Christhiana

I do understand what you mean and I think it should work this way. The tangent space would remain unchanged if I adapt the UV coordinates to the normal map. Maybe I should try this again tommorow when I've gotten some sleep. This has kept me busy all morning/day/night long Thank you for your input!

I tested your method but it gave the same result. The reflections all go to the same side. It's just a lot more work to map the uv's manually. For a correct result the color on the normal map should change when the angle of the plank edges change as shown in the pic in my previous post. With that map the light reflection is working correct. I just assumed that blender would recalculate those, but it seems a texture of a normal map within a material is treated as just a texture...

That would give about the same result as baking from the normal map texture. The Normal map still doesn't get updated. The edges of the planks will stay pink no matter what angle they are mapped to. It should look more like this one: Instead of this:

I'm really set on having the planks go round with the curve But your solution looks nice too... only this way the normals would be off as well...

BTW, your glowing sandcastle looks awesome!

This is the original bump map that came with the texture: I'm getting some nice results with the Gimp normal plugin as well. I even like the generated maps a better then the ones that came with the texture

Thank you both for the input! I tried the method of converting to a height\bump map with gimp but the results are terrible when converting back to a normal map. Also the heightmap had a lot of artifacts. I also found a website that generates normal, AO and Specular maps from a diffuse texture and gave that a try. The results are quite nice and I think I should be going that route. Generate normal and specular maps from the UV baked diffuse texture. With some experimenting with software that can generate normal maps I should be able to get a good looking result... Still if anyone knows how to get it done in the way I wanted in the first place... This is the normal map generated by the website: Doesn't look too bad already in SL: Edit: Here is the link to the site I mentioned: http://cpetry.github.io/NormalMap-Online/ It works best in Chrome.

Thank you for the reply. I tried your tip but the outcome is the same. The problem remains that instead of recalculating the normal map it just gets wrapped around the object like a diffuse texture would.

I have been working on a set of modular walkways and I'm having trouble with getting the normal maps on the round corner pieces to work correctly. I'm probably going the wrong way about this and I don't know if what I'm trying to achieve is even possible at all? I'm asking for your input on this because I'm out of ideas and I can't seem to find an answer anywhere. This is the object and the UV mapping of the part in question. I bought a woodlplank texture on MP which came with normal and specular maps. To get the texture to follow the curve of the round corners I mapped them the way shown below. When I bake the normal map in blender it's the original normal map transformed to fit the object the same way the diffuse and specular texture does. The problem ofcourse is that this way the normals are totally wrong as shown in the image below. Is there a way to make blender recalculate the normals to be correct for the way they are projected on the object? Or isn't this possible at all? Or is there another way to achieve this?

I just wanted to share something I found out today that cost me a lot of extra work... Hopefully I can keep someone from making the same mistake. I made a simple straight walkway in blender with a woodplank texture. To save UV space, I split the walkway in to halves and unwrapped them on top of eachother. To make the texture repeat a little less obvious I mirrored one of the sides on the UVmap. I baked the texture with AO and also a normal and specular map for use with SL material (the original woodplank texture came with normal and specular maps). After upload to SL I discovered the specular reflections worked the opposite way on the two halves of the walkway. In retrospect this is all very logical, I just never thought of it. I had to adjust a lot of walkways and LODs... ..the strange thing is that I get the same effect whether I mirror on X or Y axis while the woodplank pattern only runs along the x axis...

So far I get the impression it is the same as with automatic LOD en Physics generation. It's better to do the work yourself if you want it to be done correct. But maybe a good option for creators who are just starting out with mesh. I sure didn't bother with LOD's or Physic models the first months I started with Mesh. Now I'm very a**l about getting it absolutely right, so I doubt I would use the automatic splitting of the uploader.

Ah, thanks for clearing that up. To bad though... I thought we would actually have more unique faces to work with in a single object. But aside from the trick you mentioned there's no difference in splitting it up into multiple objects yourself. If I understand you correct you'll still end up with 8 unique faces per object.

If you doubt their intentions, let them come to your shop and rez the item they received. If they got the wrong item they should be able to show it to you.

They're working on some nice features for the uploader too it seems...

LL is working on having more then 8 materials on a single mesh object so this trick wouldn't work for long. You can read the announcement in this featured news article under the section Mesh Import... https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Featured-News/Check-Out-the-Latest-Improvements-to-Second-Life/ba-p/2895496

Are you sure you're not wearing an attachment that is playing the commercials? No idea if that's possible at all, just a thought.

I think hiding the garlic script in another object and make everyone use it is not a very nice way to go about this. Wearing the garlic necklace puts you in another BL database and I'm sure not everyone will appreciate this. I even think this kind of behaviour can get you to have your experience key revoked (and it should!).

Remove the 6 at the end of the link (I guess a typo). http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Land

Another thing... If I remember correctly someone gets added to the bloodlines database as soon as they are bitten. So even people who have never played Bloodlines can be in the database by accidently accepting a bite request. I think a big portion of SL is in that database. Also a lot of SL residents have tried the bloodlines system at one time or another. So banning people for being in there might leave you with a very empty sim...

I have been struggling with this myself for the past few days. Disabling the SSR on FS indeed fixed it! I was going nuts struggling to get specularity to look right! Finally...peace at last!

Scraping the bloodlines database would only tell you if someone is registered as a bloodlines player, not if they are a spammer. I'm in that database yet I've never send a bite request to anyone but a couple of friends. I only tried bloodlines for a short while, then I got into building... The approach of the script is to catch anyone who's sending out bite request, I think that would be the best approach still. Maybe there is a way to detect if someone is wearing the bloodlines HUD or the Fangs?

The correct order for buying this land for your group would have been to first set your tier level at 2048, then donate this + your 512 free tier to the group. Then have the other avi donate the 512 free tier to the group. Then you should have bought the land with the option "buy land for group". This way you could have prevented the system upping your tier to 4096 to acommodate the land purchase. Now your first month you'll pay US$25 and after that US$15 each month. It could have saved US$10.

There's a free system on MP. Search for ban bloodlines. It detects a vampire bite and will inform you as well as ban the player.

When making LODs I try not to have visible LOD switching. I test with a viewer LOD setting of 2 (firestorm default) and 256m viewing distance. I guess you're right on the shading. If I don't want visible switching I'll have to keep shading consistent across my LODs. Especially when working with normal and specular maps. As for UV seems, I can't really seem (no pun!) to reduce on the ones I already have if I want to avoid stretching. I'm already getting better results with all the tips! At least now I know where things are coming from...

Thank you so much, Drongle! Now it makes perfect sense. I do have quite a lot of UV seems in the model and verything is shaded flat. I knew smooth shading made a difference on Li, but I had no idea this was the reason. Knowing this will make designing good low Li LODs a LOT easier. especially on the low and/or lowest LODs I see no reason not to shade everything smooth. Sooooo....back to the drawing board!