Converting Yacht Build To Mesh in Blender

[MichaelCorleone Losangeles]

I've built 5 different 120 meter yacht models in Second Life with prim accounts 0f 2,000-2,500. I'd like to export them to blender, convert and import back into Second Life with greatly reduced prim counts. Here is link to a video with the details of the project.

 

[Rick Nightingale]

Your vid won't play for me (my issue; I sometimes have trouble with youtube) and I don't know how much experience you have making mesh, but...

Don't just export it and 'convert' it. I did that in my very early days of learning mesh, and it's not worth the trouble of cleaning up the export for anything bigger than a couple of prims. You'll see what I mean if you look at just a single exported prim in Blender!

Export it, yes, but use that as only a template to build your new mesh around if you want the new model to be identical. Doing it that way will give you more flexibility to make improvements too, and do things like nice corner bevelling to round off the edges on the highest LOD models. Looks much better like that.

[Sean Heavy]

Select and Edit what you want to export. Use menu Build->Object->Save as->Collada; then pick the place to save it and save. Once in Blender, File->Import->Collada. You will see that every single prim is a separate shape within Blender. Just exporting back to Collada and importing to SL won't reduce the complexity. You will have to edit the model in Blender to reduce all the extra complexity before exporting to Collada and importing to SL. I am not aware of anything in particular that will do that for you. It will be a manual process. @Rick Daylight has the right idea; building a new model in Blender using the Collada export from SL as a guide may be your best option.

[ChinRey]

2 hours ago, Sean Heavy said:

Select and Edit what you want to export. Use menu Build->Object->Save as->Collada; then pick the place to save it and save.

If you do that, make sure all four checkboxes in the export palette are checked:

The last one, the Single UV Map, is especially important since ficing it afterwards can be a serious headache.

[MichaelCorleone Losangeles]

The biggest challenge I’m having right now is the physics. It’s like the mesh is inside an invisible box so I can walk through doors or even walk on the deck. 

[Sean Heavy]

26 minutes ago, MichaelCorleone Losangeles said:

The biggest challenge I’m having right now is the physics. It’s like the mesh is inside an invisible box so I can walk through doors or even walk on the deck. 

I agree! I have had issues figuring out physics for very simple houses/buildings. I found this video that helped a lot:

 

[MichaelCorleone Losangeles]

Thanks I found that video also. I think the key is that door ways must be created using 3 separate mesh objects because extruded objects or working with boolean modifiers, the shape you see isn't the physics your dealing with. its like a shape in a box so you are interacting with a cube not a shape or hole if that makes sense. I've successful imported parts of my yachts into SL and finding I'm cutting my prim count roughly in half.