Blender questions (vertices, copying weights to joined mesh?)

[Harry Hyx]

I made a mesh shirt and ran into two questions I can seem to figure out the answer to.

The first is, how come the triangles are so visible on my mesh? It has over 20000 faces and is a PE of 230!!! And no, there's no shininess applied on this, only the baked texture. The baked texture looks smooth and fine but when I apply it onto the mesh in SL this is what it looks like.

 

My second question is, how do you apply the "Automatic weight copy" to mesh that have multiple objects joined to it? It seems to only copy the weights onto the main one.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

I'm pretty sure it's not your texture, but your model.

Quick solution for the flat faces is to check the "create normals" in the uploader. That will lower your LI aswell, every vertice on the mesh you uploaded is counted four times now. I do like to add a personal note that I think your mesh is far more dense than it needs to be for a good result, but that's your personal choice....

A better way to do it is in Blender..I can't help with that I'm afraid.

[Drongle McMahon]

The effect you see is because the quads your mesh is made of have sharp edges. As well as the faceted effect, it quadruples the size of the vertex data (and hence download weight) because each vertex has to be stored separately with the four different normals for the four touching quad faces. Sharp edges are the default in Blender, where it is called "solid" faces. You need instead to set the faces to "smooth" (Mesh->Faces->Set Smooth [2.49]).

The difference is that smooth is effectively an instruction to the shader to gradually vary the shading across each face instead of keeping it all the same. There is then only one normal per vertex, which will reduce the download weight. Furthermore, this smoothing by the shader means that you can use a vastly smaller number of triangles - probably at most 1000 instead of 20000 - which will have an even greater effect on the download weight.

As a general principle, avoid the use of subdivision to achieve smoothing. Smooth shading is better and uses less triangles*. Subdivision should be for adding detail, not for smoothing.

If you want to use a mixture of smooth and sharp edges, you can do this by making all the faces smooth and then marking edges as sharp (Mesh->Edges->Mark Sharp) and applying the Ege-split modifier. In that modifier you can use either or both of making marked edges sharp or setting the sharpness depending on the angle between faces. The latter is similar to the Generate Normals option in the uploader. The former gives more detailed control. Make sure the modifier is applied, either explicitly or by the exporter, before export.

*ETA: More explicitly: subdivision is needed for smoothing the silhouette (visible edge), while smooth shading is sufficient or better for the appearance of the surface inside the silhouette. So the aim should be to use the minimum subdivision to get an acceptable outline from all points of view (often surprisingly little), and then relying on smooth shading for the surface appearance.

 

[Ashasekayi Ra]

Harry Hyx wrote:

second question is, how do you apply the "Automatic weight copy" to mesh that have multiple objects joined to it

? It seems to only copy the weights onto the main one.

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Drongle already answered your question about the faceting that needs to be fixed by using smooth shading. So, I'll try to help you out with the second question.

Did you use Ctrl +J to join your models or did you just group them?

Sometimes when you use automatic weights, it has issues with multiple layers of vertices. You may want to unjoin the items, weight them individually and then join them together. But really, there are times where you'll just have to do some manual weight painting to handle such situations.

 

 

[Harry Hyx]

Ohhh thank you for the answers. I will definitely try out the "Set Smooth" if I can find it in blender 2.59 >.>

Yes I used ctrl+J in object mode to join them together. Im making a shirt and i tried to add buttons but after joining them, I wanted to copy the weights over from the armature to have a base to work with for weight painting but the weights wouldn't copy over onto the buttons. I tried painting in the weights manually for the buttons but I couldn't figure out how to get the same weights as the shirt so whenever my avatar moves, the buttons dont follow the shirt exactly the way it should.

[Ashasekayi Ra]

It's called "shade smooth" in versions of Blender over 2.49. You can reach it by going to Edit Mode, selecting the faces you want and using W -> Shade Smooth. Or, select the item in Object mode and use T to open the Toolshelf sidebar. You'll find "Smooth" under the Shading header within the Object Tools category in the Toolshelf.

As for the buttons, if you don't know how to manually weight them, you should try unjoining them from the main model. Then, use the bone weight copy script to copy weights from the shirt to the buttons. Then, rejoin the buttons to the shirt with Ctrl+J. [The script is an add-on: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/bone-weight-copy-in-blender-2-52-6/ ]

By the way, you may want to upgrade to the latest version of Blender, which is 2.62. It has a Collada export that is compatible with SL rigged mesh.