Scooter Hollow

Have you tried using Smart UV Project?

Well, if someone has shadows turned on in their graphics settings, anything under a roof will be darker. You could also set all the textures to be colored dark grey.

Shared media is just opening up a web browser inside the world. And like when you look at a transparent image in a web browser, what you (usually?) see is white, not the desktop behind your browser.

I would imagine anything close to realistic hair/fur would be way too complex a model...even just the flat layers used for heads can be pretty complex. The only reasonable way to go is with texturing.

I just checked, and they still have 8 for download up until May 20th. There's plenty of other places to download it though, CNet goes back to SketchUp 3. Just fyi.

You can continue to use Sketchup 8 for commercial purposes, which is the last version from before the TOS change. Last I checked it could do pretty much all the same stuff, except open Warehouse models made in the latest version (which seems to be a small amount).

Rigging mesh is possibly a completely different issue. You don't need to worry about that at all if someone already has the mesh in mind for you to work on. In that case all you need is the skin texture. Adding a tattoo to it may be difficult if the skin's been unwrapped or heavily distorted right where you want to place the tattoo at, but that depends on the skin and the tattoo. There might be software out there (Substance Painter maybe?) that would allow you to import the model and the texture and apply it without worrying about wrapping distortions.

Automatic weights is rarely the entire solution, you'll almost always need to clean it up manually. I mean, there wouldn't be a professional career out there in model rigging if one button did all the work. If manual rigging isn't working, it may not be done entirely correctly, although I would also suggest having the zipper and the top (jacket?) be made the same model. Having two different attachments move exactly the same way isn't neccesarily something I would bet on, even if they were weighted perfectly, especially for something like a zipper which looks wrong if it's even half an inch off.

You don't lose eye movements with mesh eyes, in fact you need to be careful with your weighting or your entire face might start wriggling around with eye movements.

If you're expecting to have more than 8 materials, or needing to move around parts individually, having separate meshes is the better (in same upload or otherwise). However, if you can put all of your materials on a single mesh, the object is easier to scale in-world, and for things like avatar attachments you'll have a much easier time attaching everything.

I think that's kind of a defeatist way of thinking of things. I guarantee you nobody sat down with any real modelling program on their first day of experimentation and immediately had it all figured out. The only way to become an expert at anything is with hours (days, weeks, months) of practice.

It'd be great if rigging mesh was as simple as a one-button click, 'parent with automatic weights', and boom, done, but it really, really isn't. That's just the first step, it's almost guaranteed that you'll have to manually clean up the weights yourself before it's usable. You've probably got your face rigged to your eyeballs or something.

I'll say that I do do a fair bit of initial construction in Sketchup (and the access to Warehouse models is nice too), but then I clean up the models in Blender before I import them. The Sketchup UI is a lot more intuitive for making shapes with and such, but before actually using the models, I need to take it into Blender to remove doubles, join surfaces into single objects, select and delete random floating edges, etc. I can also use Blender to do UV unwrapping for texturing, decimate to simplify the model, and such. Some things just need to be done entirely in blender though, like rigged mesh or certain shape manipulations. I'll agree that Blender is probably the most complicated software I've ever used, but it pretty much has to be. There's not a lot of getting around that it'll take...probably months...of practice to get good at.

There's a plugin out there for Gimp, but for paid tools I use Bitmap2Material (which I got during a steam sale). It's also possible to make one off of a 3d model of an object in Blender, if you have one, bit complicated though.

Unfortunately the only mesh that can really move naturally is rigged mesh worn by an avatar. The best you could do for animated mesh otherwise would be to have multiple mesh parts and use transparency for 'frames' of an animation, but it would certainly increase the mesh complexity a fair bit.

Just to clarify, the first amendment only covers what the government is allowed to do about speech. If Second Life wanted to ban any sort of speech on their own servers, they would be allowed to do so. (Such as harassment)

Copying is copying, regardless of whether you do it quickly or slowly. If you rewrote The Hobbit line by line, it would still be just as illegal as if you had copied and pasted it from a word document.

The "Generally, no" is for virtual worlds in general. Second Life in particular falls squarely in the no section. The problem with using a lot of 'free' content is the difference between money-free and license-free. Even artists who'll give away their stuff without asking any money for it, will still reasonably include terms like "don't try selling this yourself" and "tell people I was the one who made it". Which is enough to run afoul of Second Life terms.

I feel like I should point out, even though you asked us not to, that it is actually illegal to use materials from Turbosquid in Second Life. Anyways, I'll just repeat my earlier answer, try Blender.

Nalates Urriah wrote: The annoyance in the community is that the TOS defintely allows for the possibility of Charli's scenario to play out. Those that understand the Lab's business model are confident in the Lab's future behavior - because they know what pretty much has to happen. Those that don't, have trust issues. While there is the possiblitiy that the Lab will rip us off... it is not reasonable that they will as it is not in the Lab's best or financial interest. It's the possibility itself that really messes things up. For things that people have created 100% by themselves, it's probably not too huge a risk to upload them since it would be really, really dumb for LL to try and use them commercially. But because it's possible, it makes it legally murky to use a lot of the freely available resources online. CGTextures for example still has their no-SL rule last I checked, and pretty much anything not public domain is no good. The ToS makes everything a much bigger pain for everyone who's not an all-in-one modeller and texture artist themselves.

The Sketchup exporter is really poor, fyi (at least as of 8, I can't use the newer versions for license reasons). Any time I export something from Sketchup, I take it into Blender first; doing a 'Remove Doubles' on it tends to cut the size at least in half. Although sometimes Blender can't read it correctly either, and I end up using Mesh Lab as an in-between just to resave the file so it can be read. Even if you don't modify the file at all, checking it in Blender will show you if the file contains what you think it does. Perhaps only part or none of the model was being exported.

It does look like the UV mapping isn't being kept when it's uploaded. I don't know Maya so I can't recommend anything other than the obvious there (make sure you're exporting and saving after the unwrapping's been done). I would recommend bringing it up in Blender to see if the file itself is incorrect or if it's not until the SL upload that it's getting weird. Either way, Blender could fix it up if Maya can't.

Hard to tell without an example, might be a couple ways to do something that 'sparkles'. Could be a specular map with light shining on it, glow settings, animated textures, or things off the texture like small lights or particle effects...

SL isn't a bad place to start, since it gives you some goals you might want to work towards and learn with ("hmm, time to build a house, hmm, I wonder how I'd make a shoe..."). But yea, if your goal is to make 3d content and sell it for realbux, once you've gotten the hang of things you'd probably be much better off taking it to one of the model-selling websites out there.

I haven't done this before, but my guess is that it's adding shadow, not light. So for the red, it starts with red and adds darkness for shadows, and with the black, it starts with black and makes it...darker black. I imagine to get the effect in SL you'd use a specular texture.