Blender question

[Emily1313]

Im very new to blender, at moment i downloaded the new version 2.60.

It seems i need other programs to download as well to be able to upload sculpts to secondlife.

Can anyone tell me what those programs are, ty in advance

[Monti Messmer]

Hi, follow the various tutorials on sculptys and mesh? done with blender.

This work results in a texture that you upload like any other picture. No more applications needed.

Be aware that sculptys are difficult to create, maybe you want to look into mesh too depending on the objects you want to create.

Monti

[Gaia Clary]

You can create sculpties without need of extra software when you use blender. However you must be aware that only Torus like shapes can be created without errors. All other shapes (cylinder, sphere, plane) will suffer from problems near the seams This is acceptable for many models, but if you want more precision, then you will need a scripted solution.

We have put some effort into finding a good scriptless solution. We ended up with a template blend-file which contains some helper items (sculptie material and a sculptie creator which allows to upload a sculpted Prim into Blender) .

You can get Primstar-zero for free, but it currently only works on Blender 2.6 and as mentioned above it is not an optimal solution but at least it is working reasonably well.

There are also other template files around in the Web, but as far as i know none of the scriptless solutions has solved the seems problems and as far as i know primstar-zero is the only scriptless template library which allows to reimport sculpted Prims into blender.

 

[Nalates Urriah]

Let me see if I can make this simple for the new. If I am over simplifying, sorry. The 2 posts count suggests you are new to SL and I am assuming the same for 3D modeling. Forgive me if the assumptions are wrong.

Blender can be used to make sculpties and can do that without any add-ons. BUT… you must understand the oddities of SL sculpties for it to work without giving you surprises, which often result in what is called vertex vomit… an object that looks like a splattered prim.

There are lots of complications and restrictions when making sculpties with Blender. You must have a certain number of vertices and understand how to bake the vertices positions into a RGBx256-levels-of-color texture. It gets rather tedious. There are tutorials showing how. But, it is a significant learning curve.

The thread where Domino, Gaia and others were working out the oddities of sculpties was over 500 posts long and has an appreciable amount of math. (It’s in the forum archive) They simplifed all that to single web page, but it takes some thinking to figure out.

With sculpties you are using Blender to build the model and bake an image that is a sculpty map. That image is a rainbow colored image you can save as a TGA or PNG. The image is uploaded as a texture to SL. In SL a prim is set to a type sculpty and the image from blender is added as a sculpty map. Poof you have a sculpty shaped like your Blender model, if things went well.

You can also use Blender to make the sculpty's UVMap, the map that is used to make an image used to paint color on the sculpty.

There are many simple sculpty making tools around; SculptySpace, Wings, and SculptyPaint… and some others.

Gaia worked with Domino to make Primstar, an add-on to Blender that handles most of the tedious stuff and bakes the texture for upload to SL. There are free and paid versions of Primstar. If you are just learning it is a great time saver and worth the cost. See Machinimatrix.org for it. Gaia also has sculpty and mesh tutorials that you should watch.

All the sculpty tools help you make the model and bake the texture SL needs. They take care of most of the tedious stuff.

If you plan to learn Blender, go for what we call mesh models. Blender exports these as Collada files for upload to SL. I suggest going for mesh rather than sculpties as there is less math stuff to learn and sharp edges are easier to do. Also, what you learn making ‘mesh’ models for SL is useable in other virtual worlds. And conversely most of the 3D modeling tutorials for Blender work with Collada imports for SL. AFAIK that is not the case with the odd restrictions of SL sculpties.

 

[Emily1313]

Tyvm everyone for your help,I really appreciated!