Anna Nova

Not that I'm not grateful for the suggestions, but they don't answer my question. Before I commit to weeks of work to do it your way(s), I'm still looking to understand pinning. As it stands it is useless, and I don't believe that for a moment. I suspect I need to switch something on or off.

No. This is the UVMap as Blender's 'unwrap' presents it: Notice the 2 large and 4 small areas that are actually to be textured identically, so I move them to coincidence. This was suggested by Aqila as a way to get some more texture real-estate for the details: But as soon as I try to unwrap again, I either get back to the first picture or, if I pin the verts of the moved islands I get this sort of thing: Notice that the pinned islands have not moved, but all the other islands have now been mapped over them. Edit: I suppose I could resize everything by hand, but I'm not going to do that as I have 11 of these to do, and life is too short, I'll just import more 1024 textures and say "to hell with the lag....."

Now I know how you got to 2000plus posts...... I need a new bye-line for when I get to 500. How about Neko Lion Tamer.

You think your state wouldn't do it to you? Yes they would. Then they blame the other state. Now you re-elect the perps. Happens every day.

Following the advice I got here about UV Unwrapping, I am now trying to optimize the UVmaps. I am not understanding what I read in the Blender manuals. I unwrap, and get a nice even UV Map. But it has waste space with plain areas that are duplicated, so I edit the UV map to put them over one another (thus they will receive the same texture), and to stop blender moving them I pin their vertices. Now when I unwrap my reading of the manual says blender should leave those vertices alone, and it does. It totally ignores them and maps other stuff right over the top! Gaaaaaa! So, I think: don't unwrap again, use 'pack islands' to re-layout the map. No! That ignores the pinning and moves the nicely layered faces to their own space..... Gaaaaaa! What am I doing wrong? (I tried googling, but clearly I am not aware of the correct vocabulary)

I could get in reliably with Phoenix mode on Firestorm. I didn't try the LL viewer myself - can't stand it, but there were reports in General Forum. Maybe it's all coincidence, as you say.

During the last few days of DDOS attcks, several people, including me, found that the SL viewer could log in, and the Firestorm viewer couldn't unless it was set to Phoenix mode. Is there an explanation of why this should be so? Does Firestorm in Firestorm Mode use methods of communications that the other modes and viewers don't? Or did the Lab turn off Firestorm logins to drastically reduce the load? I'm not criticising such a decision, but it would be interesting to know.

Fixing the settings of my viewer after having to use 'phoenix mode' to log in yesterday. Somehow the restore doesn't work.

The way to stop this is to increase the sanctions on State Sponsored DDOS attacks. The most likely culprit is (if you are American) the CIA, NSA or FBI, (if you are British) GCHQ, if you are Russian (can't remember, used to be the KGB), If you are Chinese (some relative of President Wi)....... It's misgovernments playing childish games folks. Nothing to do with Linden Lab.

Seneca lives!

I knew it was a mistake trying to make a mesh atom bomb........

Slightly off topic. I am thinking of using a high-poly (yeah, with subsurf and everything) model to bake onto a much simpler High-LOD scaled version. This seems to me to be the only rational use of a high-poly model in blender for SL. In effect it is using the detail of the high-poly to create detail in the texture - this then gets applied to the High, Med, Low, and Lowest LOD models via the High. This way, there is some mileage in watching those lovely Blender Guru tutorials.

I have a Yava Pod station on my parcel. I love the Pods and use them regularly. If that gets up some people's nose, then it's quid pro quo for the ban-lines and 10 second ejectors that ruin flying. I also have a visitor recording system, so I know how many people arrive by Pod, it's quite a lot more than you would think. Although I am now getting more arriving by helicopter or truck to do GTFO!

The usual advice for this is to remove everything, and put on one of the base avatars from Library. Now relog. If everything seems OK, try adding the parts of your normal avatar one by one. If everything works you are fixed, but you may find one thing that is causing the trouble - then you have something to go on.

It is amazing how fast you can model in Blender once you get the hang of it. The learning curve is steep, but the rewards come in stages to keep you going. After modelling, you have Texturing yet to come!

Which then lead inevitably to the question: What is muting a node? What changes when it it Muted? In effect, a muted node connects its inputs to its outputs. Which is why, for a texture-holder node, there is no effect at all. https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/42350/how-can-i-bypass-a-node

Log in to SecondLife Dashboard at https://secondlife.com. This shows your dashboard. On the top right find Help, and the drop-down: Support. This brings up the support website. On the right look for Submit a Support Ticket I suggest you submit a request in the category 'Account Issue'. Just simply say: 'I need access to the Beta Grid. But my usual login is being refused.' I find they get back to me within about 3 days. It seems faster if you are Premium User.

Thanks. I wasn't going mad then! On the nomenclature, I'll use yours from now on. I am considering using a sub-surface high poly model as the source of textures in the future, so I'll need to distinguish in my mind the High Poly from the High LOD. Really helpful, this.

OK. I understand you are getting an error when you try to log into Beta. You may have to raise a support case with Linden Labs for access to Beta. I did for my first Avatar.

You cannot sync things imported into Beta to Second Life. They must be imported separately (and at cost) into SL. This is to stop you circumventing the price of uploads (amongst other reasons). However, if you mean how do you get things in your SL inventory into Beta.... That either happens automatically, or you need to raise a case with LL. Often the first sync of SL to Beta to a new avatar is very slow, in my experience. You may just need to wait a bit.

OK. I'm getting there with this, but I have a question, but first an explanation: make a high poly version of the mesh panel and UV unwrap it. This is exported as the High. assign materials to the err, materials. Plaster, Wood, Painted, Metal, Glass, etc.. And use the nodes to get the effect I want for each. make a baking rig of a panel lamp and a reflective backing, so that the effect is flat. I am not deliberately baking shadows yet, just albedo, texture and colour. bake a 1024sq texture for the High Poly mesh. This is saved as the texture for the High mesh. take a copy of the high poly and drastically reduce the vertex count, preserving a triangle of every material. I do NOT UV-map this, relying on the map made from the high poly - thus the texture baked from the High poly will map to this mesh. This is exported mesh as the Medium (Low and a Lowest use it too). This works well, but it is very restrictive, in that I can't edit the high poly or re-map it easily, because the medium poly is effectively using the same, but denuded, UV-map - which would now be out of sync. I can see that I could bake the high poly onto the medium poly (several tutorials about that), and in fact is this the best way to do this anyway? Does the different UV-map of the medium find it's way to the uploader via the .DaE? (Thinks: I need to understand .DaE files better) I'm prepared for the 'daft amateur' answer. P.S. I am an amateur, but that doesn't stop me aspiring to do the best I can.

(off topic) I want a course in making explanatory pictures like Aquila Kytori does.

You may also need to 'solidify' the mesh - which means adding the other side - if you eventually want to go inside that cube. The quick way, in Blender, is with the solidify modifier.

I'd start by using a search engine to look at photos of RL objects in the same class. Some people can only visualize after seeing a lot of examples.

I'm taking all this on board, and thank you for it. My old workflow was 1) Make mesh with up to 8 material slots as place-markers for textures, 2) Upload, 3) Texture the 8 SL faces with seamless textures. This is why the photo at the head of the tread looks like a Lego model. I had never baked a texture onto a mesh before last week, so you will understand that lots of the things you see as obvious are like blinding lights to me now. I realised that you could bake different materials to different textures of different sizes, but the full implications of that are just beginning to dawn.