Spinell

I agree: Ash, that was an awsome tutorial. As for the first question, here's what I'm tring to do: I want to place strings of beads, like pearls, along an odly-shaped corset I made for a specific dress I'm working o. I wanted to get the superficial shape of the corset so that I could then make the beading to match that shape.

Need a helping hand in figuring out a few details for my next mesh creation. I'm using blender 2.6 and I can't figure out how to do two things: The first one goes like this: I have a mesh that I managed, after many hours, to mold into the exact weird shape I want. Now I want to add to the scene a plane and I want to put that plane almost touching the surfice of the mother mesh; for that I need to make the plane fit the exact shape of the surfice of the mesh it's touching. I'm sure there's a modifier that can help do this, but I have no idea what it is or how to work with it. The second one might be easier to explain: I made a preatty skirt using the cloth modifier so I could get those wavy, cloth-like features. Now, when I move my camera, I notice that the mesh itself (in object mode) has some sort of shadows: the parts of the folds that are down are darker and the part that is up has gloss. I thought these were "shadows" so I went to render and clicked to bake shadows, but... the UV map I got was black and white, with no shadows at all. I want to learn how to get those nuances onto a UV that I can then save as an image and play around with it in GIMP or Photoshop. Also, I know nothing about lighting or lighting effects: the scene I'm working with has no light sorces (I had deleted them right in the beggining). It would be wonderful if you could explain to me how to solve those little problems. ;) Thank you so very much!

*facepalms* I am an idiot sometimes... Thanks for the help, Gaia. That fixed it.

Still getting used to a few of the modifiers in Blender 2.6, and the one that's giving me a bit of a hard time is the mirror modifier. Why? Well, you see the mesh looks fine in edit mode, with all the vertices merged with each other, all nice and stiched together. But whe I go into object mode, the mirror part is not "glued" to the other half. I just don't know what's goin on or how to fix this, since it looks fine in edit mode. Here is my modofier stack: Armature (it's a rigged mesh) Smooth (can't be the problem here, can it?) Mirror (Y axis; options: merge, clipping and vertex groups enabled; merge limit: 1mm) Solidify A little help fixing the problem please? ;)

Yes, they were perfect; thank you so much for writting them, Nacy. ^.^ Now I know how to make bows! Hurray!!!

I'm happy to report that your instructions were a sucess! XXDD I cannot thank you enough for all your wonderful help. Expect maybe show you how the bow turned out! I added a subsurf modifier as well. And with the use of a bended plane, I also used cloth simulation on the end ribbons (just for fun). I make clothes and I love to play around with cloth simulation.

Thank you for the help everyone. The last marketplace link you gave me is perfect: those were the kind of preatty, perfect curls I was looking for. Thank you!

Oh it's been so long I was afraid I wouldn't be able to catch a reply from you. ^.^ I love the bow: it looks very realistic, it looks like fabric, the knot is spectacular. If you could do a little tutorial for me (and everyone on the forums, I guess) that would be absolutely fantastic!Thank you so very much.

I forgot to come here to check for updates since I got busy with another project and then my mind blew up. Oh Nacy, those bows are magnificent! That's exactly what I wanted to make. The only problem is I can't seem to follow our directions. I'm not a native english speaker so bear with me please, and I'm also still learning some of the tools from blender. I didn't even know what propertional editiong WAS until you mentioned the term and I loked it up. So, would you be willing to give me more detailed instructions as to how you made that bow? I want to be able to LEARN how to make it for myself so I can make many more later when I need. If it's not too much trouble.

Hello everyone, I have a question I need sorted out: I'm using blender 2.6 and went over to machinimatrix where I discovered the marvels of the skinwrap modifier. I've been using it a lot for dresses and tops, but after watching the "shoe quest" videos from the same site, I had an idea: Would it be possible to actually make a high boot using the skinwrap modifier and then just add the heel at the end? I went to try it (using the avatar workbench) and I seem to be running into a bit of a problem. Two problems actually. First one is that the mesh shape doesn't wrap around the foot. Rather dissapointing, really. I used just a sinple cilinder with the top face cut out and, if you slide it alng the leg it works finebut as you go down and aproach the foot, the skinwrap doesn't seem to work so well and it refuses to wrap around the bottom of the foot or extend to the toes. The second problem is that while I'm doing one foot, the mesh cilinder keeps getting "glued" t the other foot. Now I saw this trick in another machinimatrix video about how to get rid of that quirk and, while it had worked with fixing tops and dresses, it didn't work here. I don't know a lot about modifiers or skinwrap in particular, so could anyone explain to me if it's possible to fix the two problems above or if this is just and impossible project? Much apreciated!

Hi everyone, I need your help finding something. I've beens earching in the marketplace for a special type of hair and haven't been able to find anything. I'm looking for a very stylised short curly hair. Not natural curls, though; very perfect curls as if made with one of those curling irons. Preferably bond, Very doll-like. Has anyone seen this hairstyle anywhere in the marketplace or in any in-world shop?

Thank you very much, guys! I wasn't getting any good hits when I searched for "bow" but if I search for "gift box" I do get some bow tutorials.

Hello everyone, I'm looking for some general advice and impression on what would be the best way to make a bow that I can then shape as I like. Now, here's the trick: when I say "bow" I DO NOT mean "bow and arrow", I mean a decorative bow with ribbon that I can use as decoration. I want to make a siple structure/shape of a bow to keep as a reference and then model the bow in different ways to make a set of different styled bows to use as I please. Any suggestions? I'm looking for tips like What basic mesh shapes should I use, any modifiers that might prove useful, any tips AT ALL. Thank you very much!

Oh, alright then. Thank you for explaining that to me. I knew the link I found wasn't specific for SL, but I didn't know how to tone down the details of my Mesh. I thought there was a specif way to do it in blender, like a tool you had to use. But all I need to do is remove some of the loops? That seems simple enough. So, tell me mroe about how SL processes this imformation: say I now fitted the respective 4 collada files into their slots in the upload window. What does SL do with these files? When I have the camera zoomed in it shows a high-quality LOD but then as I zoom out, it switches to a lowers LOD file I uploaded? Is that how it works? Just curious here. ^.^

Hello everyne. I need some help fixing a mesh I did in blender 2.63 I uploaded it and textured it ingame with no problem but when I zoom out the mesh becomes blocky and distorted, like a sculpty. Now, what botehrs me is not that, I work with sculpties often, but when it distorts, it messes up the texture I applied really badly: it's as if it has chops of white splattered over it. ANd it can very, very distracting. At first, I thought the problem was the texture, but my help group told me it was the LOD. However, I've never worked with this before so I'm not sure how to fix it. The most helpful indication I got was from here: http://wiki.alternativaplatform.com/Blender_Alternativa_Addon_-_Using_LOD I know it's not specific to SL, but if this is the way to fix problems with LOD, I want to ask: what distance should I put? The mesh itself is a sort of headress, so it's small and stands on top of your head.

I'm sorry, sometimes I forget to mention the program in my posts: I'm using blender 2.63 I've seen some of machinimatrix and was thinking of using the skinwrap technique, but like I said, not sure how I would make the shoulder cut or the front. So ideas are welcome! By the way, your link doesn't work for me.

Hello everyone. Thank you fr all the wonderful help you've been giving me with my questions. Today I'm asking you something a little lighter. I'm looking for a tutorial of sorts on how to build a blazer-type jacket or a business suit. I've seen that business suits are also kinda popular mesh items in the marketplace, so I thought finding some instructions to build a basic one would be easy, but I haven't been able to find anything. I suspect I'm looking in the wrong place or something. If there's no such tutorial to speak of, could you perhaps give me some suggestions on how start building this? Whats getting me rather confused is how to make the shoulders and how to make a preatty V neckline on the front. As curisoity, I'll explain what it's for: I do gothic victorian clothing, so I want to build a basic blazer shape that I can then fit to make a tight woman's jacket that will combine with a flexi skirt. ;)

OOHHHH.... So it's a english/american thing. I didn't know. So it's telling me the land impact is 4 not 4k. Got it. That might have been the problem, since I was the one telling people it was 4k LI. No wonder they flipped. Thanks for clearing that up for me. A very simple reasing problem but I was getting desperate in figuring out how I could reduce the number of vertices. I'll work around the scale inside blender, it might be something worth getting used to like you said. Thank you very much for all the help, guys! This land impact thing was certainly confusing!

I am very very confused... Ok, scaling down the object in the uploader menu helped quite a lot. From the original 12k+ LI I managed to reduce it to 4360, which is a great improvement. So I uploaded it and rezzed it on the ground (it's very tiny now, but no problems when I "wear" it) and then I edited it and looked at what the land impact was. It said 3. 0.0 Land impact of 3?! How?! The uploader said 4360! Is the uploader lying? What's going on?

Ok, I took screenshots: the first one is the one which has the solidify modifier applied. The second one does not: If I rezz the object on the ground, it's actually really big, but I have no idea why that is, since I used the avatar workbench to model the mesh to the avatar's size. Hope you can give me a hand. If you need more info from me, just tell me.

How do I change the convex hull to prim? And what does it do?

Hi there. I've been working on this short cloack that rests over the shoulders and I finally got it looking right. It has around 650 something vertices but for the cloak to appear properly in SL I have to apply the solidify modifier. Now the reason I hate solidify is that for some reason, when you apply it, you get something like double the versices you started with. And I wasn't planning on using this modifier when I started building the cloack, so I didn't account for that. When I went to do a test upload on the testing grid, the cloak had 6000+ land impact. I was told from a help group I'm in that if the mesh is over 3000 something land impact, just scratch the project and start over because it's way too much impact for clothing items (I make clothes). It took me around a week and 2 new projects to fix all the problems with this cloack, so I really didn't want to scrap it. I've been very confused as to what land impact really means; I know it's not a direct "number of prims simulated" converstion, but it seems that everything, EVERYTHING I build always has more than 3000+ land impact. In otehr words, I could say that I still don't know how to build Mesh for SL, not because I lack modeling knowladge or anything like that, but because I can't build stuff "compatible" with SL in the way of land impact. Now, some more details about how I built the cloak (using blender 2.63): I was told to always build things from very simple, primitive mesh shapes. So, I took a simple plane, subdivided once (I think the number of cuts was eitehr below 10 or was indeed 10, can't remember) and then did a cloth simulation of it over the shoulders of the SL avatar. When I got a cloth shape I liked, I applied it and started working on fine-tuning the details. Never did I add more vertices. I really need someone to teach me how to properly build things for SL so that the land impact stays below the 3000 mark. I haven't been able to find any guides or tutorials about this anywhere on the internet, so I'm turning to the forums.

Update: I found an excellent in-game help group and they managed to figure out hat was wrong: it seemes I didn't weight the mesh after all. I must have gotten confused. It was a simple problem with a simple answer after all. It always is... To add to that, me and the person who helped solve this problem foudn out something: I was using the "bone weight" addon from machinimatrix and supposedly that addon doesnt work on blender 2.63, only on 2.62. I'm using the 2.63 version and the addon works fine. It might be that I'm just lucky, but I would suggest people with blender 2.63 still give it a try and test it out if it works for them. You might get lucky like I did!

I'm happy you got it working, Mariano. It's always a triunf when someone new to mesh gets stuff working properly As for me, I still can't get my puffy sleeve to show up. Someone told me the mesh might be inverted and to try and recalculate the normals, which I did... but still no luck.

It's wonderful when peopl actually update their tutorials. Thank you Natales: I actually followed your tutorial a lot. My corset works perfectly and is looking good, but still having problems uploading the puffy sleeves. It has that problem where, I can upload it just fine and check the weight, but when I "wear" it, it doesn't show up. Not even with an alpha in place. Could you explain why this happens? I've had this happen before with the corset but I have no idea what I did to fix it. Just that one day it was fixed. Also Natales, could I make a suggestion? I think it would help if you added a FAQ section to the tutorial, to provide solutions to common problems. Just my 2 cents.