of the map, no matter how tiny the tube diameter. I already improved the situation a bit by allowing parts that need little detail to be vertically compressed, to make more room for other parts, but this doesn't help enough, and can still result in eyes being drawn with very poor vertical resolution.
What is really needed is to keep track of the ratio of the total tube length (along the surface) and the maximum circumference. If that gets extreme (say > 3), it would be better to map it to a rectangle that is 4 times higher than wide, and split that into an upper and a lower part, which are then displayed side by side to fill a square. The maps nor also always leave room for a disc in the upper-right 20% x 20% to which a cone segment can be mapped, even if no such segment is used. (And I hardly ever use it...) Without the disc the map could be structured as two side-by-side 50% x 100% areas, and even with a disc the left part could be 50% x 100%, and the right part 50% x 75%.
It would probably a bad idea to have discontinuous mapping of a single tube onto the maps, but very long tube length typically occurs because there are multiple tubes in the design. So it can roughly split the tubes into two approximately equally long sets, one going into the left part, the other in the right part. It might also be useful to make it pay attention to the diameter of the tubes. Those with very small diameter, such as the Spider legs or Octopus tentacles could be mapped into a narrow area on the right. Perhaps it would in general be better to not split the width of the map 50-50, but 70-30, mapping the narrow tubes onto the 30% half.
I will take a look at Minjiku.
There also is the issue that I amended the rules of Team-Mate Chess here on CVP with the possibility of a 'double promotion' to a pair of inverted Silver Generals. And that the Jocly implementation still uses the old rules. This would require extra code. While Team-Mate Chess so far was the only variant I did for Jocly (and therefore did first) that didn't need any code modifications.