Nacy Nightfire

Since this question has gone unanswered, I'll take the plunge here. If you are looking to "bake shadows with silk materials" then you would not be using the new material system. Baking refers to setting up your scene in your 3d package and baking your arrangement of lighting, shadow, specularity, reflection and other shader and material settings right into your 2D texture. This results in a texture that has static/fixed light/shadow effect which will compete with the direction of shader system in SL (or any other game) since the specularity, for example, will always be in the same spot and at the same intensity because it's baked in. Ideally for a game asset you would restrict your texture "baking" to baking in ambient occlusion since it's a non-directional effect and adds depth and realism to your object when not overdone. On uploading your mesh to SL you would apply the base texture and also optionally upload and plug-in a normal map and/or a specularity map to control real-time lighting effects on your mesh, both of which rely on the game's lighting and shadow system to dictate how the texture of the mesh looks at any given time. The environment in which you are viewing it, in terms of light, shadow and their direction contributes to a more realistic appearance of the mesh. The Normal map (shades of red, green and blue) assists in providing faux detail that isn't actually built into your uploaded mesh's geometry. The normal map causes your mesh to look "as if" detailed geometry exists by influencing how the mesh receives light and shadow, but on looking at the mesh in profile you can see its a bit of fakery. You generally create this map in your 3d program via projecting the fine details of a complex version of your mesh onto a simpler, low poly "game friendly" mesh. Just do a search on YOUTUBE with the name of your 3d program and "normal map creation" and you will find plenty of tutorials to help you out. Edited to add: The normal map is designated as "bumpiness (normal) in the SL texture editor. I believe what is generally referred to as a bump map is grey scale image and a Normal map is a rgb image. Don't get confused here. You need to input a Normal map, not a bump map. The specularity map lets you determine which areas of the mesh look specular and "shiny" and to what degree (I'm not sure if tinting the map influences the color of specularity in SL.) Essentially, the map is a greyscale texture which indicates specularity that is on/white, off/black or some degree of grey to modulate the effect. And it the effect only appears when light in the game actually hits the areas designated to be "specular". This map can be painted in Photoshop or Gimp, etc. using the UV template as a guide, or can be painted right on the model in your 3d program and saved out as a texture. Nalates Urriah has an some excellent tutorials on this topic on her blog http://blog.nalates.net/2013/03/26/second-life-normal-textures-tutorial/ If I'm off-base on any aspect of this explanation I hope someone will chime in and offer a better explanation and point out where I am in error. I'm somewhat confused by the specularity map in SL and how much it is actually specularity vs. creating a mirror/metallic effect. The uploader labels it "Shininess (specular)" but I think of those as two different attributes.

Thanks Rahkis, Chic and Cerise! I appreciate your help with this. I agree I'm just "jumping the gun" a bit and the material system is still in it's beginning stage. It's going to be really terrific when it's fully implemented.

Yes, I agree it's somewhat odd that there was a parameter for my friend to set preferences for "advanced materials" yet she wasn't seeing them correctly. I thought perhaps as it's been recently introduced it might not have been fully implemented in her viewer (her's is a non SL viewer..firestorm?). Either way, and if it's just not set up correctly in her viewer, I'm surprised that it shows ANY bump and that it mismatches the loaded textures. I would hope the viewers would just default to just the diffuse. Otherwise it's going to be really tricky to use these maps and hope that folks new to SL, and or with limited graphics capability, and/or confused are going to see something very ugly and very unexpected on the part of the creator. Here's what I see: And here is what she sees:

I set up a test using a bump/normal map and a spec map. It looked great to me. Then I asked a friend to take a look from a different viewer. She set properties to viewing advanced materials, but I suspect her viewer doesn't yet have the capability to see custom materials. What she saw (she sent me a pic) looked awful, the texture was flat but with some other horrible bump map (concrete?) added from the default bump map options and I believe the spec was overlaying the ambient occlusion map I used as the diffuse texture. I expected that anyone who wasn't set up to view materials would just see the intended diffuse texture but not the bump or the specularity or anything about those last 2 maps. Can someone please enlighten me about what folks can expect to see if they don't have viewers or systems that enable them to see custom maps? Thanks and apologies in advance if I missed that this was answered previously.

Your sofa looks great! Thanks for posting the photo. You've given me enough encouragement to get off my butt and start learning about these maps. I'm having an enormous amount of fun. I'm still playing and experimenting so nothing yet to "show and tell". Very exciting stuff!

Make sure in the Bake palette you have OUTPUT - RGBA selected: Additionally when you save your texture with transparency as a PNG file, you also must select RGBA (I don't think it's on by default):

Hi Honey, If you can post a screenshot of your results that would be helpful. Also I'm not sure what you mean by the 0 menu except possibly you mean the shortcut to proportional editing.

Ooo good tip about holding down ctrl while using the knife tool , thanks!

I agree Rahkis, the method I suggested doesn't really save time, except that it's a "no brainer" method to accomplish the task. Also I think it gives a different result on the orientation on the ends of the extensions that appears different from your method. Both are great solutions and its nice for folks to be exposed to as many methods as possible for this type of task. I personally like to "break things up a bit" and use alternative methods to keep things from being too tediously dull while modeling as all these 3d programs offer many ways to do each single thing and we have the good fortune to adopt our favorites. For me my preferred way to do something can change over time so I enjoy learning ALL the options. So yes that IS the beauty of it! (and if you have other ways please share! although I don't want to hijack the thread here with the suggestion, but this is a basic skill that alot of people starting out can benefit from learning about).

If you are trying to extend the roof so that the extension terminates flat in the z direction, an easy way to accomplish this is to go into object mode and select the roof. Press control A to zero out it's rotation, location and scale. While still in object mode rotate the roof 45 degrees* and return to edit mode. Select each edge and extrude it along the global axis it follows. Return to Object mode and press ALT R to snap the roof mesh position back to where you stored it. (I use custom transforms all the time, but for something this simple it's easy just to rotate the mesh in object mode then edit it and return to object mode using Alt R to snap it back to position.) *or whatever degree is necessary to line things up with the global axis for an edge you want to extend.

Thanks so much Codewarrior. An excellent, valuable thread. I know you spent a huge amount of time on this. 3 cups of tea and 1 cup of coffee later, I have carefully read through the entire post. It's rare to find such useful information on topology in a single spot. I hope folks who are new to this and possibly glaze over when someone mentions "topology" will keep coming back to this thread and read it over and over. As one reaches higher levels of compentancy in CG the fog lifts and it's a great feeling to reach the point of understanding the terminology and the important concepts. It takes some study to get there, but it's very rewarding.

Now THIS made me laugh (screenshot from the video): You are far, far from your being an idiot, and that was an exceptionally terrific video. Well paced and you have a great sense of humor Rahkis! It is the perfect video in my opinion and thanks for all the great tips!

Well I think both methods illustrate how tedious it is to use Zbrush for the purpose of making UVs. It's a very interesting challenge, but for practial purposes, I think we agree it's a big waste of time as a standard workflow. As we both remarked on a prior related thread, UV unwrapping it's something easily, quickly and more precisely accomplished in a conventional 3d program or a program like UV Mapper that is specialized for the task. I have even more tricks I've discovered along the way for manipulating the uvs in Zbrush, such as very carefully using the nudge tool or snakehook tool set to a very low brush size to move verts of the uvs (after you click on the geometry hold down shift to contrain to the axis of the uvs) to shape the islands up, but as we've both experienced it's difficult just to get the basic's of UVing in Zbrush down on paper. I very much enjoyed learning your method and I've picked up a few pointers so I appreciate that you shared your workflow. Thanks.

Here's another method that both allows for multiple polypaint textures to apply to one mesh made in Zbrush, and which also maximizes pixel space use for your polypaint textures. (Also note in Second LIfe you can only import one UV set per mesh, with this method and the method Codewarrior detailed you aren't actually creating more then one UV set, you are simply overlapping UV islands and assigning each of these overlapped islands a unique polygroup to create corresponding texture faces in SL. This way you can apply more then one texture to your mesh referencing a single UV set thus achieving much higher texture resolution then if all the uvs were spread out in the UV space and you used a single texture.) Create your mesh in ZBrush, including polypainting. Move the subdivision geometry slider for the mesh to the resolution you intend to export. Divide the mesh up into polygroups representing the texture areas you want to turn into UV islands. Do not exceed a maximum of 8 polygroups as polygroups are the same as material groups as far as the collada upload is concerned and material groups define texture faces. 8 is the maximum you can define for a mesh in SL. Create a clone of your mesh from the tools palette and in the Subtools palette, rename it "Clone" or something that distinguishes it from the original. With this clone set to the upload resolution you chose, delete any higher and/or lower subdivision levels via the geometry sub-palette. Open UV Master and make sure the Polygroups button is highlighted. You can optionally also use control painting to influence where things get split up. Create your UVs and flatten them. From your flattened UVs select a polygroup/uv island using the show/hide method using CTRL Shift Click and make only one UV island visible. Move and Scale it into position using the Move and Scale tools from the top menu bar. (shortcuts W and E). When one of these buttons is selected you can simply hold down alt and set your cursor in the middle of the geometry, and while holding down your LMB drag to either move, or to scale uniformly, depending on which is selected. Ideally you want to fill out the UV space as best you can. Remember to return to Draw mode (shortcut Q) to unhide and reselect the other islands, in turn. Unhide all the UV islands and select another island for editing, hiding everything else as described above, and moving and scaling the selected island to fill out the UV space. Repeat for all the islands. You will end up with something like this where the islands are stacked on top of each other: Note that as long as you do not move things off the 2d axis that the UV's occupy (turn off Zadd and Zsub while move and scale your uv islands), when you are finished editing your UVs you can unflatten your mesh without a problem. However to be on the safe side keep a back up of your mesh just in case something goes wrong. When you are finished manipulating your UVs, use the "Copy UVs" function in UV Master. Return to the original mesh and, again from UV Master, select "Paste UVs". If you haven't finished polypainting and sculpting your mesh, do so and continue as follows: In the Subtool Palette, make duplicate of your original mesh so you have a back-up on a sub-tool layer. Select the duplicate and choose Split >Group Split. All your polygroups will now be on their own subtool layer. Turn off the "eye" icons on all the subtool layers so only the selected layer is visible. Select a sub-tool layer (not the original whole mesh - just the polygroup parts) and make certain your setting for the sub-tool you have selected is set to it's maximum subdivision level re: the slider in the Geometry subpalette. In the UV sub-palette and select a UV map size and also set the UV Map Border to 8. In the Texture Map sub-palette select Create>New from Polypaint. Clone the resulting texture to send it to the texture palette for export. Repeat for each sub-tool. Note that the UV Border setting isn't persistent so you will have to reset it for each subtool. Also remember before exporting to flip each texture vertically. Export the Clone mesh that was the basis for making the UV set. Export all the textures. Upload to SL. Apply textures.

I suspected you might already understood this Codewarrier, but I assumed a few others could use the info. I tagged my suggestion to your post since it directly related to that issue. That "L-fail" thing in sync mode was an big thorn in my side until I figured this one out.

This photo above shows where to find the view mode selection for individual objects. Nodes is another type window. You can use the shortcut Shift-F3 while hovering over your 3d edit window to change it to the nodes window. It's icon for selecting it from the menu tab is labled and it looks like two stacked rectagles connected by a piece of spagetti on the RIGHT (I originally wrote left). To return it to the mesh window, use the buttons on the menu bar or use the shortcut Shift-F5. Edited to add: Clearly I don't know my left from my right. The "noodle" on the node icon is on the right : /

Toysoldier, anyone who sells their 3D art and collects money from other people, whether its on a small scale in SL or if they work full time in the industry should consider themselves a "SERIOUS MESH CREATOR". And they should attempt to learn from people, without argument, who have advanced skills - plus the time and interest - to train newcomers to the field. A job worth doing is worth doing correctly and in the end it's generally the easiest and quickest solution. However, after knowing the correct approach to this task, If you choose a limited or non-optimal solution for your workflow, that's perfectly fine, which is why I answered your question, despite my not recommending the solution be used. It's unnecessary, however, to keep justifying your choice to go that route here on the forum. And it's confusing to the many beginners who rely on the forum to get good information on how to approach their work on a very fundemental level. CG is very intimidating to folks who are just starting out and they need the right direction from people with experience. If those people happen to have a professional background even better. I'm so grateful those folks take to time to help us here. And you mistakely assumed I was a professional and I'm far from it, so you can't really speak to population of mesh forum watchers and there and their skill level or needs. I spent alot of time in Zbrush before I got serious and wanted to learn how to make things properly. I was pounding a round peg into a square hole and although I could make my stuff look ok, I knew I was missing a big piece of the puzzle. All which is why I decided to get serious with Blender (FREE and used by amateurs and professionals, alike). Suddenly I understood what good topology really meant and the importance of optimizing uvs, etc. A whole world opened up for me and all the strange scary terminology started to make sense. And I had a lot more fun. You are shortchanging yourself if you dont' keep an openmind to this. You don't have to defend Zbrush. The professionals do use it, and you get no argument there. But it's not enough and if you can only learn one program, Blender (again FREE which Zbrush is not) is a better choice for all those folks you are defending who have limited resources. Using Blender the user has complete control of his/her geometry and UVS and for making streamlined low poly game assets it is superior to Zbrush. Edited to correct spelling

I think you wrote that you split your model up into 11 polygroups and got results you were happy with. Then you tried to export your mesh with all 11 polygroups still assigned and the exporter warned you it would be a problem. You then reduced the polygroups and re-uvd. However you didn't need to go to the bother of changing the polygroup count and reprocessing the uvs. You only needed to remove the polygroups (thus, ending up with the default one) and export. The UV's you made based on temporarily setting up 11 polygroups would remain. Again, polygroups become material groups which represent texture faces in Second life. If the mesh object only has a single texture there's no point exporting with more then one material group in that case.

I have to correct a misconception on your part. I'm not a professional CG artist. After I joined SL in fall of 2007 I began learning 3d art and I'm self-taught. When I dabbled in sculpties I used many free programs, including Blender. I caught the bug and ultimately treated myself to Zbrush which I used for quite a while. When mesh was introduced I began using Blender almost exclusively. Over the course of 5 1/2 years I've purchased preowned versions of Lightwave and Poser on Ebay for very little money. My husband bought me Modo for my birthday about 4 or so years ago when it cost about the same as Zbrush, it's a great modeling program, but I prefer Blender. I'm simply a hobbiest who had devoted alot of time and some personal resources towards working on 3d art.

I want to add that just because you created polygroups for the purposes of breaking your mesh up into UV islands, doesn't mean you have to keep these polygroups on export. After creating your uvs, if you return your model to one polygroup before exporting, you will have only one material group and no complaints from Second Life on upload. Changing back to one polygroup will not disturb the UVs you made.

You wrote: "As for the comments that ZSbrush's UV Master not being the best at controling the creation of UV maps, you all are likely correct but when you consider that Zbrush's method of texturing completely prior and in 100% isolation of the creation of the UV maps and that Zbrush users only spend seconds in the UV map creation process, so far I consider it s minor limitation. Zbrush is the king of creating static models and texturing them." I'm glad my suggestion helped you get a better, however not optimal result. I want to disabuse any 3d modeler beginners of the notion that ZBrush is the king of static models and texturing, if any such people are reading this thread. ZBrush has a very solid place in the professional's CG tool box for creating 3d art. It is not, however, an optimal stand-alone solution. Zbrush, is simply one of many tools available, and, like many, has limitations.

The uv mapper plug-in for Zbrush is very imprecise and difficult to work with. It's fine to roughly uv organic shapes, but its hard to optimize the uvs for a hard surface object like a spool in Zbrush. That sort of object is very quick to model and uv in Blender or any other 3d modeler package (not sculpting package) with much greater precision. I happen to really like Zbrush, but it's limited. That being said it looks from your uv map that you did not utilize the features that UV Mapper offers such as symmetry, set polygroups as island, the paint system to attract and repel seams and the seams from ambient occlusion. The following examples are two different maps for a spool First I set it to use ambient occlusion as its basis: The next attempt to uv I seperated parts of the spool into Polygroups and selected split by Polygroups in theUV master set up. I also used the Control Painting feature to guide the plug in to get the seams approximately where I wanted them:

Erwin, you are well on your way here, but I'll also mention there is a free sculpting program called Sculptris that you can get off of the Pixologic (Zbrush) Website: http://pixologic.com/sculptris/emails/operating-system.php. It's not exactly Zbrush, but it's the same idea and it's free and fun to use. Check out youtube on this topic if you are curious. I'll also mention here that despite owning Zbrush, Mudbox, Lightwave and Modo, I LOVE Blender. I purchased Lightwave and Modo when they were low priced options. This is no longer the case. The upgrades on these programs now has them priced over 1000 usd (I believe..maybe I wrong about that, but the prices are getting up there). This makes Blender even more valuable as a full featured 3d package. My experience with Zbrush as beginner was pretty frustrating. It takes a long time to get up to speed with these programs. Personally I took to Blender like a duck to water and I use it every single day. I'm still struggling with Lightwave and Modo, however. As to add-ons. ALL these 3d packages have add-ons. But Blender's are for the most part free. Addons/plug-ins for commercial 3d packages can run from free to a few hundred dollars, adding to an already substantial purchase price.

To select UV islands when in this sync mode, set your selection mode to Face in the Edit window and and you can then use the shortcut L to select islands from the mesh itself. If you've broken away parts that have become new islands in UV space that aren't marked on the model, then L on the mesh won't select them, but you can quickly correct this by selecting "Seams from Islands" in the UV menu in the UV edit window and seams will be added to the mesh for those "unmarked" islands. It's not all that intuitive, but when you get the hang of it, it's very handy to use this method and not to have to leave sync mode to quickly select islands.

As much as I'm a huge advocate of Blender, Oni stated he is going to school to become a professional in CG. First of all, all these programs he mentioned ARE free or practically free for him since he's a student. But more importantly, as much as we can argue that Blender can stand up against all the other commercial programs, realistically the people who will hire him are looking for MAYA skills and not Blender skills. Trying to learn with Blender as a beginner and then switching to Maya for class instruction would only be confusing.