Rahkis Andel

It would probably pay off to start over. It's best that you start out with an all quad mesh and triangulate it only upon export to collada. Having a mix of triangles and quads all over will mean poorer results when the mesh is eventually triangulated. To answer the question, though, I could easily unwrap that and texture it myself. I wouldn't call it impossible at all. You don't have to start over if you don't want to, but it wouldn't hurt, like I explained.

Yep! I agree. Like I said, it's a great trick, but the more control you have over it the better, which is why it makes sense to bake out the AO by itself and layer it with an image editing program. Also it definitely makes no sense to me why the settings that affect baking are so all over the place. I hope that whenever the UI is re-addressed in the future, that's one of the things they tidy up. Edit: I didn't mean "Cheaty-fakery" in a bad way. I'm a traditional artist first and foremost, so cheaty-fakery is a great love of mine.

It may be a newly introduced bug/feature. I've never had much use for baking out everything at once, so I never noticed full render including AO. You really want to have all the control available to you -- to fine tune the AO effect. Realize that AO is an ambient lighting trick and therefore is supposed to be applied to the ambient lighting, which we have no control of in Second Life. It's just cheaty-fakery (Of the best kind) and as for all crafty tricks, they have to be used with care. I'd just assume not worry about it. PS: AO usually looks okay so long as it isn't applied to something that has to move (Such as an avatar). On buildings, it tends to not matter so much, but still more control is always better.

Sounds like Codewarrior already gave a good answer. But yeah, I can totally relate. It applies to just about every aspect of working with 3d software. Once you have done it all a few times, you'll be able to really enjoy the whole process without all the snags of getting it all figured out. Keep at it.

The texture should be different. In edit mode, you'll see the texture applied to the UVs (Via the UV editing window). In Object mode, you'll see the texture applied to the materials when in textured draw mode. If you're in solid draw mode and have textured solid on, you'll see the textures too. In textured draw mode you'll also see shadows from lighting, which can get in the way. The point is, you might have a different texture applied to the UVs than what you have set to your materials.

Wow, really? That was it? I was a little suspiciuos that something might be up with the french version since that was the only thing I could think of but it didn't occur to me to mention it because seriously, who would think that would matter?

Codewarrior Congrejo wrote: You know even a doctor can't help you if you tell him: "there is that thing, that makes me hurt somewhere" : ) It's lupus.

As far as Second Life is concerned, "mesh" just means some 3d object that is created by a 3rd party program. The answer to your question is yes by definition. Based on how you worded your question, I can't really know if that was th answer you needed, though. If you are asking if you can take any mesh object out of Second Life and use it in Blender, the answer is no, because there is no way to take the mesh out of SL and put it into Blender. The only transferrable file between Blender and Second Life is a collada file (mesh.dae). The only person that will ever have unique access to that file is the creator of the object. So if you made the mesh object yourself, you already "used the mesh thing in Blender". If you didn't make it, you'll need to get it from the owner/creator of the mesh collada file.

Oh! That reminds me...Blender is a notorious memory hog when it comes to baking -- I know you said you had plenty of memory, but it really does drain it. If you go to performance in the render settings, there should be a choice of methods, one of which being vBVH. I personally find that one to be the best mix of speed and memory efficiency for all the baking methods. Also, if the option is there and you can make it work, baking from multires is much-much-much more memory efficient, though perhaps a little slower.

Codewarrior Congrejo wrote: Here's another suggestion for you 'lazy' person (hehe just taking your own words =)) With rendering your model out (fully with fur or the hair depending on what your about to do) from top/bottom/all 4 sides, and with Viewport based UV unwraps and aligning these Uvs of your hairprop/or Body to the rendered images, you can basically 'paint' this down onto your model - with projectional painting & cloning amonst the UV layers,. For fur, a nice method to think about. You read my mind.

Nalates Urriah wrote: If you upload 2048x2048 textures that means you would upload 3 – 12.6mb images for the avatar. Of course the SL system will immediately resize those to 1024x1024 JPEG2000 images. So, there is going to be image quality loss. The SL system will squeeze the size to something under 6mb. Still that is a lot of texture download for something that generally puts so few pixels on screen. I am aware of this. Looking back, I am not sure why I said 2048. It could have been a typo or maybe I didn't know at the time that the max for SL was 1024. I think I actually have another UV thread with a slightly more updated representation of what I know. The coming SSA (Server Side Appearance) baking will likely reduce that load even more. I am not sure how good a quality the SSA system is going to produce. I expect it, from personal experience to date, to do a good job. I have not seen where anyone has tested whether initial image size has a significant visible affect on avatar appearance. But, I wouldn’t be surprised to find it does. Many feel the optimum size for avatar stuff in-world is 128x128 to 512x512 pixels. The smaller the image the better. I really don't understand what the new server side baking addresses since I have yet to actually use Second Life for anything but testing my models. From what you say, I'm excited! Ambient Occlusion is part of the viewer. If you add AO to skins and clothes, a significant number of users will see doubled AO, yours and what the viewer adds. AFAIK, there is no way to test to see if the viewer has AO enabled. So we can’t have a script select the texture to use. Plus other features are being added to third party viewers (TPV). Designing for the best render is not a simple decision. See Exodus Viewer and NiranV’s Viewer. I am aware that having AO directly in your diffuse texture is bad practice. AO is meant to be applied to ambient lighting, not diffuse lighting and will therefore clash in an obvious way if it is too strong. It is still a nice template for texture painting so long as you tone it down. My personal stance is that it would make the most sense to leave out pure AO bakes. It doesn't make sense to me to alter the appearance of objects to people with AO enabled for the sake of those who don't. I haven't quite decided on exactly how I will use AO in my SL projects, if at all. With the arrival of the Materials System we will move more toward high-poly models in Blender that bake normal maps for use with low-poly models we upload into SL. I'm designing for that as we speak. Very exciting.

If you hover your mouse over the topmost "separation" between windows in blender, you can drag that down and it will reveal the meat of the info console. Alternatively, you can turn any window into an "info" window. All scripted commands run in blender will appear there along with any errors. If you go ahead and try to bake, it will probably throw an error up there that you can see and show us. Hopefully.

Agreed. This happens with any rigged object. When you wear something with altered bone positions, it really messes up the underlying avatar. For some reason even after you take off the item, the altered positions seems to stick until you relog or whatever. Actually, I've noticed sitting and standing seems to push things back into place. It may be that easy. Not sure.

I like that idea for the "flats". I agree that maybe the AO wouldn't be ideal -- Perhaps some sort of camera mapping technique would work instead. Like, render out the hair and project to the poly-hair from the same angle. I dunno -- Laziness is the father of creativity. I'm sure there's a way.

Welcome to the confusion club. It sure is dark in here!

You probably want the "Wanted" forum, since it sounds like there is something you're looking for that you can't find. This forum is for learning to build, import and work with mesh objects in-world. Oddly enough, this information is right there in the forum titles!

You know, I have no idea at all if this would ever be a good idea, but I wonder if anyone has ever tried baking an AO map from hair stands to a proxy hair mesh...or to a body (in the case of fur) You will get shading information from the hair particles that will follow the particle "grain" so to speak. If you were a real perfectionist, like me, who wanted to texture a dog with accurate fur grain direction and you didn't want to mess around with dozens of fur textures, you could comb hair particles yourself and bake out a "template" for the fur. Just speculating, I've never tried it. Personally, I find the hair particle system to be rather theraputic to use, so if you could potentially do something to assist in low poly assets with it, that'd be great for me at least.

Great! It is usually the simple things that get us.

Pamela Galli wrote: Thanks Rahkis, but I did not see anything in that thread about occluding objects. That thread does tell you what you need to know about baking AO assuming you already understand the process -- perhaps that's the stumbling point. In my thread the floor I added was an occlusion object, as you put it. What really matters, though is that you explain exactly what your process is for baking out your AO maps -- step-by-step. If you do that, we can tell you what you're doing wrong. Showing us your AO baked out does nothing to help us help you at all. Edit: By the way, one thing that would cause your doorway to not show up in the bake is if it's renderability was not active -- In the outliner, you'll see an eye and a camera next to the different objects in your scene. If the camera is greyed out, it will not show up in renders or bakes.

How are you baking these maps? What baking method you use will determine how other objects affect the bake. I explain in pretty good detail how to bake ao in this thread. It isn't as simple as selecting your object and pressing "bake". If that's what youv'e been doing, hopefully my thread will help.

Yes. Which settings you use depends on how you apply the textures to the model. If you use "Include UV Textures", you need to apply the textures to your mesh in the UV editor. Select the verts of your mesh you want to apply the texture to, then select that texture in the uv editor. Including textures from materials picks out textures, as expected, that are set to your materials.

Curiouser and curiouser; I can upload the cat file and the preview looks great each time. I didn't change anything about your blend file at all. I don't know if that conclusively proves there is nothing wrong with the file or not, but it's pretty convincing evidence. It certainly looks like a client-side issue since no one can re-create the issue. That's really crappy news.

Perhaps I'm going out on a limb here, but one thing I noticed about your file was that it seemed to be from an avatar workbench file. If you always start your meshes from that file, that might be the source of your problem right there. Perhaps that's the corrupt file. What I always do is just leave a single workbench file on my computer. When I want to make a rigged mesh, I start a fresh file and bring in all of the elements i need via copy/paste. Like, if I just need the male body/skeleton, that's all I copy/paste into my clean file..

At this point I'm just throwing anything out there that is "worth a shot". I'm stumped as for any obvious answers. Hopefully something turns up that gives us more clues to go on.

This whole mess is making my head hurt. I've never had this kind of issue myself. Hopefully Gaia has better results. If She also sees the same artifacts in her upload, anothing thing I would try is to start with a fresh .blend file and import in only the cat mesh and export from there. Perhaps something in your file itself is corrupt and messing with the upload -- that said, even if that worked, it doesn't explain why it would always be happening to you.