Rahkis Andel

I agree that it is a mistake to cater "only" to lower end hardware, because then the overall quality of your work suffers for everyone. It's actually somewhat difficult to design something that breaks only for lower end users as long as you are creating content properly. A better way to word what they said was to disregard hardware and design for the game engine. As long as we create content that is optimized for Second Life, everyone will see it properly and efficiently regardless of hardware for the most part. Creating low poly, game-optimized mesh and using Normal maps to imply detail and specular maps to control the surface quality of materials under different lighting environments, you have created something that benefits all users, not just high end ones.

Just to give my 2 cents -- I agree that that card would not be good enough to do what they wanted. My suggestion would be to invest in a desktop solution instead or if it must be a laptop, give serious thought as to how important running SL smoothly is to you. They will need better than a middle of the road mobile graphics card if they really want good performance all the time at high settings. Compared to a similar desktop solution, it has lower memory bus width, fewer processor cores and a lower core speed. Considering that SL can be a challenge for gaming desktops under certain situations (like the club dancing situation they described), that's not a good sign.

So you own an old Alienware laptop? Given what you have already done, I'd say update your graphics drivers. My cursory research has shown that your drivers are out of date. (no guarantee that will fix your issue, though) I'm sure your laptop meets or exceeds the minimum hardware requirement, but there are many things that can cause issues with Second Life. Unfortunately, many seem to be frustrating if not impossible to pinpoint. In your case, I'm apt to point my finger at Windows VISTA. Get rid of that crap ASAP -- that's a no-brainer. Changing (Or just reinstalling) OS will probably fix your problem outright, regardless of what was causing it, but it's up to you whether or not you want to go through that trouble.

Learn something new everyday. It makes sense since occasionally the zoom level gets screwed up even in ortho. I've learned most of what I know by accidentally pressing the fail buttons that break everything.

Correct. I just assumed that since she said "Tab into perspective mode", perhaps she was in perspective mode without realizing it. Pressing tab takes you in and out of edit/object mode by default. *Edited my post a bit. PS: By the way, that mansion looks incredible. Just thought I'd mention.

Objects that are very large or very small can run into issues with Blender's clipping range. It has a start and end value. The easiest way to think of it is as though you were viewing your object inside of a cylinder that can be stretched and squished, where the start and end values are respectively manipulating the front and back of the cylinder respectively. It's hard to describe it in words, so lets just say the smaller the start value, the closer you can get to your object without the viewport camera clipping through the front of your object and the larger you set the end value, the further you can move from the object in 3d space without the back of the object disappearing from view. I will often set the start value to .01 or even .001 when I need to get really close to my model, but realize that this can have some bad affects on how the wireframe is drawn, and perhaps some side-effects I'm not aware of. One way you could combat this is by purposely working at a miniature scale (or scale your object up in the case of a tiny thing) and only scale it to export for use in Second Life (or whatever). The lens value is analogous to the focal length of the lens and affects how much perspective skews the viewport when not in ortho mode. In perspective mode, having this set too low can cause clipping too, since the object is being skewed towards you more than in ortho. And as Gaia noted below, there is no clipping in ortho mode.

Ok. Glad you got it worked out. Strange issue, though.

I'm unable to replicate this problem with a similar mesh. A few things: Are you able to remove doubles? Perhaps there is more going on than it appears? Are you able to recalculate the normals? What happens if you just try to rotate the mesh without locking to any axis? Lastly, what version of Blender are you using?

Medhue is right. Second Life will only recognize the default armature -- Nothing more, nothing less. We can't upload our own version of the armature. All we can do is move what we have around. That means we can't just duplicate bones and think Second Life will understand what it is. Luckily, there are bones that aren't used for anything. I'm sure someone will chime in saying that it may not be wise to do this because LL could remove those bones or otherwise change the system at any time (Those extra bones are not a supported feature). That being said, if this is just for personal use, I just say go for it. If it breaks later down the line, it breaks. Hopefully when it does break LL provides us with an alternative.

You aught to move this to the Wanted forum. You'll probably get a faster response there.

You are learning the hard way that the direct output of MD is not usable in a game. It takes a little more know-how than that. You have been pointed in the right direction already so just make sure to ask for help when you hit dead ends. We're here to help.

Just spec, normal and diffuse. Spec maps help control the specular hardness to make things not just look wet, so yeah. Dunno what you mean.

Nice. Thanks Gaia. That at least points the user in the right direction.

Sounds like a bug that needs fixing with the particular viewer. That's a little disconcerting, but just as mesh had compatibility issues when it was first introduced, so to will the new materials.

I know all too well. Programming is my day-job. Either way, that error message is only a symptom of the real problem: If using the UV/image editor to apply textures to your UVs was more user friendly, ideally no one would ever get that error. At the very least, it should be immediately apparent why you're getting it. I can't off the top of my head explain how I'd like it done, and since my spare time is dedicated to art and not contributing code, I can't really complain...Well, I can but no one is obligated to listen. Haha.

I assumed the same thing. How can she be using a viewer that doesn't support materials if she was able to set the properties to view advanced materials? I have a feeling something else is going on, but I couldn't tell you what it was.

That's more or less what I had in mind. An error message like that shouldn't be so cryptic unless the cause is self-evident.

I know your question was answered, but I just feel compelled to comment that that is one of the least informative error messages ever. It took me forever to figure out why I was getting it. Definitely a point Blender could improve upon.

Ohh, you're right into the fun stuff, aren't you? And sure, you can send images through PM. I understand not wanting to post everything publicly (honestly, though, that's the best way to get critical feedback). Whatever you're most comfortable with. I have good news for you. You have successfully unwrapped your mesh, which is the first step in the texture painting process. You can actually paint right on top of the model -- no Photoshop required. Of course when you're done painting, you can still save out the image and do post-pro on it in Photoshop as you wish. Honestly, that's what I'd recommend for you since you aren't really at the stage of understanding how to make good UV unwraps or dealing with texture seams. I wouldn't recommend doing it with that version, though. Only recently have the painting tools been improved. Grab the latest stable release from Blender.org. Trust me, it's not worth it to have an old version of Blender just so that you're using the same version as some Tutorial or the majority of SL. Take these steps and let us know how it goes: Click New in the UV/Image editor. Choose a Name, pixel dimension and background color for your new image. (This is like making a new blank canvas in any image editor). Don't worry about the other options for now. Select your mesh in edit mode (Hit the tab key until you can see the verts of your mesh). in your uv/image editor, click the image icon next to image name and select the file you just created. It will then be applied to the corresponding UVs of the parts of the mesh you have selected. In your 3d viewport window, switch to texture paint mode and start painting! You can play with your brush settings to get different brush effects by opening up the tool panel (T). Like I said before, report back when you've tried these. If you have any questions, ask away. Point is to play around with the tools.

We can't read your mind, so screenshots, concepts and ideas would definitely be a good start. Remember that this is art you're asking about -- It's like asking a musician, "Hey, can you teach me how to play this song I have in my head on guitar? Oh, by the way, I've never picked up a guitar a day in my life." Hopefully that analogy puts things in better perspective. Anyway, I'm happy to lend as much help as you are willing to ask for, so long as I have time for it. There are also many extremely knowledgable and talented people in this forum that would do the same. As far as your Skype issue goes...I can definitely help you troubleshoot that issue if you PM me. I've never had skype crash my computer -- I'm kind of curious as to what's going on there. Edit: Oh, and when learning a foriegn, multifunctional program suite meant for artists with technical knowledge, there is no such thing as common sense. These things have a steep learning curve; I'm sure you're doing fine.

See what I mean? Just referred elsewhere. All I meant was that if you want someone to directly help you, you need to ask a specific question. Show screenshots of what you have so far -- a concept, your 3d viewport -- anything! You were asking about proportions; I can't tell you what the correct proportions are for a lizard creature in your head. I also can't tell you how to build something with no idea of how you want it built. Understand? If all you wanted was links to tutorials, you got it. It didn't seem to me that that is what you were asking for. Glad you're happy, though.

Uhhh, pffbfbfbgh... I don't know, help us out here. All anyone can do with this kind of question is direct you elsewhere (which is something Google could do). Show us what you're doing for a start, eh?

Both of your assumptions are basically spot on. Typical hair planes are avoided in SL because of alpha order issues and the fact that we don't have double sided planes, making tubes "preferable". Fact is, they aren't suitable for a real time game environment and they are a huge hassle to make but people do it anyway because it gets them the result they feel like they need. I think the perfect mesh hair would be a mix between static hair meshes with planes sparsely used (avoid stacking) to keep it from looking like just a block of hair. Actually, perfect to me would be LL fixing the z stacking order problem (I'm ignorant on what the actual issue is, forgive me) so that we could just use hair sprites as much as we wanted. Also, while I'm asking for stuff that will never happen in my lifetime, let us use soft-body mesh (flexi) too, please.

Perhaps we'll hear news after the material viewer is out of beta. I have no idea if that project is distracting from the deformer being released, but it's the only thing I can come up with.

Wrong forum, my friend. Wanted or Inworld Employment is what you're looking for.