Nacy Nightfire

Answer: ME I thought I'd share a solution to the most annoying problem I've been having with Blender. No one else has reported this on this forum as a problem they were experiencing, but I've read elsewhere it's a problem for some folks. In a nutshell, if my file gets to large I lose the ability to 'Pan" the scene and I can't place my cursor. And in that state its like someone has tied my right hand behind my back and handed me a pencil to write with. To continue with the file and get in close I'd have to select geometry and hit the numpad period key. Was it the density of the geometry? Windows XP? Blender? Well after hours of research and trying everything think I could think of I discovered a button that was turned on by accident. It's "lock to cursor" selection in the Transform panel. Since I've never used it before or really knew what it was all about, it was off completely off my diagnostic "radar". What I thought was happening due to heavy geometry or the eventual breaking of the file, was in reality the likelihood that as I progressed along with the file I got tired , sloppy, then flailed and unintentionally hit that button. I think we've all experienced this kind of problem and I'm sharing this with anyone else that might find it useful. Perhaps others can share some similar experience with Blender that they've self diagnosed and fixed after much consternation, that they haven't yet posted to the forum for the benefit of all.

I made this type of bow quite quickly using a a box for the loops and a plane for the tails. Starting with one cube I deleted two opposite sides of the cube to make a "loop" of four faces and enlongated it by stretching. I added some edge loops to the stretched area and then subdivided "smooth" the whole thing to make it a bit to smooth it and make it more "loop like", then I used proportional editing on the center edgeloops of the loop to scale it together in the middle. I duplicated this piece and rotated it 45 degrees. I added the plane slightly behind the loops and again subdivided and used scaling with proportional editing to pinch everything in toward the center, however I also pulled out middle section of the tail to bring it forward to make the "knot". Because I wanted this to be viewable from most angles I added the modifyer "solidify" Don't forget you can also use sculpting tools to make your bow more natural and organic...use the grab and inflate and pinch brushes. A little fussing goes a long way.

Pamela when this happens it's possible that these "misbehaving" faces did not get assigned to a the bake texture with the rest of the porch faces. In face select mode in the edit window select all faces you want to bake to and in the UV texture space delete whatever texture appears by clicking the x to clear the texture assignment (you may not actually see a texture in the UV space, but do this anyway) and then with all the faces selected add a new bake texture then rebake.

It absolutely does make it clearer!!! Thanks a gazillion Drongle. I don't know where I'd be without all you excellent and generous help here on the forums. I bravely embarked on the adventure of editing the Collada file, per your instructions and it WORKED. Although I really do not have a full grasp on what everything in the file means, I get the sense there are three "sections" in the file and the Geometry part in is the middle. Just to make sure I got it right, I sorted all three areas, not just the geometry part, on the lower lod file to match the high. Although not difficult, it's tedious and time consuming. I'm weighing the tedium of this process against the tedium of perfectly matching up parts in SL. Probably it is stil worth it to get the Collada file correct, but it would be terrific if someone could implement your recommendations for alphabetizing the parts. Hats off and unlimited kudo-hugs to you!

Drongle, you wrote: "That means the only way to control the order is to create the meshes for each object at each LOD in the same order. This is tricky to do, although not impossible. You can do it in retrospect by shiftD copying in the right order and deleting the originals, I think." I'm waaay out of my league in this discussion here between yourself and Gaia, but I'll mention that to make the LODs in the case I've described below, I created the highest LOD first then used shift D to copy and move to a new layer and reduced via removal of edgeloops to make the Lower LOD. With the physics shape I just went into bounding box mode and used triangles to delineate the bounding boxes with just enough tris to support the number of materials. For a more complex LOD I would just shift-D copy from high, to medium, to low. Is there something wrong with this workflow method?

Excellent explaination Drongle, thanks again so much for your help. I actually understand this now

Thanks so much Drongle. I semi-understand this. I'm a bit dense about data blocks and why one would set a material as object vs data, but I plan to do more research in hope of finally getting it into my brain. I couldn't access the link, but I'm guessing it might be to a previous posting that you authored so I'll search that out and re-read it. I didn't quite understand it then, but I may have a better sense of it now. Later tonight I'll try to edit the collada file and see what I can come up with.

(sorry for the split post..I had problems adding text after I uploaded the pics) Here's another example of what I'm going through (hell). I made this fan with three objects. Motor (one material), Blades (two materials), Light (two materials). I made a low lod model and a phys shape for each obj comprised a triangle for as many materials as the object contained and I assigned that material. I placed the triangle(s) to create an identical bounding box as the object part represented. I used CTLA on all parts repeatedly. I assigned and reassigned the materials being very careful to give the same material to the lod parts and the phy shape. I made sure there were the right number of users for each material and there were no extraneous materials in the file. The order of the material assignments is identical on the lods and phy shape. I STILL get the warning about the material not being a subset of the reference mesh AND there's a distortion (second pic) in the mesh of the low lod. I've tried exporting as obj and reimporting, That worked once but there was flipped normals. I went back into the file, flipped the normals, tried to upload and got that dang warning about material assignments again. And I've been VERY careful to select "only selected" on exporting. When I individually upload each obj part with its low lod, I do not get distortion in the uploader or any complaints about the materials. Why can't I import it as a group? Is it possible to do so? Are there any limitations as to how many objects can be uploaded together ( in this case 3 Objects, Total materials 5. Max material per object 2.) For a project like this it' much simpler to align the parts in Blender then try to center then perfectly in SL (for me, anyway). And they have to stay seperate objects for script reasons. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Leanne the person you should be addressing your comments and compliments to is the poster suetabulous Yootz who made the centaur.

Thanks Masami, I didn't notice that feature was inclulded. That's a fantastic addition for easy mesh clean up. I'm overwhelmed by the goodies in this update.

Asha that's a terrific add-on! What a timesaver. Thanks for posting that link.

Thanks Drongle and Gaia for the responses. I did export each lod as a seperate collada file. I didn't try to group them. Also I was very careful to check export "only selected". If it occurs again I'll try to screenshop the uploader. It wasn't a complete distortion, just an odd stretching of the geometry. In blender all lods matched exactly in position, but somehow that changed and it these two lod meshes stretched in the uploader. The obj export/import corrected whatever was causing the problem. Still it is useful to figure out the reason if possible.

I'm trying to figure out if my LOD problem was a human error or an Blender 2.63.0 bug. I made a mesh with 2 lod levels. On upload the lods became distorted. I very carefull and repeatedly applied ctl-a to zero out location, rotation and scale for each lod mesh in object mode, then I pressed the shortcut U for each mesh part to just to make certain each part was a single user for its mesh data, then for good measure I selected shift-ctl-a to make duplicates real. Then I repeated all of this 3 times. No luck. Only by exporting the meshes as objs and reimporting into Blender then exporting in the collada format did I get what I expected. This solved my problem, but I'd dearly love to know why this happened and what I might be doing wrong. Any ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks everyone who posted to this and thanks Pamela for posting your problem with uploading your lod. With the great input here (and I know it's tediously repetitive to re-explain this stuff over and over - I'm so grateful you are all willing to continue doing so) I finally got that moment of clarity about LODs that I, personally, was struggling to reach. I'm so happy and relieved I now understand this.

Thanks very much for the chart and the detailed explanation. Extremely helpful.

Drongle, what does the symbol "-" mean here.

If you have an Ipad/Itouch/Iphone check the Apps and Podcasts for Blender tutorials to watch on the go. I find these very handy.

Lol Pamela. I just noticed you wrote: "Blender is affordable as long as you have plenty of blood, sweat, and tears. :-" I noticed you modestly left out the most important component - talent. And I'm not sure Drongle isn't being unnecessarily self-effacing by claiming his level of texturing talent holds him back from joining in the merchant arena, but it's certainly the case with me. I'd say the secret formula for making an object such as that lovely leather couch is: 10 percent blood, 10 percent sweat, 10 percent tears, 10 percent insomnia, 20 percent tenacity and commitment and 40 percent innate talent. I hope that adds up to 100. Even my most basic math skills are weak.

Asha, all of those are terrific Blender tutorial sites and are at the top of my favorites list. I'll also add a few more: – All tutorials by Ira Krakow are terrific. http://blendernerd.com/ http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/ http://gryllus.net/Blender/3D.html http://blenderunderground.com/ http://blendertips.com http://www.tutorialtrack.com/?series=Blender crash course

lol, THAT looks familiar . As Pamela mentioned, she and I have been working together in Blender getting her up to speed in building with mesh. Pam however is superb texture artist as well as an experienced builder and business owner in SL. The beauty of these piece are directly related to her eye for good design and her texturing skills. The 3d program she is using has no real bearing on the results she's achieved. I've helped out here and there by building some foundation meshes, such as the beginnings of the couch, tables, etc. But Pamela took them over, reworked the meshes and textured them beautifully. Her work is doubly impressive since she's starting out here with the introduction of Mesh in SL as a beginner learning a whole new way to build in such a short amount of time. As a learning tool, the main advantage of using Blender is its a program many people use here to create in SL so you are very likely to find someone in SL here on the Mesh Forum who can lend a hand when you have specific issues as you go up the learning curve. Eventually Pamela may choose to switch to a commercial program (I myself also own Modo, Zbrush and Lightwave 10), but I'm mostly working in Blender because I enjoy it and because Pamela and I can speak the same Blender "language" which is helpful for learning. All programs do essentially the same things and some do it better then others, but I'd recommend you first learn what these "things" 3d programs are suppose to do using a free program before investing your money. And again, geometry for games has to be fairly low poly so I can't emphasize enough how important texturing skills are to get professional effects that override this limitation. That means your skill in a graphics program like Photoshop or Gimp is equally as important to get the results you see on these items from Pam's store.

You wrote: (Note: In the Blender version that will be coming out next, you can delete multiple edge loops at once.) ...and I cried with joy. Yipeee! Multiple edgeloop delete!

Nothing beats careful removal of edgeloops by hand or retopology for optimizing your dense meshes to import into SL, but there is the Decimation modifier. The version of this modifier in 2.62 (as I understand it) does not preserve the integrity of your UV's however, but I believe version 2.49 has a script that does work well with UV's so you might want to explore that earlier version. When you decimate you convert your geometry to triangles which can seem somewhat random and not ideal for things you might animate. With the decimation modifier, select a percentage of the density you want to preserve and the geometry reduces. As a start you might check out this youtube video or search for others with the term "decimate" : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4X2puDf85Q Edited to add the missing word "not" as in "NOT ideal for things you might animate"

Thanks so much, Masami, this is a superb video that I'll be watching over and over. I've been hesitant to jump into the remesh tools, and now I feel I really understand how they are supposed to work.

You asked for a follow up explanation from hibit, but I hope you don't mind my interjecting myself here. Go into UV edit mode and try all the different UV unwrap modes. You'll find for a plane if you select "Project from View Bounds" for example, your texture will be applied in the orientation you expect. Orientation from a straight "Unwrap", even for a simple plane may seem somewhat arbitrary but there is most likely the expection more work is yet to be done to get the UVs perfect via tweaking (moving, scaling, resewing, etc.) the initial unwrap results. This doesn't have to do with Normals, however. edited because I spelled hibits name incorrectly. My apologies.