Hoaghes Beaumont

Oh wow, you basically answered it much better then me. I agree with your point by the way, if you are planning to bake lightning and shadows, its a whole different ballgame. Often you can still get away with stacking UV´s there as well btw. Totally depends on the object, the light setup, etc. Technically it is certainly possible to bake stacked UV´s Thanks for the tutorial by the way, saves me the time making one and you did it way better then I would have

Well, you are touching the basics of texturing here, and especially texture mapping 3d models. You know a model is basically constructed of verts, those verts connect to make faces, most commonly in the form of quads or triangles. Just like your poly model is build up of faces, so is your uvw map, it is basically your entire polygon model layed out flat. Now most models have some form of repetition, like your bowling alley has repetition along the length of the track, were the wood texture would be repeated, or a shirt with buttons incorporated would have the left and right sleeve mirrors of eachother, or all the buttons repeat. When you layout your uvw´s, you are basically solving a puzzle. Which part of my model should receive which part of the texture. You can stack them on top of eachother, mirror them and stack them on top of eachother. Lots of options. I am at my work now but tonight when I get home I will put together a little tutorial with pictures that shows how I did this for a jacket model. I am using 3ds max though and every 3d package is different. Unwrapping in Zbrush is a whole different ballgame alltogether. You either do it by masking and drawing where you want the seam to be, or by some form of automatic unwrap. Most professionals would not use Zbrush to unwrap their model unless its for previz. You just don´t have enough direct control like in other 3d packages.

If this just happens with one particular mesh it is almost certainly an issue with it not being rigged correctly. All verts need to be weighed or they will shoot all over. If this happens with meshes in general, not just one particular one I would go with the advice above.

"The problem is when I have a wood floor, say. One 1024 texture is going to be blurry; I need it to repeat." This should actually be very easy to solve by laying out your UV´s correctly. I am using 3ds max by the way but this goes for pretty much any 3d program. Just stack the UV´s of the parts you want to have the same texture on top of eachother on your layout. The same is done lots of times, for instance if you have a jacket with two similar sleaves, or even have a symmetrical face that is mirrored left to right. Instead of laying out the entire object and painting the same texture twice, thus using precious texture space, you stack the mirrored parts on top of eachother and use the same texture for it. This is how you could tile a bowling alley with using a texture instead of a procedural map. I hope I explained this somewhat clearly. Some people stated ZBrush and using Zapplink for texture baking..In Zbrush you can actually render out the baked material straight to your diffuse texture and save it out, and you can allso use Multi Map exporter (or something, under plugins) and bake out all your maps like Ambient Occlusion, specular, diffuse, etc. in one pass and then blend em together in photoshop. In 3ds max baking shadows into a texture is as simple as setting up your lighting, selecting your object and hitting render to texture, you can then select exactly which passes you want to bake. Cheers and good luck with your bowling alley

I agree, just use google, SL wiki and homepage and you should we well on your way of learning the basics. Part of the fun is in the discovery as well. Cheers.

Geez, apparently I did start a flame war after all, and I apologize for the fact. To make it clear: I am sure that the original answer was meant to be helpful, and made with the best intentions. I am not here to bash some other resident who I don´t even know. Saying: "You can´t" to a perfectly legitimate question for which the answer can even be found within LL´s proprietary tools, and then refer to the TOS and such things does make me iffy though, because yes "YOU CAN" extract your avatar, and no, it´s NOT automatically against the TOS to do so. So yes, like you say, LL of course reads this post as well, like they read all posts, and if they feel the need to step in they would do so and have done so, I am sure they don´t need residents to explain the TOS to them in this respect. Besides this, you know the general stance they take on this subject, namely that it is up to the copyright holders themselves to bring up any infringments, not anyone else. So even if I see someone selling and advertising batman masks on the marketplace (just an example) it would not be up to me to file a complaint (or lecture the seller for that matter), but up to the actual copyright owner (Warner Bros or something?). The same goes here in my opinion. It is not up to you to bring up the TOS or any possible infringment, but up to LL if they feel any of their intellectual property is in danger. Knowing the origin of Second Life I don´t think LL easily does this, they seem to favour a more Open Source-ish approach and its their full right to do so without residents reminding them or telling them about what their rights are. Cheers

" but 'his character' which to me means extracting his avatar as it looks in SL" You are making assumptions here..All he did actually ask for was a way to extract his avatar, which TO ME means his base mesh and is perfectly possible in Second Life with LL provided tools. "As a content creator myself, I am surprised that you, a content creator, have such a cavalier attitude about IP rights. How would you feel if I took your designs or creations out of SL without your permission? " I personally couldnt care less about it, actually, I would feel quite honored if I would see one of my creations on display in an exhibition in London or wherever..This is all theory anyway though because nowhere did the OP state he intended to throw a fashion show or anything along those lines. And yes, I think it is up to Linden Labs to play police here and no one else, we do not need any self-appointed TOS police just like we don´t need any self appointed anti-grieving police in Second life, they caused more problems then they solved as well. If I have a need to defend my IP I am perfectly capable of doing so myself, or get into contact with LL about it, just as you seem to be perfectly capable of doing the same. So yes, even though I do not like starting a flame war, I feel strongly enough about this point to stick to it.

To the above poster, please don´t play admin if you are not one? Even if it´s against the TOS it is not up to you to take action or play police about it, so either reply to his question or do not reply at all. Cheers. Regarding your original question Frasoir. Yes of course it is possible to extract your avatar, there is even an option hidden somewhere in the viewer settings that lets you extract your avatar as an .obj file. Which should be easily convertible to whatever format your 3d printer uses. I myself make mesh clothes and use 3ds max. I have bought a very nice plugin on the market place (SLAV plugin or something) that lets you bring rigged avatars into 3ds max, you can use the advanced menu (developer menu in viewer 2 I think) and then under character test -> export shape to .xml or something. Then you can find this .xml file in your second life folder (if you are interested I can give you a detailed walkthrough when I am behind my computer) This is no copybotting or anything by the way, all fully supported viewer 2 features that either let you extract your avatar as an .obj or as a .xml datasheet to load into a program like SLAV. Cheers and if you want more help, just post a reply and I will give you a walkthrough when Im behind my own computer.

Elvina, you only tick off the skin weights when uploading to SL right? Not Joint positions? The mesh should snap to your avi if you do it correctly. My workflow which works for now: -New max scene with system Unit and viewport Units set to meters. -Run script - select the 2012.mse one -Select Avatar, set scale to 1 meter -create - load -I dont rescale anything myself right now, but you can of course scale your avatar up like stated before. -build whatever you want as edit poly -skin wrap it and select the upperbody mesh and lower body mesh as base (easiest way to quickly skin something like clothing) -convert skin wrap to skin and adjust vertex weights by hand where needed. -hide everything except for skinned object and bones -export selected to .dae using fbx plugin for 3ds max (use standard settings but make sure to include animation-morphs-etc) -import selecting skin weights but not include joint positions -wear the item More or less this, it did take me quite a while to get everything figured out as well but now it seems to work fine.

Possible but no reason to ever do so except if you need a guide to model your retopo on. Might as well just rebuild your assets from scratch though.