Tutorial for texturing Mesh in Blender for SL

[Madisen Babenco]

Hi does anybody know of any step by step tutorials that explain exactly how to texture a mesh object in blender and export to secondlife?  I have managed to export my mesh model but I am now completely at a loss as to how to go about texturing the model and baking the texture for sl.

I used to make sculpties and textures in blender, then bake the textures as an image and upload to SL but using the new version of blender and mesh for the first time, I am now totally stuck.  Help needed please? :-)

[Nacy Nightfire]

I highly recommend the videos brilliantly done by Ashasekayi - start with the lantern series:

[Nalates Urriah]

Also take a look at: http://www.youtube.com/user/gaiaclary?ob=0&feature=results_main 

Gaia's videos are professionally prepared. No 'and uuuhh' or rambling. They are lasered and to the point.

SL Specific

Making textures for SL is not much different than making textures for anything else. However, in Blender there are lots of freatures that cannot be used in SL. For instance, you can bake and use bump maps (a separate image) in Blender. However, there is currently no way to use a user made bump in SL. This means one must bake the bump into a texture. The problem with that is it pretty much locks in the light direction, so one has to plan for that.

The SL viewers will do Ambient Occlusion (AO). Blender will allow one to bake AO layers but there is no way to bring them into SL and use them. Again, it is easier to bake AO into the texture, but then if I have AO on in my viewer I get your AO and the viewer's AO on top of it. If you leave the AO out of your texture, and I have the viewer's AO off, I see no AO.

So, even with all the capability in Blender, we still need to bake all those features into a single texture or leave them out and upload that to SL.

[Ashasekayi Ra]

I'd highly recommend the Canned Mushroom Blender texturing series. It is extremely thorough and has a class type structure.

Link:

 

[Nacy Nightfire]

Thanks so much for that link to Canned Mushrooms/Jason Welsh's videos.  I'm working thru them and although I'm a bit beyond the first in the series skill-wise, I'm still picking up useful  workflow tips.

One correction I'll make that may have been corrected already in viewer comments (I'm watching these on an Ipad so I don't see viewer's comments).  Jason uses the AVERAGE ISLAND SCALE feature of blender incorrectly and then suggests that blender is a bit wonky in it's implementation of this feature.  He did not properly select all of the faces in the UV space when he invoked that command and therefore didn't get the results he expected.  (I hate to see Blender "taking the fall" for user mistakes.)  I've never had a problem with this command.

This however doesn't detract from the excellence of this series or the extreme generosity of Jason Welsh to provide this instruction for free.  He works on the Mac and the PC in many different programs so it must be a "herculean" effort to  accomplish what he does for the general student public - and  he does it so well.

[Ashasekayi Ra]

Yes, I think his channel is pretty awesome. He does make an occasional flub where you can tell he mixed up hotkeys between different programs. I usually suggest his series to people starting out because of the class type of structure that goes from point A to Z through an entire process.

[Kylie Sabra]

I've just started and the above suggested tutorials are just wonderful.  A week ago I was pulling my hair out, but finally the Blender light clicked on.