Building Buildings

[Chic Aeon]

64 meters is only for LINKED objects so you can make something 54 meters and then drag a copy.   Don't forget stairs or a teleport system so folks can get where they need to go.  Once you get things the way you want (the dragging copy thing) then LOCK the build down.  

 

That's one way anyway. 

[IvyTechEngineer]

I am thinking about building a very tall in SL to house 200 posters. Is there an easy way to build a large building in SL? 

Here is something I would like to use for each floor. 

100 Vertices

200 Tris

LI 2.279

Any idea how much land impact would it be if I built 71 floors?

[Aquila Kytori]

 

Tip: while creating objects that require alignment, such as the levels (floors)  of your high-rise building, avoid using arbitrary lengths like 7.136m. Instead, opt for precise measurements, like exactly 7.00m  or 7.1m. the use of one decimal place is ok but not more.  Aligning large objects with irregular bounding box measurements can be a pain .

20 hours ago, IvyTechEngineer said:

Here is something I would like to use for each floor. 

100 Vertices

200 Tris

LI 2.279

Any idea how much land impact would it be if I built 71 floors?

I think you meant 17 and not 71 floors lol .

As Chic says; "testing testing testing"

I did 2 tests, one uploading a single floor level and a second uploading which combined 4 levels( floors) into one object.

I was going to a test with having the exterior walls as one object and all the inside walls and floors as a second object but after seeing the results of the other two tests I didn't think there was much to be gained from doing that.

First the single floor object:

 

Spiral stairs in such a tall building would be terrible for an avatar to negotiate, go for an elevator, teleport system, internal ramp or wide internal stairs connecting each floor .

For the Medium Lod model we only need to create something to represent the outer walls. For the inside only the high Lod model will ever be seen so no need to create anything for the inside.

All Lod models need to contain the same list of materials. The High Lod model has 5 materials assigned to its faces so this Medium Lod model also has to have the same 5 materials assigned. One material is already assigned to the outer walls that leaves the other 4 and for those we create 4 extra triangles somewhere in the medium Lod model that wont be seen, and assigned each one of the 4 unassigned materials. ( but any ways for this example  model it has already been assumed that nothing on the inside lower than the High Lod will ever be seen ). This only applies if you are using the SL viewer when uploading. If you are using the Firestorm viewer then you don't need to worry about adding the 4 extra triangles and assigning them the 4 unused materials. No idea why I had forgotten that Beq, a firestorm dev, fixed this issue a couple of years ago. Thankyou Beq 

see Beq's Blog here :  https://beqsother.blogspot.com/2021/06/taming-mesh-uploader-improved-workflow.html

and here :  https://beqsother.blogspot.com/2021/06/summarising-next-improvements-to.html

 

For Physics..... not a lot to say except that as the inner barrier wall is only 1meter high in the High Lod model if we made the collision surfaces for this wall the same height it may be a little too low to prevent an avatar falling out over it so the physics "walls" for this barrier were made to be 1.4m high.

Uploading......  the Low and Lowest Lod slots are set to use the Use LoD above . That's to say they both will be using the Medium Lod.

 

When rezzed the LI for this single floor level object was just a little lower than yours :

 

and when stacked one above the other, 16 high the LI was 30. The missing "17th" floor would be the ground level floor, the floor with the door way opening in the outside wall to allow access to the elevator at ground level. So add and extra 1.5 LI for that.

 

Test 2 was 4 floors combined in one object :

 

 

Rezzed and with Physics Shape Type set to Prim; the LI per Floor level was better:

 

 

So the answer to your question is, it depends :

With one floor per object the 16 floor building was 30LI.

When 4 floors per object the 16 floor building LI was 20LI.  with the added bonus of having a lot less objects to align  

"Testing testing testing" 

 

 

Edited October 13, 2023 by Aquila Kytori

[IvyTechEngineer]

Hello

Nice job Aquila, and you made me laugh. No spiral stair cases, lol. I had planed to use a teleporter or elevator. Still need to add a door to the bottom level. I think the bottom floor will contain a directory for different posters groups. I want to use a touch to teleport to go to the first level of a group. Most of the posters use the browser and link to a image that I have stored on our website. This makes it very easy to organize no cost to upload images. These posters are typically 6 meters wide and 3 meters high. I have a few other that have a 4:3 size and a few that are images that I uploaded but most of them use the browser. I believe I have about ~200 posters. Each floor can display maybe 12 posters (3 per wall) so I need about 17 floors and I picked a 30 meter square with 6 meter walls. The posters would be displayed around the outside wall. 

I have always just used the SL Viewer and only used Firestorm for downloading models.  I need to figure out how to apply multiple materials in Blender. Most of the time I just ignore the materials (sorry) except for the mountain I was working on that you (an others) helped me with.  

Regarding "Testing testing testing" I put in a ticket to access the Beta Grid and will try to use it for this project ...

Thanks

[IvyTechEngineer]

After spending the morning and having problems at every turn I was finally got something that seems to work before my network connection went down. I attempted to create 5 materials for the building floor. Most of the videos I watch don't show you how to merge all the images into a single image for upload for a single mesh model to Second Life. Maybe I need to create a new image that has all the textures I want and adjust the uv map (this is what I did using Paint). Also, most of the YouTube use procedural nodes for the materials. So you do you build something with multiple materials for SL?

[Aquila Kytori]

16 hours ago, IvyTechEngineer said:

I attempted to create 5 materials for the building floor. Most of the videos I watch don't show you how to merge all the images into a single image for upload for a single mesh model to Second Life.

You don't merge all the images into a single image !

1 Seamless tilable image texture for each material.

In Blender you unwrap all 5 materials to a single UV map. Think of each material UV's as  a layer in the UV space. So each material will be unwrapped to its own "layer" . If, in Edit mode you now select all of the model, the UV's will look a mess because all the material UV's will be stacked on top of each other. This is not a problem because whether in Blender or in SL, when you select by material to assign an image texture to the  faces only the UV's of this material will be selected.

 

16 hours ago, IvyTechEngineer said:

Maybe I need to create a new image that has all the textures I want and adjust the uv map (this is what I did using Paint).

No. A model this size will be using seamless tileable image textures on its surfaces. These Image textures do not need to be applied in Blender. In Blender all you need to do is assign a test grid to each material so that you can check the orientation of the Uv's in the UV space. At the same time we are checking that the scaling of the Uv islands of a single material are all approximately at the same scale, And checking that the scale the UV's of all the materials are also at a similar scale to one another, though this is less important because the individual image texture can be rescaled when applied in SL.

In Blender we test with a UV grid then in SL we apply a seamless tileable texture to each set of material faces. If you have these image textures on your hard-rive (downloaded from the internet or created yourself in Paint) then of course you can test them out in Blender as well. Any seamless textures you have will be uploaded separately from the mesh. Or you buy some seamless tileable textures from the many  texture suppliers stores inworld or from the SL MP.

So all you need to do in Blender is mark seams, UV unwrap and edit the UV's so they are orientated correctly.

Best is, after marking seams and assigning the 5 materials , in edit mode select all of the model and UV unwrap everything in one go. This will result in all the UV islands having approx. the same scale. Then edit these islands to suit. If some of the UV's are a little deformed (edges that should be aligned to X or Y are off) then try unwrapping again either using the Conformal or Angle Base method :

There are different ways you could unwrap this particular model, below is an example of unwrapping using UV seams and aiming to have, where possible, a single UV island for each material.

 For example the exterior walls:

If we mark a single vertical UV seam somewhere on the exterior walls this should unwrap nicely as a single continuos UV island,  The seamless texture will wrap around the exterior walls with only a single join where the UV seam was placed.

The same for all the other walls and floors. If UV seams are placed correctly each material UV will be a single UV island. Note in the example below the interior walls unwrap as 2 UV islands, main interior walls and interior walls of the elevator space.

 

As you can hopefully see its all about marking seams, and editing the Uv islands.

Have a look at my post in the following link of how to edit the UV islands. This is only a single material Upper and lower interior walls but its the same process for your 5 materials. Unwrap everything in one go, orientate the UV islands correctly then scale them all up together. Yes the UV islands have all been scaled up so that they extend well beyond the UV space but this is not a problem because we are not baking textures we are going to apply seamless textures to the model when rezzed in world.

 

The screenshot below shows where the single vertical UV seam is placed for the outer walls. We mark seams for the rest of the model in such a way that each material unwraps as a single UV island:

 

When finished your UV's should look something like in the gif below. Selecting by material to show the UV's of that material and at the end selecting all 3 material together to show how the stacked materials UV's look in the UV editor:

 

and this is how they look when a test grid image texture is applied to each material :

 

If the above all sounds too complicated I would suggest you take a step back and  create  a very simple rectangular room, no windows, no doorways and experiment with that so that you have  exterior walls, interior walls and floor all assigned there own material, all UV unwrapped together, all orientated correctly and all scaled up together in such a way that the top of each walls UV's extend up to Y = 1 in the UV space.  Import into SL and apply some seamless tileable textures.

 

If you want to take a closer look to see where I have placed  UV seams in my model then you can download the .blend file from here :   https://file.io/vEnCtPXUC9QA

 

 

 

 

Edited October 23, 2023 by Aquila Kytori

[Aquila Kytori]

I'm not happy with my previous post,  it makes it appear as if there is only one way to unwrap and edit the UVs etc of your model  when really there are others that are perhaps less complicated like for example in orthographic view, selecting individual walls and UV unwrapping using the Project from View ( Bounds) method ............

Since you're already familiar with UV unwrapping, you just need to keep in mind that you'll be applying a seamless tileable texture to each material surface and edit the UVs accordingly.

If necessary, additional texture re-scaling and offsetting can be performed in SL using the edit build floater.

 Put on your engineers white (or is it red for engineers?) safety helmet and do what engineers do best, solving problems

 

 

Edited October 23, 2023 by Aquila Kytori

[IvyTechEngineer]

Thanks Aquila,

You did a lot of work on this. There are many things I need to learn regarding Blender. I have posted questions on several of the Blender YouTube channels, I think Grant Abbitt responded but I have not looked at his posting. Most of the channels use the procedural nodes approach. It will take me some time to understand your response. In the past I have never had any luck with applying multiple textures to an object I have built and uploaded. I typically can only add one texture or color. If I build it in SL then I have no problem with multiple textures. 

Also, when the object is downloaded the textures are not downloaded as well, I think. 

Again thank you for your massive effort.

Regards

IvyTechENGINEER

[Chic Aeon]

13 minutes ago, IvyTechEngineer said:

Thanks Aquila,

You did a lot of work on this. There are many things I need to learn regarding Blender. I have posted questions on several of the Blender YouTube channels, I think Grant Abbitt responded but I have not looked at his posting. Most of the channels use the procedural nodes approach. It will take me some time to understand your response. In the past I have never had any luck with applying multiple textures to an object I have built and uploaded. I typically can only add one texture or color. If I build it in SL then I have no problem with multiple textures. 

Also, when the object is downloaded the textures are not downloaded as well, I think. 

Again thank you for your massive effort.

Regards

IvyTechENGINEER

I typically stay away from here these days since I am in OLD Blender and have no intention of leaving LOL (yes tried many times; we didn't "mesh" well". 

Anyway if you are trying to bake several textures to one plane (texture file to export) this MAY help -- at least with the idea.  

 

The simple one:

 

And more advanced

These are the OLD interface.     

[Aquila Kytori]

 

On 10/23/2023 at 8:42 PM, IvyTechEngineer said:

In the past I have never had any luck with applying multiple textures to an object I have built and uploaded.

 

On 10/22/2023 at 7:28 PM, IvyTechEngineer said:

 

From your Blender screenshot you appear to have successfully  added 5 material slots and applied them to relevant faces of your model so it is not clear to me what part of this process you are having problems with ?

 

On 10/23/2023 at 8:42 PM, IvyTechEngineer said:

Also, when the object is downloaded the textures are not downloaded as well, I think. 

Don't worry about this. Very very few people upload there image textures along with the model. There is almost no advantage in trying to do this. Just do like every body else and upload your textures as  separate uploads and then apply them to your model inworld using the SL edit floater. 

[IvyTechEngineer]

Chic, thank you I will check out your videos. I typically only do one object at a time and never use the procedural nodes. I have played a little with Unreal Engine's blueprints but I think this may an over kill for what I am trying to do, i.e. draw objects using another tool and import the models as STL files.

Aquila, also thank you for your kind words. I am not a Blender expert per se. I use it as part of the work flow to convert and simplify STL files into DAE file formats. My only issue has been when I attempt to add textures to my objects I cannot texture on individual face.  I can texture the entire object with one texture but no individual faces. Perhaps if I create an object with multiple materials it will allow me to change the textures on the individual faces? 

ivyTech

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

5 hours ago, IvyTechEngineer said:

Perhaps if I create an object with multiple materials it will allow me to change the textures on the individual faces?

Yep! That is exactly how it works. Each material in Blender becomes a "face" in SL. SL does not let you select individual arbitrary polygons on a custom mesh.

(Caveats: Each object is SL is limited to 8 "faces", so don't use more than 8 materials per object. In fact, try to use as few as you can, since large amounts hurt graphical performance. If you make custom LODs, you may have to ensure each of your materials is used on at least one triangle somewhere in the mesh for all 4 levels, otherwise the upload will fail with most viewers. I think Firestorm is the only viewer without this problem.)

Edited October 25, 2023 by Quarrel Kukulcan

[IvyTechEngineer]

Thanks Quarrel,

It has never been real clear to me about how materials work. I remember from an earlier post from Chic that 8 materials was the max. Also, I remember Aquila telling me that the reason my model textures go messed up was because "The most common cause of this is that the object has more than one UV map. This can result in the wrong UV map being uploaded with the model." and the solution is "Don't create a texture at all". I will try this out.

Thanks

IvyTech

[IvyTechEngineer]

It worked, thanks for everyone's help. I still have a few issues with like adding textures on the inside wall of an object. I am working on my dog house design now. Not sure the best way to do that. Also, maybe I could add some loop cuts around the edges and paint them black to make the outline look better?

[Aquila Kytori]

19 hours ago, IvyTechEngineer said:

I am working on my dog house design now. Not sure the best way to do that. Also, maybe I could add some loop cuts around the edges and paint them black to make the outline look better?

 

If Chic's mantra is "testing, testing, testing," mine would be "reference images,  ref. images,  ref. images".

Check out some dog house images with google.

For example simply adding some trim will better define the edges :

 

 

[IvyTechEngineer]

Very nice. I do not have this skill set. 

[IvyTechEngineer]

ok, I am not sure how to ask this question but as I understand it I can have up to 8 materials for a model. Only one image can be applied to a UVmap? The image can be created like I made it before (using Paint) or images can be uploaded to SL and used on a surface or I can use or buy something in-world. Also, seams can be used to help segregate the UVMap between sections that will have common textures. 

I have edited the UVMap and rotated all the islands so that when the textures are applied they will align. I did this by scaling and rotating everything. Attached is the UVMap for my sm house that I have been working on. My only other questions is "Seamless tilable image texture". I assume this would be the textures that are already available in Second Life? Otherwise, I could try to buy or dins something. 

 

Thanks

[Chic Aeon]

17 minutes ago, IvyTechEngineer said:

ok, I am not sure how to ask this question but as I understand it I can have up to 8 materials for a model. Only one image can be applied to a UVmap? The image can be created like I made it before (using Paint) or images can be uploaded to SL and used on a surface or I can use or buy something in-world. Also, seams can be used to help segregate the UVMap between sections that will have common textures. 

I have edited the UVMap and rotated all the islands so that when the textures are applied they will align. I did this by scaling and rotating everything. Attached is the UVMap for my sm house that I have been working on. My only other questions is "Seamless tilable image texture". I assume this would be the textures that are already available in Second Life? Otherwise, I could try to buy or dins something. 

 

Thanks

Yes, seamless tileable textures are the traditional ones we used in SL on PRIMS in the beginning. And they still work on mesh but as I understand your post  you are laying out the texture in Blender so that -- say the BRICKS -- would line up.  This works but only somewhat as a different set of bricks might be different. So best perhaps to line up with a grid pattern OR the exact texture you are going to use.  

There are complex ways you can do this linking a second UV map to your main one but keeping it simple at the beginning is a GOOD thing. If you are using a texture like stucco then the problems are less. 

While you can only have 8 materials per mesh upload (this isn't quite the truth but we'll go with that rule to keep things simple)  you CAN have more than one mesh model in a house. So say main walls, roof, floor - patio and planters area?   So you can have more than 8 textures in your house. It is good to keep the tiling textures down though as each new texture is another trip out to the server.

 

It looks like you are starting with a very simple build and that's a great way to learn. 

You can also BAKE your texture into UV maps (one or more) to use on your house. And you can also make just an ambient map with shadows and then add your textures to those in your graphics programs. There are several ways to texture mesh in SL.     Hope that helps a bit.  Ask more questions and likely others will answer too  

 

 

[Aquila Kytori]

Yay Chic has already done the heavy lifting I'll only add a couple of screenshots. 

As Chic says lets keep this one simple. We are assuming that all you want to do at this stage is, when rezzed inworld apply  seamless textures to the appropriate faces of the house.

 

All that you need to do is, in Blender, select faces of the model and assign them a material and you are ready go.

 

In the example below I have laid out the UV's approximately the same as you have yours.

The first material we assign to the model will automatically be applied (assigned) to all the faces of the model.

Below I have added a new material and named it Wall_Outside. In the Shader editor I added a new Image texture and loaded up my seamless tileable Wall_Outside image texture.

The scaling is probably not correct at the moment but this is easily fixed by either scaling up the UVs in Blender before exporting and or selecting by material face inworld and adjusting the Vertical and Horizontal scaling in the Texture tab of the build floater.

 

Next we add a couple more materials and select faces and Assign them.

 

We can scale up the UV islands in blender :

 

or leave as is and scale up inworld.

 

Thats it !  Don't be afraid to experiment. You don't even need to load up the seamless image textures to the Shader editor in Blender. Just add the number of materials you need and assign them to the appropriate faces. Select your model > export it and bring it into SL as is then apply your seamless textures there.

Once you have that done then go back to Blender and try loading up image textures for each material.

 

17 hours ago, IvyTechEngineer said:

I assume this would be the textures that are already available in Second Life? Otherwise, I could try to buy or dins something. 

You can buy seamless textures inworld, from the SL market place, create your own or search the internet for CC0 seamless textures.

For example this one :   https://cc0-textures.com/c/wood

 

There are different ways to layout the UV's depending on how we intend to use them. As Chic has hinted if we were going to bake out textures in Blender then they would be layed out quite differently. but yours are just fine for the moment.                                       

17 hours ago, IvyTechEngineer said:

I can have up to 8 materials for a model. Only one image can be applied to a UVmap?

Yes up to 8 materials assigned to a mesh for SL and  each of those materials can be assigned its own image texture if needed. In the example above 3 materials for 3 seamless image textures. 

The UV's could also be stacked by material one above the other. or in the example below 4 materials on 3 different UV layers:                                                                                             

Edited December 13, 2023 by Aquila Kytori

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

5 hours ago, IvyTechEngineer said:

ok, I am not sure how to ask this question but as I understand it I can have up to 8 materials for a model. Only one image can be applied to a UVmap?

You can only have one UVmap data structure on an uploaded object. Blender allows multiple UVmap data structures on an object, but if you upload that, SL will ignore all but one and mess things up.

However, you can have up to 8 materials per object (a.k.a. "faces" in SL), and each can have its own texture, so you can use the full UV area for each material and they won't interfere with each other, even though your unmappings lay all over one another.

And once the object is in SL, you can not only assign a texture to each face, but you can shrink/slide/rotate that texture so it appears multiple times across the UV area and in different orientations. For scaling in particular, this lets you repeat a pattern across a large area so you get finer detail. The downside is that the pattern will be obvious if you shrink it too far, and it needs to be seamless so it blends smoothly with itself.

Edited December 12, 2023 by Quarrel Kukulcan

[IvyTechEngineer]

Thank you for your response. My sm house is based on the one you built and shared on YouTube. I just never figured out textures until recently. I am revisiting some of the things I built before and adding more details in my notes on them. Since I don't use Blender every day I need to keep better notes on the process steps. I have very little artistic ability, lol, but I can paint by numbers. 

[IvyTechEngineer]

ok, I did a little more exploration and found YouTube video that was helpful based on what you were saying. I was able to tile some of the images currently assigned as materials and it looks pretty good. I think I need to realign the UVMap to make sure all the islands of the outside wall have the same vertical reference because of the image texture I am using. 

My sm house models now has multiple images textures for the floor, inside and outside walls, and the foundation. I was able to tile the images so it looks much better using the shader editor. I got the impression that maybe I could bake the images together to create a single image texture? I think somehow everything needs to be combined but I am not sure how to do that. Maybe I am misunderstanding something ...

[Chic Aeon]

57 minutes ago, IvyTechEngineer said:

ok, I did a little more exploration and found YouTube video that was helpful based on what you were saying. I was able to tile some of the images currently assigned as materials and it looks pretty good. I think I need to realign the UVMap to make sure all the islands of the outside wall have the same vertical reference because of the image texture I am using. 

My sm house models now has multiple images textures for the floor, inside and outside walls, and the foundation. I was able to tile the images so it looks much better using the shader editor. I got the impression that maybe I could bake the images together to create a single image texture? I think somehow everything needs to be combined but I am not sure how to do that. Maybe I am misunderstanding something ...

Yes you could bake all the textures you defined (up to 8 into one texture or 2 or whatever). I do that often.  I suggest though that for THIS project you just try and get this much working and THEN worry about the baking as there is lots involved there such as lighting etc.  I have a video on how to do that but OLD interface. Hopefully there is something new explaining how to do in the the current version of Blender.   

[Aquila Kytori]

13 hours ago, IvyTechEngineer said:

I got the impression that maybe I could bake the images together to create a single image texture?

You are the an engineer, do the maths !

I will use an Addon  ...............

 

Sometimes is OK to bake all the materials to a single Image texture but in this case it isn't.

When we have the UV's scaled up so that the image textures are correctly scaled on the model we are increasing the number of repeats of the seamless textures across the surfaces. This increases the number of pixels per meter ( Texels/meter), increases the density of pixels on the model.

If we now bake down the materials to a single 1024 x 1024 image texture this will drastically reduce the pixel density across the model and resulting in a loss of  detail.

 

Example : the front end of the building is 4m x 4m, If we scale up the all the UV's so that the front of the building's UV island exactly fits the 1024² image texture (UV space)  we have an pixel density of : 1024 / 4m = 256 pixels per meter.   Nice

 

Now we scale down all the UV islands so that they all fit within the UV space ...........the pixels density will, in this particular example, now only be  approx 64 px/m 

 

The single  baked image texture compared to the original seamless textures is not good................unusable ............

 

Baking down multiple materials to a single image is fine for small objects but not for larger ones like this building.

 

14 hours ago, IvyTechEngineer said:

I think I need to realign the UVMap to make sure all the islands of the outside wall have the same vertical reference because of the image texture I am using. 

Hint....... If instead of having a vertical UV seam at each corner of the outside walls (resulting in 4 UV islands that would later need aligning)  you only have 1........... one corner with a vertical seam would result in 1 longer UV island. 

 

Texel Density Checker addon for Blender : https://mrven.gumroad.com/l/CEIOR

 

[IvyTechEngineer]

ok, I attempted to create a single texture map for the UV map of the house and I got this. I think it is ok. Not sure why  some of the images bleed over to the other islands...