building art gallery, installation, shop

[painthemoon]

Hi!

What do you need to build art gallery/installation? Im using Blender and Unreal Engine to create environments, but Second Life graphics seem to be low quality yet they are kind of high quality.

Im looking forward to share visual works, music and environments created in Unreal Engine. 

Also how can you make clothes and other kind of models, including make up services/visual enhance and create your own shop to sell them? Just use Blender to create and then import it to Second Life?

Thanks!

[Chic Aeon]

Blender is the most popular 3D program here but the important thing is that you need a DAE file format on export. There are tons of little things that you need to know too but you will likely find out.  The largest texture you can have (in most viewer uploads) is 1024. You can have 8 materials  per single mesh. The maxium size is 64 meters.  There is  a start. 

 

Have fun 

 

I have NO idea how things in Unreal will (or if) they will translate to second life. If you are making in Blender then most likely you will just use Blender for your work. Some folks use Substance Painter to make their textures.  

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

22 hours ago, painthemoon said:

What do you need to build art gallery/installation?

SL's maximum image size is 1024x1024 and it runs everything uploaded through JPEG-2000 compression. Images don't have to be square but width and height both need to be a power of 2 or SL will stretch that dimension up to the next one. If you have to shrink an image it's often best to use linear interpolation instead of what most image software suggests because if you use something like bicubic sharpening, the sharpening interacts poorly with the JPEG-2000 and you'll get excess artefacting.

It's probably best to display art using a cube or maybe plane prim. Those don't collapse into simpler models with distance and they don't cost Lindens to create.

If you're crafting architecture or statuary in a 3D program, you'll need to learn about what SL expects for the physics collision model and the multiple simplified Levels of Detail that all uploaded mesh objects have (and which will be auto-generated if you don't create your own). That's bigger than I have time to post about tonight, sadly. Folks in the Mesh forum will be able to help there.

Edited September 28, 2021 by Quarrel Kukulcan

[painthemoon]

Ok, thanks!

How about importing body mesh models made in Blender into Second Life? Is it that easy as drag on drop from Blender to Second Life? What kind of file formats do I need?

[ChinRey]

33 minutes ago, painthemoon said:

What kind of file formats do I need?

Second Life's mesh uploader only supports the COLLADA (.dae) format so you have to export from Blender in that format.

It's easy enough to do quick-and-dirty meshes in Blender but if you want to make good content for SL it's a lot more complicated. Blender is intended for frame-by-frame rendering of fairly simple scenes with relatively few objects. A game is supposed to be rendered in real time and the scenes tend to be far more complex. This means you have to be far more careful with how many tris and textures pixels you load the computer with. A streamed virtual reality like Second Life is even more complex with even more crowded scenes so even game assets tend to be too heavy.

There are lots of tricks and techniques for optimizing meshes to make the most out of each tri and pixel but unfortunately, although there is a lot of good advice on this forum and on various blogs, there is no comprehensive manual. Linden Lab doesn't have anybody that have the skills to write a manual like that and they've never been big on documentation for users anyway, so the official documentation is rather poor and often misleading.

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

3 hours ago, painthemoon said:

How about importing body mesh models made in Blender into Second Life?

Do you mean stationary mannequins or wearable mesh bodies?

[painthemoon]

Yeah, wearable meshes. Basically using Reallusion Character Creator to create quick face sketch and then editing whole character in Blender and then importing to Second Life. So full body mesh + character head/avatar.