Anna Nova

We were all noobs once. Even Steller Sunshine. It isn't immediately obvious that if you buy an object, you can't alter it unless it has mod permissions. Or that what looks like a flat plane, may in fact be many flat planes linked together. I still remember discovering that....

us Residents have to stick together. After all we are younger and have more insert attribute of choice.

Sex in bunks is much overrated anyway.

I find I see red much more easily than others. :-)

Whoopee doo! I am $5 (plus VAT) a month richer! I can afford the new yacht! Kisses every Linden that stands still long enough!

In the end I deleted all the faces affected, recreated them (saved 4 faces = 8 tris = 24 verts....). And it just worked. I put that down to the sheer cussedness of things. (Some Neko Lion will be along with a picture to cussedness shortly

OK. This didn't work, so I am going to paraphrase the instructions to check my understanding: 1) Hit the X at the bottom of the UV/Image editor, these disconnects the the bake-to Image from the UV. 2) In the 3d View select the object, enter Edit mode - Face select, select all faces with A (noted that all face are selected.) 3) Reassign the Bake-to Image in the UV/Image editor by choosing it from the list under the 'Browse Image to linked' drop-down. 4) Rebake.

I'm on another one of my panels. I got to bake it. Everything is fine, except the middle wall panels don't bake. They show up fine in Rendered View. The wall panels on the left and right are the same material, and they bake. I checked that the normals point correctly. I have tried assigning them to a different material, and then back again. But nada! It's driving me nuts. Does anyone know of anything else I can try?

There is that Margin setting in the Bake panel that controls how much 'spill' there is around an island. It gets kinda critical when the UV is very dense. I tend to start at 1px (after watching your videos), but the blender default is 16px. It's probably a fruitful area of experimentation.

I don't pretend that I got max-pack on this first one, but I'm quite pleased with the lack of black..... I have a tendency to take .blend snapshots as I go through the workflow, that way I can usually use the Append to grab things that I used in one mesh in the next. The struts and understruts on these panels migrate like that.... And, ya, I do feel pleased. Especially in this awesome company.

(-: Baking textures pink again eh? :-)

Still nothing for Linux then.....

It's OK, I knew you had made it up. (-: I forgot the joke-quotes. :-)

You clearly don't know about the corrective surgery. I could demonstrate, but my virtual scalpel is blunt.

No one will stop you doing whatever you like on your sim. You pay tier, you make the rules. We reserve the right to say what we like about it though, and also to lobby LL to change the fees for content that cause the rest of us costs, or other annoyances. I'm glad my parcel isn't next to yours.

Hi again. I'm going to do a final report back, and use Aquila's style of photographic reportage. Everything you all helped me with has worked out really well, and the first panel is now to a standard that I feel I can upload to SL and replace the Mesh-Generator version (which was 3.8LI with all the LOD's set to zero). This is the new panel in the uploader, notice that because I am using two imposters, one for Medium and one for Low/Lowest the vertex count drops fast. This one uses a single plane as physics... But even using an analyzed box I get the same (but a bit more physics cost): After upload and setting to prim, the SL dope sheet on this is good: This is a close-up, no doubt I can work on the texture nodes and improve this, also the lighting still needs some work in Blender: Pulling back, here is the whole panel: I set my viewer to 1 LOD and 600M distance, so Medium comes in fast, but I can't tell the difference, I promise they are different screenshots: Then we get to Low, still good: and way way way away, you can still see a little detail ( like the windows!): This is the screenshot in GIMP that I carefully posed in Beta with a large grey panel behind, to use for the Imposter texture, to the side you can see some of the transforms I did to crop it, fix the very slight perspective error, and scale it to 512 width. Then I deleted the grey in the windows to trans: I hope that helps someone. I am not a professional, none of this will be offered for sale. But the satisfaction is immense.

You are today's 9 Post Noobie, and I claim my $5. These forums are inundated with 'This is my first post on this forum but I've been in SL for 600 years' posts. Often they also include 'and I know everything there is to know about <insert topic of choice>'. And usually 'and you are all doing it wrong!" We just laugh. The maxim 'Don't feed the troll!' comes to mind. But there, I did.

Once again, Aquila, you explained it so well. I am now targeting getting a lower LI than the Mesh-Generator originals. I think with imposters at Medium, this should be achievable. I've started in on re-making the walls using the mirror modifier... The UV-mapping is so much easier. I'm not as quick as you, but I'll report progress in due course. Edit after further consideration: I am looking at how to get all the 7 materials that I need for my actual build into this. I need the 7 materials during the workflow up until I get to bake that texture - I thought this sort of defeated things if I have 2 imposters - now I need 9 materials. But no, both imposters get the same texture - and 8 is OK! But then there is also your final implication, that after that bake, I could delete 5 of the 7 materials anyway (saving a copy of the .blend file first!), assigning the remaining one to all the 'materials', because the same texture is applied to them all in SL. This gives a lot of scope to add to the materials used to bake - as there is no practical limit to the number of them in blender, only the limit of 8 in the exported collada. More revelation. Sorry if everyone else finds all this blindingly obvious. Anna.

Brilliant expo Aquila - as always, thank you! I have used this technique (array, mirror, etc) in the past, but always applied before UV-mapping. The revelation here is that by Uv-mapping before applying, you get automatically stacked UV-maps. And how about the stripped versions for Medium and lower LODs? Does this mean that when I strip out the unneeded detail, stretch a few planes to cover gaps, and all that low-LOD stuff, the baked texture is still going to apply correctly? In one of your pictures I notice that some of the quads seem to be triangulated. Why is this?

I love it when he talks dirty.

I would just like to point out I did NOT say this. LL's stupid forum programmer may attempt to make it look like I did, but I didn't.

I don't think you can fix it. And all builds must suffer from it - for many things you can get away by using the same vertices in a seam, and then they must coincide, but if you have a link-set then the positioning just cant be precise enough at height. Despite the proliferation of sky boxen, SL is really designed as a low-level platform. I'm sure if anyone knows how to fix this they will be along shortly. As for a better explanation, I'm not totally sure I can explain it very well, but here goes... A coordinate is a vector of 3 floating point numbers <x.x,y.y,z.z>. As far as the X and the Y axes are concerned they only have to describe a point in the region, 256x256 meters, but for the Z axis there is no limit. So if you are at 1000 meters, that's 1000 meters-worth of coordinates lost in the precision of the vertical. I'm not a math whizz, but again, I'm sure there will be one along....

I think he's shaved his chest, and maybe....

There are a limited number of decimal places allowed in coordinates. So the higher you go the fewer decimal places of precision you have in the Z coordinate. This results in the sort of thing you are seeing.

I guess that may be the best plan. Each of the 11 is different - there are 16 walls of 11 types. But there are common elements, so I may be able to isolate those and so reduce the number different textures. The problem is that the texture at High-LOD is what gives the detail to the Med-LOD (and thus also the Low and Lowest) so I have to figure out a better way of handling that. Yes, it does. I only did the overlaying of the obvious large areas, thinking that a I could re-unwrap to improve the size of the smaller item and thus the detail they could carry. I can carry on and fix the round things by making them straight, and overlay those, and several other significant items. Then have a quick re-layout and scale-up. This has been an excellent exercise, and thank you all for your thoughts. I'll get there.....