Help! My mesh are see-through.

[Arcturys]

Hi! I am new to blender and started just about a week ago. I made a few mesh but seems like there's a bit of a problem. Everytime I duplicate an object, the outcome in SL seems to be different form what I've made in blender. Here's my screenshot:

http://i39.tinypic.com/ip1is3.png

 

http://i40.tinypic.com/5evacx.png

 

As you can see, I duplicated the other half of the frame on blender. and there's the final outcome in SL. The duplicated frame seems to be see-through at any angle. I don't know how to make it look full/not see-through. I have been doing this for days and I have not had any solution for this. Does anyone know what's wrong?

[Aquila Kytori]

The mirrored side has the "normals" facing inwards .

A face/polygon only has one side , and that needs to be facing outwards so what you need to do flip the normals of the faces of that part of your model .

You can do that by selecting your mesh in Edit mode and  in the Tool panel  find the section headed Normals and hit the Recalculate button

or in Edit mode just select that part of the mesh which has the normals facing inwards and hit the Flip button.

As this can happen quite often its a good idea to work with Backface Culling enabled in the Properties panel (N). Doing that you will be able to see as your are working in Blender if the faces are wrong and correct them as you go along .

Also you could enable Normals from the Properties panel, the direction of the normals will be shown as little blue lines.

I suggest you do both of these before Recalculating/Flipping so you can see how they work .

 

Edited to add :

You mentioned that you are duplicating part of the mesh to get the other half of the mesh ...........

Blender has many Modifiers and the one that is perhaps used the most is the Mirror Modifier . As the name implies it mirrors a mesh about one or more of its axis using the Objects Origin (the orange spot) as the mirror center.

 

 

 

[Arcturys]

Hi! Thank you for your reply. I tried applying mirror modifier, also ctrl+J all the objects and uploaded them to SL, but this is what turned out:

 

http://gyazo.com/80a1db52a45d6aa2212bf69a27cf32d5

 

http://gyazo.com/b789022e9801a59712288db8ccc4ebff

 

It came out only the half of the frame. Was there any steps that I have missed? Thank you!

[Drongle McMahon]

Did you apply it, as opposed to just adding it? You apply permanently by clicking the "Apply" button in the modifier stack and the modifier panel disappears. Or you can apply just for export, without affecting the original, by checking "Apply modifiers" in the Export Collada panel.If you don't do either of these, it will ignore the modifier and just export the half frame.

[Arcturys]

It seems I haven't joined the objects before exporting to .dae ^^; But after joining, everything wen't hollow.

 

http://gyazo.com/6a64a788c4b4258619a3d9b29efe94b7

I "recalculate" and also "Flip Direction" but it seems I have messed up somewhere. Can you tell me the steps before export a certain mesh with multiple objects? I find it dificult to join objects. Somehow it ends up wrong..

[Drongle McMahon]

That still looks like flipped normals. With so many intercrossing surfaces as at the hinges here, the recalculate doesn't always get it right. You need to select just those faces that are wrong and flip their normals. There's no real problem exporting separate objects. Just select them all and export as normal. You should end up with a linkset. If some objects are too small (0.01m) thery will get stretched by the uploader. So those should not be separate objects.

The problems start with LODs. If you use auto-LODs, the uploader may decimate the objects unevenly, which can cause a mess. If you makr your own LOD meshes (recommended) then you have to use an alphabetical naming scheme for the objects in Blender, so that they are i the same order for eac LOD. Then make sure the "Sort by object name" option is checked when you export (the SL presets should do that). Without that, the lower LOD objects may get jumbled and used for the wrong high LOD parts. 

[Aquila Kytori]

Hi again

I noticed in one of your images that you're using 20,000verts / 26,000tris in the mesh, This if ok if you are wanting to render out an image but for a real time renderer like  SL its really too many .

As a reference the complete SL avatar uses approx; 3,700 verts, 7,200 tris.

You may find it usefull to download the Avatar workbench .blend file http://blog.machinimatrix.org/avatar-workbench/

which contains a 1 to 1 scale model SL avatar on layer 1. This will help you to model your meshes the correct size In Blender and you will see, by comparison, when you are modeling too much detail into your mesh. Its not very economical to have polygons smaller than the pixels on your screen  in your SL viewer 

 

Some will say even this is too many  ......... lol but in general use as few vertices as you can to get the shape you want and delete all the faces that will never be seen. The rest is texturing ......

[Drongle McMahon]

But I don't think you will see very clearly through a chunky lens like that! :matte-motes-wink-tongue:

[Aquila Kytori]

............and the subject/title of the thread is ! ?

:matte-motes-tongue:

[Arcturys]

Thank you so much for your input and advice, Aquila & Drongle! I finally made it (I'll try to make a better one) but at least I learned something =D http://gyazo.com/f0b62096afe3cfe48ed6fa9c4675e4ac 

I will try to texture it soon!