Nacy Nightfire

Overall, I'm pleased with my beginner attempts to build and skin my own avatar mesh. I do have two questions. 1) Is the head making jerking movements because of the default eye animations? Can I incorporate the default eyes or if not, can I freeze the bones so they don't move at all? Or do I need a freeze animation inworld. I'm seeing some odd bending when sitting. Can that be overcome? Is it trial and error or do I need to work on the bone heat or move verts around? Any help would be appreciated. Pics below:

Well that was fun!

I strongly encourage you to open a comedy club with that avatar as the host. In fact "I smell Funny" would be an excellent name for the club.:matte-motes-smile:

I got 100 YAAAY! It's only "test" test BOOOO! :matte-motes-asleep-2:

Thanks for your response to my question Vivianne, I apologize for waiting almost 2 months for expressing my appreciation..I somehow missed it. I'm still struggling with the set up and customization of the SL forum..too much more fun things to create and do then fiddle with it - or so I tell myself :matte-motes-nerdy: I imagine I'm not alone in experiencing a continuing round of emotions about how the mesh thing has evolved. I spent hours and hours of time learning the "ins and outs of sculpty making" for clothing accessories in particular, and I've purchased a fair amount of somewhat/relatively costly sculpty making inworld aids so I was both glad and sad to think that it might be come obolete...I still feel both relieved AND disappointed that it will be sticking around..weird, huh? Well, I'm happy to settle on mesh, rather being the "great new thing to over rule all other forms of creation in SL" to settling into just one of 3 main choices to build things, depending on one's needs. It both provides new challenges (and I can't wait to see what people come up with on the main grid...someone always defys everyones idea of what's possible) and at the same time all past efforts in learning and creation aren't for naught.

That's handy! Thank you Tapple

I dropped my Linden home with my premium membership when I realized I wasn't going to have the time free to be involved in SL as I had in the past. However, I really enjoyed my LL home while it lasted. I particularly liked the ability to abandon a home and find a new one if a neighbor moves in that is irritating. Stylistically the more modern versions aren't my favorite, but they turned out to be the best for decorating and moving around. Also I turned my draw size way down so I only had a veiw of a few houses and the rest was water....every house can have a waterview! Because I really enjoy the challenge of fractional sculpty making and texturing, I had a house filled to the brim with one-prim-wonders, lots of arm chairs, bed, desks, sofas, chandelier and interesting lighting, rugs, decorative 3 panel screens, artwork, etc., etc. It amazed me how much I could pack into the place with the prim limit. Loads of fun. I was hoping the introduction of mesh would enable even more prim economy and building opportunities, but the cost advantage of mesh over prim and sculpty building isn't panning out. The good news, however, is the time spent learning about sculpty making and the time spent building up a sculpty inventory isn't lost. Yes the place is deserted, but alot of people move to private sims for respite and tranquility..this experience is no different. Once can always hang out at hubs, clubs and music events, etc. when in a people mode.

Thanks Drongle and Dain! I didn't actually import in a physics shape, I thought I'd selected the lowest lod...strange. Oh well. It finally worked out. Thanks so much for the help.

Could someone please explain this error message and is it the result of overlapping UVs? Also where is the log file? Thanks in advance.

Bodzette, you want to be working in Zsketch, not Zspheres. If you are using ZB 3.4 or 4 this should be available to you. Its basically a drawing mode for zspheres and you set it up by appending a zsphere and pressing "SHIFT A" to start the zsketch process (also accessible in the tools palette). If you go to the Pixologic website there are some excellent videos teaching the ins and outs of zsketching and its worthwhile to learn this. In a bit I'll post some pics of the process I used.

That was fun! Nice job and thanks for setting out the comparison, Vivenne. Very helpful. I don't see enough advantage to buying the mesh version over the sculpted. The barrel is an "eye" catcher so it really matters, and the sculpted barrel holds its texture considerably better then the low poly mesh version. I agree the mesh sink is slightly better then the sculpted, and I'm not convinced there's much difference in the wood texture to matter. Over all I'd buy the sculpted set.

Thanks bodzette and your gun is excellent - I meant to post that! Thanks so much for showing us your work. Zbrush is soooo addictive. I'm sure you're following the Zbrush Central forum for tips and help. If not, I can't recommend it enough. This quickie hairstyle is about 39 prims and could be less if I took time on it (or maybe a bit more with added flexis for some movement) I'm guessing a nicely modeled hairstyle might be able to sacrifice the flexie part. My average prim/sculpty/flexi hairstyle is about 180 prims and although there's no limit to attachment prims, it helps alot overall to tone the attachment primcount down. Hopefully those extra talented SL Hair artists will adopt mesh put that into practice.

In your artistic hands Vivenne zsketching will be a magical hair making machine! It's alot of fun! For anyone wondering how I set myself up, I loaded the avatar and deleted the top and bottom to reduce polys that have to be drawn. Then I append a zsphere as a subtool. Press "N" to select the zsphere" Press "SHIFT A" to go into zsketching mode and draw your zsketch right on the avie head. Keep toggling "A" to see how its going and when happy press "make polymesh". Pick it up in the tool pallette. Smooth and model. Decimate. It might be hard to texture from the the "quick and dirty" UV master UV's, but with polypainting, maybe not. I haven't gotten that far yet.

You might find Zsketching a nice solution for making hair. Here's a pic of a quickie example (not textured). I used zsketch and the snake brush tool to pull out "strands" and a few other basic tools for shaping, then decimated. Edited to add picture of quick polypaint texture test (grey scale image slapped on hi res version using spotlight and color tinted in SL):

auto retopo? Exciting indeed!

Anyone here using Sculptris? It's a free sculpting program from Pixologic for Zbrush users. I haven't used it much, but after downloading the most recent version I noticed there's a brush one can use to selectively lower "tessellation" on user specified areas of the mesh. This might have interesting possibilities for "painting" decimation where you can spare the resolution and other lod uses. The program exports obj. "Dynamic Tessellation Sculptris frees you from the need to worry about your model's geometry. As you model, Sculptris is constantly analyzing the surface to ensure that there are enough triangles to display the details that you're creating. If there aren't, Sculptris automatically divides the area under the brush while leaving the rest of the model unchanged. " http://www.pixologic.com/sculptris/

Maybe this will help you out. Crease tool in Maya for hard edges that transfer to zbrush (and I would assume also Mudbox)).

:matte-motes-smile:Thanks so much Ashasekayi....It's been a while since I tried rigging. This time I'm not going to forget to write all these great tips down.

Still using 2.49. I think its because I decimated the mesh (/me boinks myself on the head) so it can't deform properly. Although in Blender's pose mode it seems to deform splendidly. In SL its all wierdness.

Ok, I couldn't program my way out of a paper bag, but I figured out what I was doing wrong. I assigned a material in edit mode, but I needed to assign a material via F5/Material Button "make new". Now I have to figure out why my uploaded rigged mesh looks like chewed up gum.

daeTriangles.material = mesh.materials[k].name AttribluteError: ‘NoneType’ object has no attribute ‘name’ I rigged my mesh and all the vertex groups seem to be properly assigned. I assigned a single material to the mesh and I made uvs. I also "made real" the modifier. When I select the mesh and the bones in obj mode and try to export I get the above message. Anyone know what this means?

It actually spits out a highly accurate texture. The youtube video author mentioned other similiar types of photo to mesh programs but he has found the texture results from this program to be superior. Also the process gives you some opportunity to edit the mesh results before you commit to having the obj processed. Processing happens on Autodesk servers. There is absolutely more work to do with the model, but the realism is quite impressive. The youtube tutorials are excellent and really nicely goes thru the process step by step. Retopology, reprojection and decimation are necessary, but it seemed to be a relatively quick process in Zbrush. I'm sure other programs have similar capablilities, but the ablility to transfer the image into "polypaint" (which I think is just a fancy name for vertex paint), is a great thing since you can retopologize and change your uvs, then re-transfer polypaint back to a new uv texture arrangement.

I just finished watching the tutorials...they are fantastic, even if one has no intention of making use of this tool but uses Zbrush. Good stuff there.

Well actually there still is alot of clean up work and retopologizing that needs to be done, I think. Here are some videos from Youtube that someone posted on the ZBrush Central forum site: HD Part1: HD Part2: HD Part3: HD Part4:

http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/photo_scene_editor/overview/