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IvyTechEngineer
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I have built 5 garages that do not have roofs that I am placing in a sandbox for students to use. Their assignment is to add one of the 5 roof truss designs that they drew to the top of their garage. I think I used a common original building but just modified the texture on each version. All objects are linked and the building will support fourteen 28 foot roof trusses. 

When I was attempting to fine tune the placement of the garages within the sandbox I noticed that the building origin was not at the same location for one of the buildings. All z locations are the same but either x or y should be the same with one of the locations adjusted for the spacing between the garages. 

SL is down right now but why would the origin of one build be different that anther one?

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That is the puzzle. It doesn't male sense. All the building were created from the same base model. The first model is created and all the building elements are linked. Floor and walls are textured and it is ready for a new roof. 

The first building is place in my sandbox @ x = 190, y=250 and z=1.623

The second building is then copied from the first @ x = 180, y=250 and z=1.623

Then I unlink the second building, re-texture and relink. Everything look good.

The third building is then copied from the first @ x = 170, y=250 and z=1.623

Then I unlink the third building, re-texture and relink the origin has changed to

x = 174.238, y=250.022 and z=0.050. 

I believe the last item selected sets the origin for the building but I could be wrong...

 

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On 11/15/2021 at 5:16 PM, ChinRey said:

You can always use Ctrl+Shift+Alt+4 to hide and show avatars but I think most builders simply cam away from their avatar.

Camera control is a rather important skill for builders btw. So:

  • To focus on and object: Click on it while holding down the Ctrl and Alt keys.
  • To shift camera sideways or up and down, hold down Ctrl, Alt and Shift and use arrow keys or move the mouse
  • To rotate camera, hold down Ctrl, and Alt and use arrow keys or move the mouse
  • To cam in and out, either use the mouse wheel or old down Alt and use arrow keys or move the mouse
  • To revert to default camera position, hit the Escape key

One of the requirements to become a real SL builder is to fall off your work platform without noticing because you and your camera are too focused on your build.

 

There are several free builder grid textures available. Carl Metropolitan's is probably the most common and you can pick it up at MP: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Basic-Builders-Grid-Texture/8534776 or here: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Basic-Builders-Grid-Decimeter-Scaled/8667959

Or maybe you want to make your own. Metropolitan's grids only cover a 10x10 msurface since that was the size limit back when he made it. I used to solve that limitation with texture repeats but maybe it's time to come u with a new 64x64 m one?

 

 

I was also wondering if there are shortcuts to standard orthographic views like there is in CAD programs? Also, in the drawing of assemblies there are a number of mates than can be used to align the part faces, edges, etc. in CAD tools. Does SL have something like that? 

Thanks

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3 hours ago, IvyTechEngineer said:

I was also wondering if there are shortcuts to standard orthographic views like there is in CAD programs?

You can't do this with large objects so easily, but with many objects you can use the build tool and rotate the object through 90 degrees on some of the axes to get aligned in different ways. Assuming you are standing facing your garage in the picture earlier, rotating it around the Z axis will get you side and front elevation views, rotating it around it's X-axis will put it into the position of a top-down view. If you really felt the need to replicate the CAD-style three-views you could have four copies of the model and put them in different alignments, however,  feel trying to work in the CAD-style is not going to get you the smoothest of experiences here.

 

3 hours ago, IvyTechEngineer said:

lso, in the drawing of assemblies there are a number of mates than can be used to align the part faces, edges, etc. in CAD tools. Does SL have something like that? 

The Builders-Buddy type aids help with precise positioning, but for a lot of us it's as easy to look at a prim's X,Y,Z positions and dimensions and from that calculate how far along one of those axes a different sized prim must be positioned so that the adjacent faces are coincident.

In some of the Third-party viewers is a command-line calculator so that you can type in expressions such as "calc 105.65 + 0.5/2.0 + 0.75/2.0" which will give you a value showing where on the axis in question you place a 0.75 cube so that one face will be up against a face of the 0.5 cube centred on 105.65 on that particular axis. It's much faster than using a calculator.

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  • 1 month later...

I am looking into building a small old west town, maybe 6 buildings. The Second Life Marketplace has some builders that have buildings that might work but I am a little unclear about how to evaluate the significance of Land Impact. For example, RE Blueprint Design has a 16x16 building that has a Land Impact of 47. Is this ok? I am a little leery about buying something that has no reviews. I could spend some time and create buildings in SL myself but this may take some time to do. I have attempted to also reach out to some of the builders and only a few respond in SL. (Sent them notecards via IM but I am not sure they are still active SL users.) Suggestions?

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2 hours ago, IvyTechEngineer said:

The Second Life Marketplace has some builders that have buildings that might work but I am a little unclear about how to evaluate the significance of Land Impact.

Well, you know how many prims you have for your land. There's no need to save on them unless you risk running out.

 

2 hours ago, IvyTechEngineer said:

For example, RE Blueprint Design has a 16x16 building that has a Land Impact of 47. Is this ok?

That doesn't sound too bad for a good ol' prim house. It probably isn't convexed so you should be able to cut the LI down to about half too.

 

2 hours ago, IvyTechEngineer said:

I am a little leery about buying something that has no reviews.

I wouldn't trust MP reviews either if I was you. ;)

But with old prim builds like these, you can usually expect that what you see is what you get. It's mainly mesh you should be a bit more careful about.

Also, consider the price. I don't know exactly which building you have in mind but most of them cost 50 or 100 L$ each. That's roughly 20-50 US cents. Can you afford to risk that much money?

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15 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Well, you know how many prims you have for your land. There's no need to save on them unless you risk running out.

 

That doesn't sound too bad for a good ol' prim house. It probably isn't convexed so you should be able to cut the LI down to about half too.

 

I wouldn't trust MP reviews either if I was you. ;)

But with old prim builds like these, you can usually expect that what you see is what you get. It's mainly mesh you should be a bit more careful about.

Also, consider the price. I don't know exactly which building you have in mind but most of them cost 50 or 100 L$ each. That's roughly 20-50 US cents. Can you afford to risk that much money? 

I am not so much worried about the money, it is really the land impact and the fact that some of the buildings have not been reviewed nor do they respond to my attempts to ask them questions. Also, I was thinking that some of these building could be built in SL or Blender and they might allow more customization. Some of the buildings from other builders include signage which I might need to add if it is not included. In addition, I wanted to do a rough layout of the building before buying them. This would be a great class project for my students maybe. 

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27 minutes ago, IvyTechEngineer said:

If I have an object, like a coin, that has two sides, can the both the head and tail sides be merged in Blender using uploaded as a single image image in SL?

You may be thinking of a flat mesh which can have different textures on different sides. I have a few of those on my Marketplace for free/fullperm. You'll be able to use them for what you described.

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1 hour ago, IvyTechEngineer said:

If I have an object, like a coin, that has two sides, can the both the head and tail sides be merged in Blender using uploaded as a single image image in SL?

If it has to be one texture, it's as simple as copy pasting the 2 images into one image in an image editor. Preferably an oblong texture such as 256x512. Creating a coin in Blender and mapping the UVs onto the new image.

A slightly more complicated way is to create a coin in Blender with 2 materials and 2 UV channels. You could then bake the 2 images from 1st UV channel, to the 2nd UV channel, into one texture.

You will have to create a new coin either way, though.

Of course, if it's a prim cylinder (or a mesh unwraped in a similar way) you can just edit the texture scale to 0.5, and the offset to 0.250, in-world, when using an oblong texture.

Edited by arton Rotaru
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16 minutes ago, IvyTechEngineer said:

Sorry, one more question about uploading models with textures. If I upload a file that should include a texture, can I select the texture or should it have the same file name?

While you CAN upload the textures along with the mesh object, I think the majority of people simply upload them separately and then apply them to the faces of the mesh in world.

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33 minutes ago, IvyTechEngineer said:

Sorry, one more question about uploading models with textures. If I upload a file that should include a texture, can I select the texture or should it have the same file name?

What Fluffy said, uploading the texture separately. I pretty much always check textures with the local texture feature in-world anyway.

If the texture is applied onto the model when exporting, this texture has to be in the same folder where the exported mesh  is, to be found by the importer. You need to check Include Textures in the importers Options tab as well.

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4 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:

always check textures with the local texture feature in-world

100%!  Especially once you start delving into normal and specular maps, but even with just a diffuse map I can't think of any instance where you shouldn't test with local textures before uploading.

I tend to work in 3D Coat a lot and find it really helpful to upload the mesh as soon as I'm done with retopo and LOD making.  That way I can check the base AO/normal/diffuse maps to make sure they work in SL before I start texturing, and then while you're creating the textures all you have to do is hit save in whatever app you're using and the textures will automatically update on your mesh in SL, which is exceptionally useful!

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22 minutes ago, Janet Voxel said:

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but if he made a coin like object in blender with a cylinder. Unwrapped it and applied those texures to each side of the UV map and baked it. Wouldn't that be all he needed to do?

With the coin images as they are, it would require to scale, and move them in Blender, to avoid overlapping UVs. Doing that will lead to the same result when baking indeed.

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Just wanted to add since I mentioned normal maps, etc. you could also look into using one of several tools available to generate depth and cavity maps for the coin texture which you could then use to create the normal and specular maps needed for SL materials.

Anyway, it would be a really nice touch, but it's best to stick to mastering the basics first, especially when it comes to sensible texture resolutions based on object size, because as nice and shiny as those coins may look with 3 high resolution 1024 x 1024 textures on your creative efforts will most certainly draw the ire of others. 😄

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3 hours ago, Janet Voxel said:

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but if he made a coin like object in blender with a cylinder. Unwrapped it and applied those texures to each side of the UV map and baked it. Wouldn't that be all he needed to do?

I have used Blender but am no expert. Textures are something new for me so I watch a lot of YouTube videos. I typically do more CAD work outside of Blender. To create the texture I ultimately used I started with 

and then moved onto 

I used Photoshop and paint.net to merge the two sides of the coin and that worked ok. Photoshop was used to crop the images and paint,net was used to merge all the images together into a single image.

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3 hours ago, arton Rotaru said:

What Fluffy said, uploading the texture separately. I pretty much always check textures with the local texture feature in-world anyway.

If the texture is applied onto the model when exporting, this texture has to be in the same folder where the exported mesh  is, to be found by the importer. You need to check Include Textures in the importers Options tab as well.

Thanks, I wanted to minimize the cost (i know that is lame) but thought if I could create a single texture that it would be better. When you upload a model the Include Textures can be selected as well and somehow SL knows what texture needs to be uploaded. Maybe that info is embedded in the DAE file?

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2 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

100%!  Especially once you start delving into normal and specular maps, but even with just a diffuse map I can't think of any instance where you shouldn't test with local textures before uploading.

I tend to work in 3D Coat a lot and find it really helpful to upload the mesh as soon as I'm done with retopo and LOD making.  That way I can check the base AO/normal/diffuse maps to make sure they work in SL before I start texturing, and then while you're creating the textures all you have to do is hit save in whatever app you're using and the textures will automatically update on your mesh in SL, which is exceptionally useful!

Thanks. I am not sure I totally understand what you said. My background is really CAD (Solidworks) and Blender to translate to a DAE file. Not much experience with textures per se. I have used Photoshop and paint.net (free) but still just a hack ... lol

 

Snapshot_001.png

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1 hour ago, IvyTechEngineer said:

I used Photoshop and paint.net to merge the two sides of the coin and that worked ok. Photoshop was used to crop the images and paint,net was used to merge all the images together into a single image.

You can do all that in PS easily. What I would do is resizing the images to 128x128 (Bilinear). Create a new image with the size of 128x256. Ctrl-A > Ctrl-C > Ctrl-V into the new image. Move one up, and one down (hold Shift to keep it in the middle). Merge the layers (Ctrl-E). Add some padding by duplicating the layer. Move it below the original layer and give it some gaussian blur. Copy the blurred layer several times until you have something like this.

Coin_PS.jpg.069bb6d660d0aad31fe86830a84d1634.jpg

Activate the background layer and save as Targa 24 bits/pixel.

 

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7 hours ago, IvyTechEngineer said:

Thanks. I am not sure I totally understand what you said. My background is really CAD (Solidworks) and Blender to translate to a DAE file. Not much experience with textures per se. I have used Photoshop and paint.net (free) but still just a hack ... lol

 

Snapshot_001.png

I was just extolling the virtues of the Local Textures feature which you can (and should) learn more about from this wiki page :) 

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