Blender mesh creation with SL in mind

[Chic Aeon]

1 hour ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

I was under the impression that Blender can bake in crevice shadows itself, and that you don't need to go through the extra steps of A) produce an image of just the shadows, B) save that image separately, and C) use an entire separate program to merge the shadow texture onto the base diffuse texture for every object you create -- just the ones you intend to be easily retextured by other creators (or even by yourself).

 

It will using Cycles (what I use) but as I have said i ONLY have knowledge of Cycles in 2.79.  The people that I have chatted with in the recent past  said that cyles works "the same way" in the 2.8x versions.  I just don't understand the interface so can't help more there.   Personally I think Cycles works WAY better than the Blender Render AO method for a big variety of reasons :D.   But if you are selling full perm models then of course that AO map is needed. You can make an AO map in Cycles but it is much different than the Blender Render version. 

 

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

1 hour ago, n0minous said:

I'm sure you can do that using Blender's shader nodes, but isn't using layer-based image editing software like Photoshop and Substance Painter easier since you just use a multiply blending mode over the diffuse map?

How do you get Blender to produce that AO map in the first place? I know you need to set up nodes to create a normal map.

[n0minous]

19 minutes ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

How do you get Blender to produce that AO map in the first place? I know you need to set up nodes to create a normal map.

Ah, there should be plenty of youtube tutorials on it such as this one: 

It seems that you select the high poly model, give it a material in the properties editor > material properties tab, and in the shader editor, connect an ambient occlusion input node's color output to the Principled BSDF's base color input. Select the low poly model and in the shader editor, create a new image texture that's not connected to anything. Select the high poly first, the low poly second, and then bake a diffuse map. I bake maps in Substance Painter instead of Blender, so some of these directions might be wrong.

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

12 minutes ago, n0minous said:

...and then bake a diffuse map

Exactly. That's my point. "and then bake a diffuse map" means "have Blender combine everything instead of exporting things separately and merging them with Photoshop". It's another option -- one that shouldn't be too tricky because figuring out how to make Blender create shadow and/or bright spot maps in the first place is the hard part (and is required by both methods!) Once you've got that down, you're 90% done.

Edited July 15, 2020 by Quarrel Kukulcan

[n0minous]

15 hours ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

Exactly. That's my point. "and then bake a diffuse map" means "have Blender combine everything instead of exporting things separately and merging them with Photoshop". It's another option -- one that shouldn't be too tricky because figuring out how to make Blender create shadow and/or bright spot maps in the first place is the hard part (and is required by both methods!) Once you've got that down, you're 90% done.

Wait, so you already know how to bake an AO map in Blender? I gave you the benefit of the doubt and tried to carefully explain the baking process in case you weren't familiar with it. You could have made your point directly instead of wasting someone's time trying to explain something you already know how to do.

Could you please explain to me then how you combine an AO map with a diffuse map in Blender using shader nodes?

Edit: I didn't mean to sound too harsh and I understand that baking maps itself takes a bit of learning nodes if you choose to do so in Blender. I just assumed that Jul was already comfortable in Photoshop and I still think it's easier to blend via layers. But if anyone wants to further learn node-based workflows, by all means.

Edited July 15, 2020 by n0minous
Avoid double-posting

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

19 hours ago, n0minous said:

You could have made your point directly instead of wasting someone's time trying to explain something you already know how to do.

My point is only that Blender can do a combined bake. Pick "Combined" as the bake type and check the Diffuse (w/direct & indirect) and the Ambient Occlusion boxes (plus maybe also Glossy if you want highlights too). This produces a single texture with the base diffuse plus shadows (and possibly highlights) combined into it. (AFAICT this is pretty much what anyone who talks about "baking textures" is referring to.) It's faster than making a separate AO image plus exporting plus hand-merging.

Of course, if you want an AO image (like so people can make better custom textures for your shirt), obviously make one.

Or if you can't figure out how to do full texture bakes (because they're fussier to set up than isolated AO generation is), just do what works.

[JulsToffy]

Okay, I continue exploring Blender in my free time and I'm genuinely confused as to how people manage to create items that stay below 3 land impact. I made a set, a board, a cup with berries and a simple cookie which i'll probably delete lol. And I faced a problem that when uploaded to SL, this item was around 7 land impact. What influences land impact? I made as many loops as possible, removed details, etc. etc., but still... this board clearly shouldn't be over 1li lol.

Any tips please? I'm absolutely confused on how to approach li.

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, JulsToffy said:

Any tips please? I'm absolutely confused on how to approach li.

Sorry if this is toobasic for you but first you need to look at not the land impact but the weights. Any object in SL has four weights attempting to estimate the load it adds to various parts of the system:

• Server weight represents the workload on the assets servers (these are the servers that run the database keeping track of everything in SL).
• Physics weight represents the workload on the simulator. (It's called physics weight because handling the physics is assumed to be so much work for the simulator all other tasks are trivial by comparasion and can be ignored).
• Download weight represents the bandwidth needed to transfer the object from servers to client.
• Render weight (or whatever they call it this week) represents the workload for you gpu.

Render weight does not influence land impact since until very recently LL couldn't care less about how our computers handled SL. The other three weights do influence land impact but in a rather unusual way:

Land impact is the highest of the the three weights: server weight, physics weight and download weight, rounded off to the nearest whole number. It is calculated for a linkset as a whole, not for each mesh, sculpts and prim separately.

One very common mistake people make when trying to reduce land impact, is to reduce the geometry of a model that has a physics weight higher than the download weight. That isn't going to work of course. To reduce the land impact, you need to find out which weight determines the LI and work on that one:

• Server weight is determined by the number of parts in the linkset and (for some reason) the number of active scripts. Each prim, mesh and sculpt adds 0.5 to the server weight, each active script adds 0.25. If you want to reduce the server weight, you need to merge meshes into fewer and bigger ones.
• Physics weight is determined by the complexity of the physics model. This is a rather complicated matter but objects like the ones you've shown us here shouldn't really have a physics shape more complicated than a simple cube (and even that may be overkill) which will give them a physics weight well below the server weight.
• Download weight for a mesh is determined by the size of the compressed mesh files. (For prims and sculpts it's calculated in a slightly different way that doesn't really make sense all the time.) This is first calculated separately for each LoD model and then the four values are weighed towards each other depending on the object's size. There are a lot of complicating factors but the basics is, the fewer the vertices and tirnagles your model has, the lwoer the downlaod weight.