bodzette Coignet

Nacy, Thanks, I figured it out. Yeah ZSketch is *much* quicker for blocking things out! I think I have the basic workflow down for the creation of the mesh part. Now it's down to learning to sculpt better and texturing! Thanks again.

And... a textured version of it. Still pretty crappy but not bad for version 2.

So after some pain I finally got a more or less acceptable hair model in zbrush. It had some 300,000 polys however, so I had to decimate it way down. Here is the end result uploaded into SL: (not textured yet - I'll play with texturing next)

LOL: couldn't figure out how to get it to a polymesh after I'd played with snakehook tool. I suspect what I'm doing wrong is using the 2.5D snakehook tool. So instead I didn't use Zspheres. I redid it with standard spheres and cones etc and then used the snakehook brush which applies to mesh in edit mode. I also used the move tool and the rake tool. I subdivved the individual subtools to div 4 or 5. This is what I have so far. Ugly but it's a work in progress that feels like it's moving in the right direction.

Nacy, Thanks so much for the tip on how you made your hair! I haven't been able to do anything so far except (finally!) got a bunch of zspheres drawn onto an SL Avatar head but I'm going to stubbornly hack at it until I get something that resembles a hairstyle and then hack at spotlight till I figure out how to texture. Here's as far as I got till now:

Nacy that's *awesome* OMG! The spotlight tool is absolutely awesome for texturing!

From the looks of this, it's also RC Le Tigre: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Release_Notes/Second_Life_RC_LeTigre/11#11.06.28.234198  11.06.28.234198 This is the "mesh-prep 2" project. scheduled 2011-06-29 We have taken the latest development changes from the mesh development branch and merged them in with this code. This gets us closer to releasing mesh.Included are infrastructure and framework changes to support the release of mesh. This release does not include any mesh functionality.

Well I'm doing my best, but I'm a rank amateur compared to all of you. If I have a mesh I can't upload for no obvious reason, I make a jira and attach the mesh.

And here is the hair. I know. It's pretty bad, but I'm sure after doing another ten of them I'll get better. I still haven't added any flexi-prims to it. So far it more or less looks like crappy low-end sculpty hair but I'm a beginner so what the heh LOL So each of the main pieces are subtools (zbrush equivalent of individual sculpties) on which I used mostly the move brush and occasionally the standard brush. I also imported a SL avatar head in obj and resized the mesh round it to give me some scale on the SL head for reference. Then I tried to bend the mesh round the head using the move brush and also the matchmaker brush to try to deform the various subtools better round the head mesh. Then I deleted the head mesh subtool out of the subtool list and used subtool master to merge all of the tools into a single subtool. Then I made a 1024 pixel UV map, set UV map to map-planar and used Zsculpty collada exporter. The version you see in the SL side of the photo is a sculpty version rather than the collada version, also exported with Zsculpty because it works with both. I need to seriously bring up my sculpting skills though but whatever, it's all good fun in the beginning. I think I have the workflow basically down now. Just need lots and lots and lots of practise.

OK Here's the gun I made. I used shadowbox for the complicated bits and a cylinder tool for the front part which I masked and alternately inflated. I used lazy mouse and backtrack snap to track for the grooves along with a small brush size on the standard brush. Where there were irregularities I subdivided the mesh up to div 4 and smoothed out there to get better control. Likewise I subdivved it up to that level for better control with the mask and deformation-> inflate. Then I merged all the subtools into a single tool. At the end of it all I had a pretty cool though a bit amateurish model (not bad for a first serious attempt though) but with way too many polys at something like 700,000 polys. So I used decimation master to cut the poly count down to to 65 K, after which I exported it all to collada with zsculpty plugin. I textured it just with a black color in SL. I'll get into texturing later once I am reasonably good at sculpting.

I don't know anything about maya but when I try to export textures from Zbrush they don't wrap properly unless they are exported as "planar" textures.

So I think I can put the lie to those who say that Mesh creation will be in the "exclusive hands of an elite bunch of creators". Two months ago I never had even made a single sculpty and had barely been able to build a bunch of prims. Using zbrush has been a hard slog to learn over the last two months but yesterday I made a reasonable facsimile of an assault rifle and uploaded it to the mesh grid. I've also made some sculpty hair which is a lot worse looking that the rifle but I want to be able to do hard surface modeling as well as organics so hair and guns lol Anyways if I can do it anybody can. I *so* can't wait till mesh comes to the big grid.

OK That makes sense. Morphs. @Feynt, Would you need to weight the mouth mesh of whatever mesh you were using with the eye bones in order to use them? (Not a huge rigging expert)

OK so we have two versions: one is it won't work unless you use an alpha and wear the mesh on top of your default avatar body. The other is yes it will work. Here's a question: how do animations of the face e.g. the mouth work right now if there are no bones in the face? My assumption was the SL default armature includes bones for the face. If not, how do the emote animations work then?

re: IFMesh is much more expensive then nobody will use it That's not necessarily true, neither in RL nor in SL. There are various factors including but not limited to: how much will people value mesh once it has been uploaded? The two reasons why people would still upload mesh even though it's more expensive that immediately spring to mind are that creators can sell way more copies and that even if they are more expensive and demand is low, people will still buy them for builds because they effectively get more vertices for their buck.