Problem loading up my mesh staff: Textures come out borked

[ExuberantKatboy]

I'm new to Mesh and I've been working on a wizard's staff for a while, mostly to learn and with the hopes that I could produce something interesting by the end of it. And I finally got it to look a way I find decent...

http://i.imgur.com/Ka44djK.jpg

That's not bad, I think, but I ran into a problem when I tried to upload it. It cost 117 L for the upload, and it came out looking something like this.

http://imgur.com/kl6tynB

Anyone have any help for the newbie to this?

[Gaia Clary]

You need to apply scale and rotation. that is: tell blender that whatever you did while rotating and scaling your mesh in Object mode is fixated. So all rotations are set to 0.0 and all scaling is set to 1.0 without actually changing the object visually.

You do this In the footer of the 3D view:

Object -> Apply -> Rotation & Scale

Then export again and all is well.

[ExuberantKatboy]

Thank you for your time but sadly this hasn't fixed my issue. I also have Zbrush, though I don't know how to work that as well so I still work with Blender at the moment. I've heard it's better for numerous things, if you can think of any way to make this staff easier to make workable.

Edit: With some fiddling and whatnot, I've found out that I can upload this mesh in three pieces. There is another problem, though, that I notice with the textures correct...

http://imgur.com/aheWmeS

I have no idea with this problem is either.

[Drongle McMahon]

What exactly is it you see as the problem? Just the upload fee? Otherwise, the preview in the uploader looks correct to me, apart from being rotated (which Gaia's suggestion would fix - or perhaps you rotated the preview?). However, the numbers in the Blender picture say there are 135 objects, with a total of 50090 triangles. Now I can't tell whether all those objects are in the exported file, but from those where I can see the selection outline, it looks like they may be. If that is the case, then 117 L$ seems a very low fee for uploading 135 objects.

There is no reason I can think of why you would want this to consist of so many objects, ot so many triangles. The result will be high LI as well as high upload fee and an excessive amount of work for your GPU.  You can sinply combine all the objects into one by selecting them all and doing Object->Join. You can use up to eight materials for the parts of the joined mesh that will have different textures.

You are likely to run into other problems is any of the materials has more than 21844 triangles. But the triangle count should anyway be drastically reduced. You clearly have a level of detail that is far smaller than it will be possible to see in SL. Without being able to see more of the detail, it's difficult to say where the reduction is best, but you can do a lot of reduction by selecting edge loops and using Delete->Dissolve. (Do one each of the identical parts, then duplicate it to replace the others, to save work). One common explanation for excessive triangle counts is the use of subdivision to obtain smooth-looking surfaces. This is hugely wasteful. Instead, many fewer faces should be set to use smooth shading, to achieve the same effect. Sharp edges can be kept where needed by using the edge-split modifier. Smooth shading will reduce the LI a great deal even before the triangle count is then loweredm because vertices on sharp edhes get duplicated in the uploader.

In you third post, it looks as if you have some inverted normals. To see this effect in Blender, check the "Backface Culling" option in the Display section of the Properties panel in the 3D view. This will make the faces one-sided, as they always are in SL. Select the offending faces and do Mesh->Normals->Flip to get the normals correct.

 

[ExuberantKatboy]

I wasn't mentioning the L as a problem, just a curious side note that might help diagnose whatever problem I might have.

The issue mentioned was the messed up coloration. The giant crystal was completely without color, random things were technicolor, and everything that should have been dark brown was yellow.

[Drongle McMahon]

Ah. Where are the colours coming from? Are they just material colours, or are you applying and uploading textures?  If it's the latter, it could be a UV mapping issue. If not, then I don't know. I never upload textures with the model (for a number of good reasons*), so I don't know how well the uploader preview deals with texturing/colouring so may objects at once. You might get something different when you complete the upload and observe inworld. Have you done that? (You can use the Aditi grid to avoid costs). You could see if joining helps here, but there will be texturing anomalies if you end up with more than 21844 triangles in any material.

*1) paying both mesh and texture fee every time you change either. 2) proliferation of hidden copies of textures in inventory. 3) redundant repet uploads (and fees) for general-pupose textures. 4) reports of other problems here.

[ExuberantKatboy]

Thanks for the advice!

And thanks to everyone and their help, I somehow managed to get around my problem. Following general advice given to me in this thread, I was able to get the entire staff uploaded and put together in Second Life with no issues with one sided textures! It seems going over everything with a fine toothed comb resolved my other issue, so I guess I'm golden.