Aquila Kytori

Medhue Simoni wrote: It looks so strange from the trailer, as it uses many different styles. It almost reminds me of Animatrix, where the creators of the Matrix movie had animators around the world make their own part of the Matrix story in their own style. "It looks like you’re making 12 short movie parallel and not one full-length feature… (like animatrix) The director and writer – supported by everyone – are working on a compelling story that holds all the different team styles wonderfully together. We don’t want it to become like Animatrix at all – which wasn’t a movie even." From : http://gooseberry.blender.org/faq-campaign-and-cloud-questions/

Hi Before Unwrapping to create a UV map did you add any Seams to your dress mesh ? Also in the UV Editor window you will probably need to edit the UV's to reduce stretching to a minimum but at the same time use as much of the available space as possible. Sometimes its necessary to spend more time editing a UV map than was spent in creating the actual mesh. Best is you use Google to do a search for: Blender UV unwrapping A good place to start would be this video : http://cgcookie.com/blender/2011/01/21/intro_uvmapping/

Hi As others have already said instead of adding lights to your scene and baking out shadows you probably should be baking out Ambient Occlusion (no lights are needed ) Have a look at this thread , message 3 and 4 : http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Need-advice-buildings-in-blender/m-p/2368791#M24858 Set the Samples to 5 and play about with the Distance and Strength values until you get something you like. Then set the samples to somewhere around 20 or 30 for the final bake.

Agree ........ an opportunity to say thank you to the Blender Foundation.

Hi I have never tried using Marvelous Designer but your question had me curious how a collar would be made. This short video even though its not in english I just about managed to follow. So maybe you will see something in there that may help you . part 2 bending the collar over : part one: was too complicated for me but i expect you will understand the workflow .

I made a copy of the mesh and when in Face select mode "hidden" faces appear as if those faces were seen from behind with Backface culling enabled. Except even when I disable Backface culling they show like that . This seems a bit strange ? Unfortunately Daloco I think you need to scrap this mesh and start again . Edited to add: OOOPS those 2 orange dots are the 2 Ngon faces Advice is still to redo the mesh from scratch lol Edited to add: For some reason we have the same number of vertices , tris and faces in Blender but in the Uploader your mesh has a few more .

You have a lot of Ngons in your mesh. Ngons are faces with more than 4 sides. It is best to try to always have only quads or triangle faces . When you upload a mesh the Uploader converts all faces to triangles. Because you have some awkward looking Ngons it could be miscalculating and creating triangles which are filling in the opening. So you could try converting your mesh into all triangles in Blender before uploading. In Edit mode select all of your mesh and then find the Mesh menu at the bottom of the 3D window ..... Mesh > Faces > Triangulate faces and try uploading again .

Hi When you say it is " filled in " do you mean the visual mesh or the physical mesh ? That's a silly question if its a regular edible doughnut but if you meant a large doughnut shaped mesh ring then you would need to also create a physics mesh (collision shape) and upload that along with the visual mesh. Then when it is rezzed inworld you would need to edit your doughnut and change the Physics Shape Type from convex Hull to Prim. As Chic has already said a couple of screenshots would help.

What it looks like is happening is that one of your physics meshes is being stretched to the bounding box of the complete castle. If your castle is made up of more than one mesh object try uploading only one part along with the appropriate Physics mesh . IF you then still have a problem post an images of that mesh object and its Physics mesh but this time in Edit mode and also of how it looks when rezzed and set to Physics Shape type Prim when Show Physics is enabled. If your castle is a single object check that all those "boxes" making up the physics mesh are one object as well. It really looks like only a couple of those boxes are being used .... Also there is something wrong with the lower part of your physics mesh. It doesn't seem to correspond with the mesh Like its missing the lower 2 meters?

Yes a little strange that . I to had thought it would have been ok to have used single sided walls but when I rezzed the mesh on the beta I found that I could quite easily walk through from the back , (invisible) side . It used to be fine. I say that not because I would generally create a single sided wall like that but because the times that I have slipped between the inner and outer collision walls of a triangle based physics mesh wall I never managed to escape by simply walking through from the invisible back side. Drongle McMahon wrote: I also noted the return of a very old bug that I thought had gone away in the mesh beta. With the subdivided wall, even though it is exactly vertical, from the impenetrable (visible) side you can walk up it as if it was a slope! A wall isn't much use if you can simply walk over it! (In the original bug, this happened even with un-subdivided walls). Castle builders take note ! lol

Hi The physics mesh has to extend to the bounding box of of the castle in some way and as the triangles making up the turrets are quite large they don't add much to the physics weight . Remember this is a triangle based physics mesh so, for the tops of the walls .. they needed filling in because the walls are so thick if someone on the roof of the castle decide to promenade along the tops of the walls they would fall down between the inner and outer collision walls. If the walls had been normal house thickness (say less than 0.2m) the filling in maybe wouldn't have been necessary. For the side walls of the ramp .....well the stairs are over 2 meters high so they need a collision walls at the sides and at the rear to stop avatar walking through the visual mesh .

"Because the actual physics don't have to be perfect for your box car I would suggest only creating a collision mesh for the exterior and the inside floor. This will mean avatars will be able to walk through from the inside to outside but .....hey, its art " I don't think that was very helpfull so i'm adding an image of a proper Triangle based physics mesh for your box car. The important thing when your going to make a Triangle based physics mesh is not to have very small triangles in the physics mesh . For example the thin faces that would normally join the inner and outer walls are not used .This creates separate elements but it is still one mesh object. In the uploader you don't use the Analyze button. The physics mesh is not analyzed , the quads will be converted into TRIANGLES, hence the name Triangle based physics mesh. For large mesh objects the physics weight will probably always be lower when you use the Triangle based method. The physics weight will increase if you scale down your mesh and decrease when you scale it up ! When you have created a physics mesh using "boxes" (convex hulls) then it will need to be analyzed. When you ask it to be analyzed the uploader takes a close look at your physics mesh and converts it to a collection of CONVEX HULLS. Because your physics mesh already contains only simple non-overlapping convex hulls (boxes) the uploader leaves it as it is. The physics weight of a mesh that has been analyzed : ...... will stay the same when you scale it up or down. ...... may increase when you change it from Physics Shape convex hull to Prim !

I got similar results to you but only when the mesh had not been UV unwrapped (Note I used solidify modifier as you did to give the walls roof and floor thickness) and in the uploader ........ When rezzed on the beta grid and physics shape type set to Prim the LI increased to around 8 for all 3 uploads You mentioned that you were trying to keep the LI low . To do that you would need to optimise your mesh and use a triangle based physics mesh (Not Analyzed in the uploader) Becuase the actual physics don't have to be perfect for your box car i would suggest only creating a collision mesh for the exterier and the inside floor. This will mean avatars will be able to walk through from the inside to outside but .....hey, its art

Challenge accepted but not sure what the image was suppose to demonstrate so I chose Physics again

Hi Chic The physics weight will increase when changing the Physics Shape Type from convex hull to prim in the edit panel for a mesh that had its Physics Analyzed in the Uploader. This can cause the physics weight to become the higher than the download weight and so increase the LI . In a previous thread http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Loss-of-detail-in-physics-shape/td-p/2547478 the castle example that I had used boxes for physics and had been Analyzed in the uploader, when I changed it to Physics Shape Type Prim the Physics weight increased from 1 to 6. So to stop your LI from increasing like that for your railway carriage (car) the physics mesh should use the Triangle Based method and Not be Analyzed in the uploader. For your first question I have only experienced that once http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/LI-count-something-not-right/td-p/2254573 so I ask you was that mesh UV unwrapped ? ( I am sure I have used the solidify modifier (applied) before and not noticed any particular problem when uploading )

Hieronimos Audeburgh wrote: Also, Aquila, in your example using planes/triangle based shapes... If I understand correct the walls, towers and ramp are also solid? In that case a physics count of 1.0 is... Astounding : ) Yes. You can actually see the collision shapes inworld from the Develop menu at the top or your viewer. Develop > Render Metadata > Show Physics http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Problem-with-home-mesh/m-p/1787413#M18544 And Yes its often a good idea to upload things that can /will only be seen from the inside of a building separately. Not just because you can use a different Physics model type but because you can work on the LOD models separately and so save a lot of LI costs .

For completeness here is an example of a triangle based (planes) physics shape for the castle and underneath is a comparison of the LI weights of the 2 types of Physics mesh . As drongle said the Physics weight is a lot lower when using the triangle based mesh for physics. When using this method always avoid using small triangles in the physics mesh. Small triangles = a higher Physics weight. For this reason the faces making up the thickness of the walls are often deleted but because castles have thick walls its ok to use them here. The bigger and fewer the triangles used in the physics mesh the lower will be the Physics weight .

Hi An example of a physics mesh for a simple castle: The physics mesh is coloured just to show better the different elements. When using this hull "box" method to create the physics shape make sure the boxes don't overlap (leave a little space between each part) Doing that insures you end up with the exact same physics shape that you create in your 3D software when it is Analyzed in the mesh uploader. When using the Hull method and Analyzing there isn't a problem with wall thickness or "unintended openings on the sides"

Says more detailed videos to to follow .

hi Did you hit the Analyze button in Step 2 of the physics tab of the Uploader? If you didn't then if your floor mesh is less than 0.5m thick the the mesh will act as if it were Physics Type Convex Hull even if you have it set to Physics Type: prim ! http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Making-physics-HELP/m-p/1751753#M18002

Hi Llike Chic I didn't understand what you were doing in the second image of your first post. I Googled "triangular shaped reflective discontinuity" , seems your the only person in the history of humankind to have ever have used that combination of words; But I did come across this tutorial which explains some problems that can appear when baking normal maps and he does explain something about "Discontinuities". Don't know if they are the same as yours though . http://www.chrisalbeluhn.com/Normal_Map_Tutorial.html I Don't understand either why you had to hand paint (clone) the Normal map to get those inner surfaces right , couldn't you have just set those faces to flat shading and rebake ? I think i'm missing what you are trying to explain . This where we really miss not having Chosen Few around these days so Probably best to follow MistahMooses advice on this .

If you were having problems getting the Python script thing to work some one called HiPhiSch has since made a little Addon which replaces the need for entering the file path in the script panel with a more usual type Blender panel. http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?326534-Cycles-baking-is-here/page7 message N° 124

As Arton has said you need a special development build of Blender to bake using Cycles but you don't need that if you go back to your usual Blender Render. The Tutorial in message 13 is not for baking out a Cavity map but for setting up to create a Rendered Image using the cycles renderer. I mentioned message N° 13 because the first few images shows where the things are So what you have to do is follow the steps in message N°9 only. (Using the Blender Render) And watch the Andrew Price video from 0:45 to 2:25 where he explains what the Dirty Vertex Paint options in the Tool panel are for.

Hi MIstahMoose wrote: I work in blender mostly, a bit of Zbrush. I don't believe blender does cavity maps? It does bake AO and I do have that in there, but not super apparent for this particular object. This reminded me of an Andrew Price video using Dirty Vertex Paint , ( yes that is what its called , Vertex paint mode > Paint > Dirty Vetex paint) . http://www.blenderguru.com/videos/how-to-quickly-add-dirt-to-crevices/ And when I did a search for Blender dirty vertex baking I didn't find a lot but over at Blenderartists.org in a couple of threads they call this baking cavity maps . http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?241389-Dirt-procedure&p=2035422&highlight=dirty+vertex#post2035422 Message 9 explains the workflow and the top part of message 13 shows some screen shots of settings.

Pamela Galli wrote: While the render was very impressive, I did not think the actual models used very good. I would not be interested in using any of them unless they upgraded considerably. You have to give them time. Starting with a table .......... a chair ....... a ........ well its smart furniture and no UV unwrapping to do