Sciuriadi

Especially when followed up by some variant of "wanna make bouncy bouncy while the wife's at work?" It gets tiring swinging ones handbag at pervos.

Uhmmmm this makes about as much sense as Mr Blobby....

Just another lazy day.

I have found baking normals from a texture to be extremely hit and miss. Some materials come out perfect, while others don't show at all or come out all grainy. The way I find to be 100% accurate is to make a copy of your mesh, subdivide a few times and then add a subdivision surface with a setting of 4-6 (simple subdivision, not Catmull Clark) and then add a displacement modifier with a greyscale version of your normal map as the displace texture. Tweak the settings accordingly (usually is a very low number for strength and height unless you want a mountain range) and then bake the detail onto the low poly mesh (selected to active).

I am by no means an expert on texturing but I do love to tinker in 3d packages. Generally "realistic" looking textures will be baked from a high resolution model (very high polygon count) to a low resolution model. That way one can accurately render things like creases onto a flat surface so as it looks like it has depth. With the use of a normal map as well as baked shadows one can get a pretty nice effect. Some folks however paint their textures completely by hand. As for software, there are many choices out there, from free and very effective to ridiculously expensive. Personally I have subscribed to use Photoshop for texture editing and also use Blender for the modelling side of things which is free. Many people use GIMP in place of Photoshop, this is a free program and can produce amazing results. However I find the interface a little clunky for my liking. For the textures themselves, you can get some lovely looking effects by simply playing around with filters and layers in Photoshop. These work nicely for basic surface textures, although for more specific patterns take a camera out into the world and take pictures of EVERYTHING. You never know when that close up of a discarded sofa or the wall of the local church will come in handy. There's thousands of tutorials on Youtube detailing how to use both Photoshop and Blender. The learning curve is pretty steep if you are looking to make complex items but it's well worth the effort.

loitering on the doorstep wondering what furniture to buy

Wow, that's a nice and detailed explanation. Found that my problem was separate objects within the collada file. Once they were all joined together it worked like a dream. Thank you so much :).

I am currently in the process of building myself a house. All is going nicely apart from the physics. I modelled a simplified version of my building that was simply the floor plan extruded up with as many faces killed from it as possible, leaving only openings for doors. Scale seems to be applied to everything however the physics mesh is showing as a tiny model in the far corner which is rather bizarre. Basically it is about 1/50th of the size it needs to be. Well I got it to the right size, looks perfect on preview, but still doesn't work properly. I set to prim but there's loads of random bits blocking my path. Also a lot of times the physics mesh simply doesn't register and I have no option to set physics as prim. Is there something I am missing???? From what I can tell I am doing everything correctly. So far am in the early stages of the build and testing as I go, but at this rate I am so tempted to simply give up. This seems impossible to figure out....

Most mesh bodies come with a HUD that allows you to hide "slices" of your body. It's pretty normal for there to be a little clipping on tight fitting clothes.

With the temperature starting to fall it's time to cover up...

Trespassers will be EXTERMINATED!

I grabbed myself a new mesh body and now I can climb walls!

I used to spend my weekends jumping around like a demented chimpanzee to acid techno in filthy old warehouses... Now I sit in a comfy chair watching my avatar dance and typing rather than trying to yell over the music. Hey... at least in the virtual world you can simply block creepers and oddballs and a mesh spliff won't get you arrested!

I have noticed that things have been super slow of late too. Particularly when it comes to things like colour change and body/head HUD's. I know it's supposed to take a lady forever to get ready but my goodness! Usually that's from trying on several dresses and asking partner "does my bum look big in this?" not waiting ages for a pair of knickers to apply! I must add that it isn't all the time, sometimes it's quick like it used to be, location doesn't seem to be the issue.

Body - Maitreya Head - Eve'olution Skin - Lumae gift Hair - Ayashi Clothing - Brii Underground