Myra Wildmist

Thanks. I'll take a look at Zambooki, and, maybe as Rolig suggested, I'll repost this in the animation group. @Rolig. I actually did do exactly that search on the market and in-world. I just got too many results and most of the ones I visited were junk. That's what made me post here.

I'm putting together my first piece of furniture that I might sell on the marketplace. For the moment I'm still experimenting, but I've started dropping some poses and animations in the furniture. They're all freebies from places like Hippo and they're all about what you'd expect from freebies - not that good. Most are just static poses, too, which I don't want, either. Since I'm still starting out, I don't want to drop all of my lindens on animations - some full perms are over 1000L. Can someone recommend some stores that have some nice, affordable animations for furniture, please? Thank you

Awesome! Thank you, Codewarrior. That's exactly what I need.

Avastar might be worth considering, and $22 is fairly cheap. If I find I'm working a lot with mesh avatars, I'll certainly try Avastar, but for now I'd like to walk through the process in Blender to get a feel for it. Plus, this might just be a one-time thing. Is there a process, tips, for what to do once I have the body parts in blender? I'm not thinking about adding clothes or anything at this point. I just want to get the avatar into blender, export it as mesh/collada, then import it into SL as mesh.

Hi, I kinda researched this, before, but it's been a few months since I did anything with it. What I'd like to do is export my avatar to blender, then export it from blender and reimport it as mesh to SL. Is there a step-by-step guide on doing this? I think I have pieces of the process. There are other links in the forums, but I didn't see the whole process documented. I'm fairly confident I can get my avatar to blender and then maybe I could figure out the rest from there, but I don't want to assume anything. Any and all links are greatly appreciated. Thanks

@Dora. Thanks for the tip, Dora. I'll try working with the faces, first. That just didn't occur to me. @jennifer. I didn't get a UV map, unfortunately. I did send a request to the maker, but it was a freebie. But hope he has one. @Chic. I'm not that familiar with texturing outside of some moderate experience with prims and sculps. What do you mean by ambient mapping? I'm a good reader if you have a link that helps me understand. Thanks, everyone. I learned a bit from this post, too.

I've been pouring over the forums, today, reading about texturing and mesh. From what I've read, it seems like the best approach to adding texture to a mesh object is to do it in Blender, first. My problem is I got a nice mesh, full-perm sofa that I'd like to retexture, so the mesh object is already in-world. What are my options for adding texture to the object? Can I export it, maybe, and import it to blender and add texturing there? Haven't tried that, so not sure it's even an option.

Senobia Xenga wrote: Myra Wildmist wrote: Are there other expenses I'm not thinking of? Textures, sculpts, trinkets, bits, bobs, scripts and templates, unless you're handy enough to make your own. Gifts/hunt items/MM Boards/Lucky Chairs are all 'expenses', of sorts because you make nothing from the items you give away. Uploading fees for the pictures/ads Paying staff/models if you're popular/big enough to have/need them Photography fees, if you're not happy with doing your own pictures for ads Advertising, if you go with SL radio ads, SL magazine ads, things of that nature Yeah, it can get real expensive real fast if you let it. Even if the merchants sell exclusively online, LLs takes a cut of every sale they make. Wow, yeah, Senobia. Silly of me to think it was only land fees. Hah! If only. My friend and I were talking about this, this weekend, and we figure maybe the most popular places might sell 100 items in a day. If the average price is 300L, then that's about 30000L that a really successful business might make each day. That's only about $120 US. That's not much. Minus expenses and stuff, the most popular business might make $100 a day. Might. Or about $3000 a month. Does that sound about right? I doubt most businesses make money like that. Maybe a handful, but they have to do a whole lot of business and that's still not much of a living. I wish there was some way people could start making some more money for all their efforts. There's just some wonderful things in sl and there'd probably be more if more people could make somehting of a living doing this.

Thanks for the info everyone. I didn't think anyone got rich in sl, but I thought maybe the owners of the big stores might at least be making some rl spending cash. It's kinda cool that so many people are doing something that's more about the work than the money. That's sorta beautiful.

Okay, this is a little crass, but does anyone make any money from their stores? I'm asking because the owners of DV8 have decided to close their store. DV8 is a big store and there always seems to be people there. I would think they do a pretty good business based on the store traffic. I know there are lots of reasons people walk away from businesses in real life and in sl, but people who are running successful businesses don't usually just pack up and leave. If an SL store was making a little extra income, at the least, for people I just don't see them walking away. Are most stores labors of love? If so, thank you for all the beautiful clothes. ;) If it's the land fees, maybe the solution is to just go online. Are there other expenses I'm not thinking of?

Thank, Drongle. It's a learning process. UV maps are next on the syllabus. : )

@Mikki. Thanks, Mikki. I switched my shading to smooth and that helped a little, but it only reduced my size by about 10%. It's still pretty big. I'm going to try recreating the whole thing and reduce my vertices, etc. ETA: Oops. I did the math, Drongle. You left out a zero. I think you meant 49700.

I created this relatively simple mesh obj in blender and imported it to sl. It seemed like a simple build in blender. I made a sphere, using the default settings, and applied the sphere to a circlular curve. I also did something to stretch the sphere, but that's slipping my mind, atm. Anyway, when I imported this into sl its default import numbers were 45K triangles and about 99K vertices! Wow! Total prim count was about 180 prims. There are only about 64 of those beads and each one should only has 32 (default number for a sphere) vertices. That doesn't add up to 99K. First, does anyone have any idea why I ended up with such a large model? Second, what can I do in blender to reduce this? I guess I could change the number of vertices in the original sphere. Thanks for any help.

I'm slowly, very slowly, progressing with Blender and have moved beyond creating some basic mesh shapes. I've imported some of my work into SL and I'm experimenting with those. However, I'm having trouble texturing more complex items and even basic shapes such as spheres and cylinders will distort a texture when I apply them in SL. So far no amount of tweaking will fix that. I don't know much about texturing outside of the basics, so I have some newb questions: Is there a trick to texturing irregularly shaped objects? (I'm going through some youtube tutorials, but no luck so far.) Should I texture my mesh objects in Blender and then import them? Is that even an option? I haven't tried uploading texturing from Blender. What texturing tutorials would you recommend? Thanks

Thank you, everyone. I finally got my brain wrapped around this. My mental roadblock was happening at the upload process where it was asking about the 4 LOD. I just didn't really understand that I was actually uploading 4 different ones. This post helped a lot: http://www.demonkiddesign.co.uk/blog/ (A special thanks to Keli Kyrie for sending me to that blog.)

Hi, Luc. I think the issue is I don't know how to change the LOD in Blender, if that's what you're referring to. I set the LOD to high when I import objects, but that doesn't help for everything I import. How do I set the LOD in blender? Do you have a link you can refer me to?

After some work and research, I think I figured it out. It doesn't seem to be possible to change the detail of an object after you've changed it, but when you first create it in blender hitting F6 brings up details settings. I set my band up to 128 vertices and that's better.

I'm having level of detail issues with small objects I'm importing to sl. They look all chunky when I zoom out. I've set the LOD to high when I import, but that's not helping. I think I have to increase the detail of the objects in blender before I export them, but I'm not sure how to do that. How do I increase or change the detail of blender objects? Thanks.

Just thought I'd post the updated band with the Solidfy mod applied. The color didn't translated well to sl, so maybe it's best not to apply the materials beforehand. tnx, again, drago.

ahhhh that's probably it. and, yes, I am. ty, drago.

I'm starting small with mesh, and I've tried importing some very basic mesh shapes into SL. So far I've had no problem with the primary shapes, such as spheres and cubes, but then I got a little more adventurous and made a simple, gold band in Blender. The image below is the band before I exported it from Blender. This blender object has some thickness, but when I imported the Collada file into SL I got this: Where did I go wrong?? Somehow I lost the thickness of the band importing it into SL. Thanks for any help.

Thanks, everyone. Very helpful. I think the seeds of understanding have taken root. : ) Thanks for the example, Ariel. That helps a lot.

Ahh. That would explain why pants and shirts can share the same hierarchy. What about the shoes layer? Is that ever used?

It's probably not that important to actually making clothing, but I'm trying to understand the hierarchy of clothing layers. Basically, which layer takes precedent over another. I'm looking at Seshat Czeret's chart. The hierarchy of clothing layer is this, from highest to lowest: Skirt, Jacket, Pants and Shirt, Shoes, Socks and Gloves, Underwear, Tattoo. Pants and Shirts and Socks and Gloves seem to be equal in precedent. So two questions, I guess. If the pants and shirt layer have equal precedence couldn't they interfere with each other? For instance, the waist of the pants could interfere with the bottom of a shirt. How does SL decide which wins if they're considered equal? Is the shoe layer used at all? Is it one of the layers in a typical package of shoes? Thanks for the help

I'm starting to learn about creating clothing, too. As Tiffy mentioned, .http://www.mermaiddiaries.com/ is a great place to start. Here are a couple of other links to get you started: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Clothing_Tutorials (Great resource with lots of links to other clothing tutorials and general info.) http://seshat-czeret.blogspot.com/2009/04/theory-of-second-life-skin-and-clothing.html (A fave of mine. Very clear explanations and lots of good info.)