Dree Eames

I just received an email notification that Allegorithmic is offering a summer discount on their products for both Steam versions and non-steam this offer is good until June 28th. Also there will be an upgrade soon to beta ver 8 of Substance Painter.

By "preview window" do you mean the Mesh Edit window? If that is what you mean and you like the way it displays on the mesh, I'm not sure why you are unhappy with how it looks in the UV/Image Edit window. What I do notice is that your UV island arragement is not optiimized. You are wasting a tremendous amount of resolution on your texture map by grouping those UV islands together at the bottom. Try an arrangement something like this to get more detail/smoothness in your bake:

A simple solution is to map out the size you want for the furniture piece you intend to create right in SL using a prim (or prims) and export it. Then import this into Blender and use it as a size reference. I don't know if SL offers the feature to export primitives, but Singularity does. Easy peasy and no math! (or maths for those over on the other side of the lake).

If you look at the header within Andrew Peel's video you can see he's using a beta version of Microvellum's software. By posting this video he is apparently seeking feedback to see if there's sufficient interest in the features prior to making an add-on available to the Blender community. Personally I find many specialized plug-ins initially appear very attractive, but in practice they take too much time to learn, to memorize the features and to become comfortable with the specialized menus which add complexity to an already feature rich program. Some plug-ins, however, like Avastar, are multi-purpose and are worth the investment and time taken to learn the features. There's a limit however to how many of these very specialized tools one can adopt and integrate into one's workflow without becoming over-burdened. Just my 2 lindens on the matter.

I can't tell if this is related to the issue you were dealing with, but when one of my mesh models acts wonky I usually go into vert or edge mode and press cmd-shift-alt-M to highlight all non-manifold verts/edges quickly. Those verts/edges highlighted along the perimeter of an open mesh wil be correctly highlighted, but you might also find some highlight un-intended interior geometry for quick deletion.

Thanks for the Tip, Chic. I completely missed this feature. At first glance I thought this was a pretty useless feature since everything I make is filed on my hard-drive and backed up, but with more consideration I realize it's a nice way to collaborate with others on a project without having to go back and forth via email and/or dropbox if you prefer to keep things completely in SL. Also it can be useful to build to the scale you want in SL. A "template" of the general shape and height of the building can be quickly put together with prims and exported back into one's modeling program without relying on (eeeek!) actual numerical measurements.

Chic, I haven't purchased any mesh in SL, but it seems possible that the content creator might very well provide an AO, Normal, Specular and UV grid map to purchasers of their Full Perm items to create individual textures. I fact I can't imagine why they wouldn't provide this in many cases. Edited: I now realize what you meant was you get an object that is a mesh, not a texture that "creates" the mesh. There is, of course, too little info from the poster here. Thinking about it, she/he might be talking about having purchased a texture package made up of a tiled diffuse texture with supporting bump and specular maps, in which case they are used like any other tiled texture. And as you already mentioned, in edit, the texture is slotted to the texture window, the normal map slotted to the bump window and the spec map slotted to the spec window. All with the right setting in preference to view it properly. If this is actually the case and the poster is hoping to use these basic tilable textures on a sculpty of his or her own making, perhaps this is a question for the texture forum? For some reason I "read into" the post as wanting to copy a mesh via the textures, but perhaps I was off base about that.

I think you are confusing the texturing maps for mesh objects with those rainbow type maps used for scupty making. Scupties are derived from a special type of "texture" that gets interpreted by SL, and 3d mesh program that can import them, into a mesh with a fixed number of verts. The color is the "information. The textures you purchased cannot be used in this way. These diffuse, spec and bump maps are the "clothing pattern",as it were, used for texture placement and controlling lighting effects of a mesh object and are made the creator to fit a specific mesh. The map can be made hundreds of different ways for the same object. So the information on these maps you purchased is only about texturing and there is no vertex placement information that can be extracted for rebuilding that mesh into your 3d package. If you were a very advanced modeler you could make use of those textures by modeling something similar and organizing the uvs in such a way that they can make use of the textures, but I pretty much can guarentee that would not be what the creator would find acceptable and it might be actually a TOS or copyright/fair use issue. And it would most likely be more work then it's worth and give poor results. Good texturing is as hard a job as good modeling. On the other hand it's possible the vendor is selling basic maps with the spec and bump to match the inherent uv maps of basic prims in SL. In that case I'd say just use the prims. I can't otherwise think of a case where a creator would sell these maps to you without the actual mesh. It doesn't make sense.

Packt Publishing just sent out a notice they are running a 5 dollar an e-book sale. They sell a number of Blender books (and most likely other software). The books the are selling are not based on the absolute the most current version of Blender, but useful none-the-less. Just thought I'd pass along the link for anyone who is in need of such a thing as I've purchased a few ebooks from this site in the past and found the material helpful. http://www.packtpub.com/search?keys=Blender&sort=0&types=0&forthcoming=1&available=1&count=20

Adorable intro animation :matte-motes-smile:

Are you hinting that this technique is lagalicious?

The process is also explained in this thread here: thread in Mesh I did a test run in Blender and came up with this fairly effortlessly:

I'm somewhat confused. What exactly are you joining? The high and low lod mesh objects? Using v. 2.69 I just took 2 objects and assigned 2 materials per object (total of 4 materials) I assigned seperate textures to each of these material face groups. Then, after confirming the UV names for each object were the same, I joined these two objects. All materials were joined and retained and each material group's assigned texture was still conrrectly assigned. So I'm not clear on what your workflow was and what you were attempting to do here.

Lol! And I wrote: "you may which to correct..." Which of course is supposed to be "you may WISH to correct." Spell check is clearly a double edge sword

Thank you for this very excellent contribution. There's a small typo/spell check "gotcha" you may which to correct next time you edit this so people using translators won't get confused. "Where" should be "were" :

You can still select meshes in render view you just can't see the outline around them when you do select an object. However if you look at the item list you can see what is seleted. I use render view when I want to quickly take some screen snapshot of what I'm working on without including any clutter (lamps, camera, grid, etc.)

Apparently the discussion was started by Gaia Clary in Mid October : http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2013-October/041926.html If you read through the follow ups to Gaia's question you will find the reasoning behind not changing this implementation. I haven't yet read to the end, so perhaps there's some compromise solution expected further down the line.

Frida are you adding the lace below where the mesh top terminates? If so that won't work. There's no geometry that exists beyond what is shown in the image. If you rework the texture by shortening the image of the top (ie crop the top) and using the image as a guide add the strip of lace in a way that doesn't go below the edge of the tank top as you see it here, and then save in a format with transparency, that should work, but the opaque part left may be too short and it might not really follow the shape nicely. If you have the actual mesh file you could add more geometry to to the bottom and then UV that added portion, apply a material with transparency and add your lace texture. And then you would have to weight it so it moves with the rest of the top's geometry. You may confused in thinking this template works like the "old school" clothing in SL where it was simple enough to just take the template into your graphics editing program and paint to extend and embellish the base texture.

Yes. There's been a change in version 2.69. The fix is to change both UV map names to the same name and then join. It should combine the two the way you expect. See this thread where this is discussed: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Why-is-texture-black/m-p/2363623#M24793

There's no general advice that can be used in all cases, but I will mention something that I think eludes beginners which is you can selectively unwrap a mesh's parts using different methods. You don't need to commit yourself to a single unwrap choice for the whole mesh. For example you may want to "project from view" some group of faces into a UV island and then use smart UV project, etc. for other selected parts depending on various factors. It takes a while to get good at this and it's always an interesting challenge. Some folks hate it, but I rather enjoy the "puzzle" aspect. I never use the cube, cylinder or sphere projection, btw. Generally I define my seams and use "unwrap" or I use "smart UV project" and then perhaps move/rotate/scale and sew islands together. And often I use "follow active quad" to get a grid layout. Sometimes I use the sculpting tools to relax the UVs if needed after I'ved unwrapped organic models. In certain cases I use the mirror function, etc. There are lots of options and it takes some time exploring how and when these options are useful and it helps alot to practice, but the up-side is you have all these tools at your disposal to get optimum results. To get really good at this you have to look through the menu options in the UV window and search out a tutorial for each option. There's not a whole lot out there relating to the intricacies of uv mapping in blender, but I managed to teach myself through sheer perserverance. And don't be afraid to look at tutorials for other 3d programs. The tools will be named differently and there may be other options, but you will learn a lot about the UV process and the rational for how different types of 3D mesh is deconstructed into it's 2D UV islands.

Two suggestions: 1) Try selecting all the UV islands and pressing CTL A with the cursor in the UV space to average the scale of all islands 2) Set your 3d view to texture and apply a temporary UV grid in Blender. This is an option available to you when you add a blank texture in Blender. There are two grid choices or you may find one you prefer that you can upload. Select the UVs and add this temporary grid texture and manually scale your UV islands so the grid appears even over the entire mesh. Edited to add: Generally one does not get perfect results after unwrapping. More work is usually necessary to scale, move and rotate your UV islands around to get the desired results based on the scale of the texure, the direction of the texture and if it repeats, etc. The unwrapping part is just the beginning of the process.

I haven't done any clothes rigging since mesh was in Beta, and even then I was a beginner at it, but the first thing that strikes me is the arms being modeled in the "T" orientation. (unless you've pre-rigged this and you are displaying it with the arms down) I'm making an assumption that you are going to want to wear this item (although it might be a shop window display). I wonder if anyone here who rigs clothing can make a recommendation for this op about this.

Good point about the ground plane, Aquila. And up-ing the samples also makes for a much smoother/nicer ao result although it takes a longer time to bake.

I agree Chic. You really want to put your effort in the tweaking and the texturing. Normal maps should perhaps be viewed as the frosting on the cake for those who can view them. The mesh should stand on it's own as if they weren't added, but if you can squeeze in a bit more detail, it might be worth adding them. I've been told all these extra images do add lag so that might be an argument against using them. I'm not inworld much these days so I have little personal experience to use to make that judgement call. Here is a very ugly example snapshot from SL. I made by quickly modeling a very basic test mesh to which I added multi res and sculpted (please don't throw rotten tomatoes at me - I spent a whole 5 minutes modeling this thing ) Both shirts are the same low poly (1 LI) object:

AO bakes in a unlit scene as it is completely light independant. So you may have some thing else going on with how you are setting up your scene relating to the settings you've used for AO, such as baking with normalize unchecked, your choice of ao blend mode, the attenuation distance and fall off settings, the number of samples and selection of raytrace vs. approximate. With the wrong (or right depending on what you are looking for) settings you can easily ao bake a box with no lid that is dark inside as well as one with very little ao influence that will be light. I think it's incorrect to say that lights will correct an ao problem and will confuse beginners who are trying to get a better handle on baking ao. Edited to add that I'm referring to ao baking in Blender.