Michael Kyuzo

Often, people will bake an ambient occlusion texture in blender, and use that as the starting point for a shadow layer in photoshop or the like. You'd want to set the layer to multiply, or possibly overlay, depending on the results you want. You can adjust the opacity to soften the effect. Another common technique would be to light your scene in blender and apply your shadowless textures and bake out the full lighting to a new set of textures. I hope this helps a little bit. Let me know if you have more questions, i might be able to help. I'm not all that advanced with blender, but may have some advice. Good luck.

I believe you need to change from basic to advanced mode. On the login screen, there should be a drop-down to the right of your name and password that allows you to change to advanced mode (See below). Hope this helps.

My understanding is that custom bones/skeletons are NOT possible right now. There has been talk about them being added at some later date, but I'm not aware of it being a definite. I'm hoping that it does in fact get added in sooner vs. later, but we'll have to wait and see what the Lindens decide, and what kind of time table they settle on if they do decide to add custom skeletons.

The preformed meshes are by far the quickest and easiest way to get going. It also ensures that you have the uv layout set up correctly and that you have the correct number of verts. I have found though, that at times, it can be a lot quicker to model from scratch and just do the unwrap myself afterwards. For instance, when I'm making a sculpt with several linked parts, such as a wooden pier, or if I want to have symmetry that could be tedious to achieve by hand, I'll just model from scratch, using the modifiers and such. You just have to plan ahead and know what LODs you're targeting and what sculpt map layout (square, oblong) you're going to be using ahead of time.

Drongle McMahon wrote: My guess, coming from Primstar, is that you have to start with the special sculpt meshes (Add->Sculpted mesh script), to get a mesh with the correct UV map. You can't use an existing mesh. Then you must only push vertices around, no adding or deleting and no extrusion. The UV map must stay as it is. This should all be described in the machinimatrix tutorials. Look at the recent one that explains how sculpties work. It helps a lot if you understand that clearly. Sorry if you already watched those. Let me preface this response by saying that I have not used Jass2 or Primstar2. I have used Primstar1 on sculpts I've made in both blender 2.49 and 2.58. You don't have to use the built it sculpt mesh types. You can model your mesh from scratch, using extrudes, mirror modifiers, etc, but you have to keep in mind the max number of faces, and the layout of your mesh. If you do model from the ground up, you'll need to manually mark your own seams, and use the 'follow active quads' unwrap method. Then you must resize your uv layout to fully fit the uv space without overlapping verts. The real key to getting the sculpt map to bake when using this workflow is to ensure that your uv layout is named properly. By default blender will call the first uv layout 'UVTex'. The Primstar scripts look for a layout called 'sculptie' to use for baking. You can rename the uv layout in blender. For blender 2.49 go to the 'Editing' buttons and in the 'Mesh' panel you'll find 'UV Texture'. In blender 2.58 you can find the 'UV Texture' panel in the 'Object Data' buttons. I would start by checking to see what your uv layout is named. Also, be sure that you have an image assigned for baking. Hope this helps. NOTE: In the above image you should change the highlighted UVTex to read sculptie instead