VanillaSunsets

If you look for a gaming notebook you are almost always on the safe side. Yes, they are more expensive and pretty heavy compared to an average notebook, but you will have dedicated memory for you graphics card and that is what you want. The top brands are Alienware (I believe Dell took over Alienware but they are still for sale), Asus (ROG series) and MSI makes some nice notebooks that will do fine. Medion used to be an underestimated brand, they make good gaming notebooks these days tho and they are very reasonably priced. I often have to run a graphic editor, Blender and SL at the same time. So if you want to run not just the SL viewer I recommend dedicated memory!

Did you switch to a different AO? That could be the reason you did not have this problem before. It is just impossible for animation makers to prevent clipping, considering there are tons of dresses and skirts around. Also the other way around... it's impossible for clothing creators to test outfits on every walk, dance and stand animation out there. A dress maker will test the behavior of the dress/skirt on a few poses and run trough a couple of walks. The more extreme your animations are, the more clipping will occur.

Another quick tip. If you find Gimp complicated ( it took me a while to get a decent workflow after switching from Photoshop), try Krita. It looks and feels more then Photoshop, a more intuitive interface.I have to say I use it more and more. It is pretty powerful and you can download it for free here: https://krita.org/en/ The Marketplace also offers many building kits, most are beautiful and a lot are even full perm, AO's included for most. Meaning you could even sell your build if you want and earn back what you invested :matte-motes-wink-tongue:

I would start by learning how to type...

It is very true as stated by other residents, it does not have to be made out of mesh. I don't know why you want design you own house so it is hard to say what your best options are. Have you thought about trowing some prims around yourself? It can be very fun and you do get a one-of-a-kind build that you yourself can adjust to your need, land or mood. Who knows... you might find out you are an excellent builder :matte-motes-bashful-cute-2:

The rezzing "bug" you mention has probably to do with the physics shape of the mesh. SL sees that as the surface while you cannot see it unless you set those to visible in the viewer. Not entirely sure but this is the most likely thing to cause this. There must be a lot of ppl on the forum that know much more about this then me :matte-motes-wink:

I have run SL on notebooks for over 10 years, I don't think I ever logged in on a desktop. Over the years I found out that a good graphics card is key. Today I own: ASUS ROG G751JL Intel® Core™ i7 4720HQ 2.6 GHz ~ 3.6 GHz Processor NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 965M Ultra settings run fine, no heat, no noisy fans.

If a mesh house is build "right" textures can be modified the same way as they can on a system prim. This is done while building in the 3d software. You have the option to map it so that it will behave exactly the same as the system prims. If there is AO baked in you will lose that when you change the texture but that would be the same if it was a prim build. If you have the AO maps, you can of course use those in Photoshop, Gimp or Krita and make your own textures. Mesh, again when done right, can save a lot of prims. Prims are not at all undesirable, it is a matter of knowing when to use mesh, prim or sculpted. Combinations are possible.

Sure, there are creators that accept custom work. Not a lot tho, custom work is time consuming and it's very hard to meet the exact wishes of a customer. Especially if the customer does not know a lot about creating mesh in general, meaning, being aware of the limits of mesh in SL. Custom work is expensive, even more so if you want the work to be exclusively for you. Also, most creators will ask you to pay in advance. If you still want a custom house after considering all of the above, I suggest to post in the Commercial-Wanted section of these forums. Make sure to be clear in explaining your wishes and be realistic in your expectations!

What you are trying to accomplish should be possible if the item is full perm. So it's not an SL limit, a bug it could be.

I just reacted on you other post about making mesh. I would like to tell you that you should indeed explore you art skills in SL. It is the ultimate environment to build you skills in your own way and as fast or slow as you like. Many people find out in SL that they have skills they would not as easily discover or work on as they would have in real life. Lot's of them are woman that would not even get noticed in real life, some have become great artists and well known in this virtual world and even outside of it! SL is a very emancipated world, you can tell by the high number of Blender-SL specific tutorials in the web that are made by woman compared by the just Blender related tutorials which are mostly by males, lol. So don't let anyone stop you and go use the skills you were blessed with :smileyvery-happy:

Making mesh for SL is a process. If you have Blender and Gimp you should be all set. Some things to consider are: - Start small, create very simple objects (chair, table, a rock) to begin with, to get the feeling of what will, or will not work for SL. - SL is a very specific platform, you have to play by the rules, meaning... low poly modeling, learn to make LOD's and physics. - Look very careful how other creators make their products, try going into wireframe and observe how things are made. - There are lots of pull perm kits for sale on the MP, some will give you the files that you can open in Blender, inspect them closely! - Even more kits are for sale that you only have to texture, it might be a good idea to buy some and learn how to texture first. - Start watching many,many tutorials about Blender on You Tube, there are loads, specific to SL. Don't skip to that till you get the hang of the Blender basics. - Avastar is indeed a good addon once you know your way around Blender and well worth the money if you like to create clothing and avatars. I don't know Mesh Mixer so I can't help you there. I doubt there is anything on the MP that can learn you how to make mesh from a NC or a kit, besides from just studying and observing it. It is a long process and there are many ways to do stuff in Blender. As you learn you will develop your own workflow. I wish you good luck and lots of fun!

Sometimes creating for SL feels like rowing a sinking boat to an ever changing shoreline, lol. We all have great ideas but no power to influence the virtual world we choose, well, not enough power anyway to change things for the better. And maybe Sansar will be all we desire but Sansar is not SL and I doubt it will ever feel like it. There is only one SL and I have a very complex affair with it, both love and hate it.:matte-motes-bashful-cute-2: A lot of times I feel like I am always one step behind as things do change pretty fast. When you tackled one challenge another one rises. If you make clothing you have probably going crazy over the last few years. Learn to sculpt.. nah, forget sculpting, mesh is the new thing. Ok, now that you can create mesh, let's debate for months about whether it will be liquid mesh... or maybe fitted. Fitted it is, it just doesn't fit that well so you have to make both "standard" and fitted. Then Bento arrives. This cripples you creative flow, never knowing if you are on the right track, wondering if the track will be all different next week, lol. This made me give up creating clothing some time ago, it was just no longer fun and took up way too much time. I am not in SL to make a profit. My creations make me just enough Lindens to pay my rent and buy the things I need to keep creating. As long as there is a balance between the time, effort and fun I will keep creating but some days you just wonder who you are kidding. SL is moving alright, sometimes even in the right direction :matte-motes-delicious:

Just dreaming... but it would be nice to have 2 texture slots in the uploader. One for ppl that don't use ALM and have that texture shown, and one that has a slot for diffuse, specs and normal (ok, that would be 3 slots for the second one) ... yep... dreaming on:matte-motes-bashful-cute:

Spend the better half of the day checking tutorials on your Google page and on You Tube. Some video's I have seen before that were abracadabra to me back then are starting to make more sense now. Reminding me of learning Blender for the first time, it was like that, watching hours of video, re-watching, getting slightly depressed, thinking I'd never learn and give up. Giving it a day or two and diving back in head first to discover I was starting to understand the basics and after some time even the more complex aspects. Those were the days :matte-motes-big-grin-squint: I am now in the process of (re)watching and filtering ot outdated stuff and trying to focus on what will work for the Blender>SL pipeline. Also what will work for my kind of creations. I am looking at settings and am working on a light setup that will work for most my creations. It is still trail and error, lots of errors, lots of starting over and over, lol.

I used both those render machines, but that was years ago. I do remember they were fun to use too. I will keep them in mind, I kind of forgot about them, lol.

I never realized you did tutorials but now that I found them I will dive into them! Ty for linking me to them. The reason I do not want to give up this easily is that I know Cycles gives me much more control over my materials and I WANT that, lol. After failing badly at making Blender Cycles spit out a texture that I can define as near to perfect ( I am too demanding for my own good...) I started to think maybe Cycles was just good for renders and not (yet) for baking. I do love to study and learn but I was afraid I was wasting my time on a "dream".... My computer can handle a high number of samples so no problem there. I mostly make small decoration and furniture, much easier to make textures for then large builds or houses, so in that way I consider myself lucky :smileywink: Ty for giving me some hope and inspiration. I will keep at it, bake in Blender Internal for a bit longer while I learn Cycles on the side till I master it to my satisfaction!

I find it is not getting easier to decide how to map your creations. Should you bake in AO? Well, that depends on what settings the customer is running on his end. If high settings are used there already is AO and they see shadows. That can look unrealistic as the baked in AO and shadows are fixed. On the other hand... if the customer can't run SL in high settings and I don't bake in AO and/or shadows... the product will look "flat" and will not have a lot of appeal. Same goes for normal and speculair maps by the way. An option is bake both shaded and unshaded and offer both. Meaning more work, more costs. Costs went up whit the introduction of the normal and speculair maps anyway so you could think "what's another 10L". Then we have the Windlight options... I adore them when I take pictures but as a creator, well...., they can make your creations look weird to say at the least. It is just impossible to consider all the settings a customer could activate. For now I think very carefully when I bake my maps, considering all the settings, the scene and how the product is build. Mostly I end up with a very subtle AO influence. I put a note about me using materials in the product description and hope for the best. Last note: I do still love creating for SL but I hate thinking some customers will not enjoy my products as they were meant to be. It makes you a tiny bit insecure. The key would be customers being aware of all the things that can influence the look of a product and hope for the best again :smileytongue:

I agree that the term outdated comes to mind a lot, yes. That goes for documentation as well :matte-motes-smug:

Glad you fixed it

quick look.... You might want to check your normals. Looks like some faces are facing the wrong way.

TY, am always too busy to check! I love the ability to convert material from Cycles to conventional and visa versa btw!

Ik have been taking a pause from creating for SL for a while, now feeling the tingling urge again to start messing around in Blender again. This time I decided to be hip and work in Cycles Render, you gotto learn sometime, right...? Now it takes some getting used to, up to the point of small frustrations and the feeling I better return to Blender Internal, bet you have been there. But, hey, I am not going to get Cycles scare me away! I am getting better at it, no more noisy renders and I killed the fireflies:matte-motes-evil: Still, I think I need to and should be able to optimize this process and make it more "fun"! The things I still dislike are the fact that I cannot see my baking in real time. In the Internal Render I could see the image being baked and that saved time. Sometimes you only need 5 seconds to see the bake is not the result you wanted to achieve and I would kill the baking process. In this engine I have to wait till the progress bar reaches 100% to see the result. Is there some setting I missed? I have had troubles with light in the scene, my baked textures seem way too dark. Is the a way to optimize a scene for general use in SL? Baking seems much slower in general coz I have to set the samples pretty high. Maybe there is a way around that? Are the any settings in general that differ a lot from the Internal Render that I should change? I know these are a lot of questions and I am sure more will pop into my head even after I finalize this post so any advice, trick or hack is very welcome! I am sure I am not the only one that is overwhelmed by the Cycles Render Machine:matte-motes-agape: I realize Blender to SL is very unique pipeline, so I can accept it if Cycles just is not ready or never will be for SL targeted creations. I will (and as I feel now, gladly) return to Internal Render and just be happy to have mastered it a bit for the future!

Keep in mind not all residents are as sane as you would like them to be. Also note that some are sane but just like to say insane stuff to see how you react... trolling that is called. Don't feel bad and just mute or ignore them. Lots of other, more fun stuff to spend your time on, right?,

That's nice, hihi. :matte-motes-big-grin: