Sienia Trevellion

Hi all! I've been making mesh lately, and I always export the ambient occ to Photoshop, texture there, and then upload my textures to SL. I want to play around with baking the textures in blender and then importing those baked textures to SL. Does anyone have a pipeline for this? Most of the posts I find about this are outdated. I tried going into the UV/Image Editor in Blender and chose "Pack Image". Then uploaded it to SL. It charged me the extra linden for the texture uploads (there are 4 materials - 4 textures) but the mesh imported all black without textures, even though I selected textures in the upload window.

In the past I've made silly errors like having duplicate meshes overtop one another, etc. So let me look through this one more time meticulously and if I can't find anything I will gladly send it to you to do with it whatever you wish. Thank you for your help and offering suggestions of what to look for. Update: Gaia - I think it is the size of the bezier loop. I just increased the thickness and the upload wants to work now. Crazy. All this time and that's what worked. I didn't do any of the other things this time, just changed the size to make it larger.

Gaia, I'm using static as it's a non-rigged item. Now, everytime I go to upload and calculate fees, it tells me that the top object in my models outliner can't be uploaded. On a hunch, I deleted the bezier cuve necklace loop and tried to upload, and now it's letting me. I have converted this bezier cuve to mesh. Could it be that it's too thin? I had read that small things sometimes have issues. This piece seems to be the common denominator on all of my uploads that are having problems. I'm not 100% sure about that, but it seems to be the case.

I'm at wits end on this. I went through, cleared out and added all new materials. Added a plane and assigned a material to it, so that I can add an invisible texture to it. Added one extra triangle on "Material A" that touched the edges of "Material B". I've made sure to select "Selection Only" when exporting. Just tried using the LLViewer rather than Firestorm and the error I'm getting now is: Dae Parsing Issue. I've seen posts where people got around the problem by unchecking "Single Matrix" on the collada exporter but I don't see that option. Maybe it was on an old version of blender, I'm running 2.66. Saw another post where someone exported it to their desktop and then SL accepted the upload. Tried that, it initally allowed me to change the settings in the uploader window (which was new) and when I went to calculate fees I got a popup with the MAV_LOCK error again. Read yet another post where someone had used symbols or long names in the file name and made sure that mine does not. So thennnnnn....I tried to save it to another area with a new name, the folder I have Blender in. I had read a few posts on that clearning up the issue as well. Interestingly enough, it then gave me an error stating the name of (what piece of the model) was giving the error. That was new. I deleted it from the model completely. Tried the upload again and got the same .dae error saying the same piece ".006" was not able to be uploaded. Odd since I deleted it and it's nowhere to be found in the outliner. Not giving up yet but definitely frustrated.

I've read a lot of posts in the forum about this. I keep getting this error for the last 4 days. I've created 3 different models, rebuilt one of them 5 times from scratch to figure out why I keep getting this error. I've tried different viewers. Tried to upload in a non-pathfinding region. Re-downloaded blender. Rebuilt files from scratch. Made sure not to use mirrors at all on the rebuilt files. Made sure all doubles were removed. The only thing I've now found in common is that I used the bezier curve on all three projects and made a necklace loop. So I tried to then upload each piece of the file separately to isolate the problem area....none would upload with exception to one file last night. It allowed me to upload both the necklace loop and the actual necklace separately, but not together. I just created a new model this morning and got the same error. Any thoughts that my noob self might be missing that are obvious to any of you? *Update: Just was able to upload the necklace only without the necklace loop (bezier curve). So it seems the issue is there. Only thing I want to mention is that when making the necklace loop I made half of the necklace then duplicated it, joined it and then created the middle section by joining to points of the path to make a segment at the back of the neck. The direction of the bezier curve all flowed the same direction after that and I didn't see any problems with it. But thought I should note what was done. I made the depth on the bevel: 0.005. The resolution: 2. Fill: Full. I then converted it to mesh. So, I don't know!

Thanks so much Codewarrior, I hadn't seen your thread so I'll read through that as a start and go from there.

Could anyone point me in the direction of some good bone weighting discussions / tutorials? I've watched Gaia's and learned a good bit, but I attempted a dress recently that made me want to drink myself to death. Why are dresses so evil? I also ran into a bit of an issue that was unexpected. Because of the shape of the dress, it had a visible inside area. When weight painting, I found that I would accidentally weight paint areas on the front and inside of the dress when I was working on the back of the dress. It was tough! I used a small amount of weight and strength but still found it happened enough to be a constant annoyance. Any tips are appreciated.

Rahkis, thank you for helping me make this properly! You're the best!

When I first made the petals, I had a subsurf and solidify modifiers on them. I applied both and then I went in and deleted loops to pair it down to what you see now. I'll keep this in mind and it really is apparent to me now that how I was going about it with the susurfs wasn't the best. I learned soooo much from all of this. Thank you again!

Either way, it's a whole heck of a lot better than what I was doing previously! Here's where I'm at now... Collar & Inset fabric area (Now one piece): 844 Faces Pearls (I cut off the back of them that weren't visible anyway): 320 Faces Roses: 3,398 Faces - Still trying to get them lower but not sure if I have the know-how to do it effectively

Oh I see what you're saying. Let me do it again and as you said, clean up the triangles. Yay! I'll post the final cleaned up version when done. You are a lifesaver and a great teacher for blender noobs

Rahkis, I love you!

Ohhhhh!!!!! Yes! Okay let me try this!

I reworked it and was able to drop it, but not enough to be reasonable yet. I'll keep at it. These are the counts after applying a subsurf (if any), and focusing on using smooth instead. The petals are the thing that keep stumping me because they are double sided. I'm going to focus more on dropping their count next. Material 1 (collar): 2816 Material 2 (inset fabric): 64 Material 3 (pearls): 960 - On this note, is there a way to make a smooth, low-poly sphere? I'm going to look around for info on this on blendercookie and such. Material 4 (roses): 14676 I'm wondering about something. On this collar, could I delete every other row of edge loop but keep the area at the bottom so the scallop stays. Is this bad topology? I know my questions end up being more like conversations but I learn a ton here. You guys rock.

Aww, thank you so much, that means more than you know! I'm trying to learn mesh and really enjoying it, but I want it to not only be beautiful but functional. Pray for me. hahaha. Pray hard.

This is also very helpful. I think if I can adjust the way I'm going about some things I can get the counts down to reasonable, workable levels. I will probably post the count once I've reworked or rebuilt it to get feedback. I swear I'll get this someday. LOL. Thank you for your patience!

Oh.my.god. This is an awesome example of how incredibly, ridiculously, outrageously large the amount of triangles is on my little itty bitty thing. I'm going to take a deep breath and just realize that soon, hopefully very soon I'll get this. LOL, thank you for the example!

I'm sorry Helium, I don't understand what you mean by patches?

That's exactly what I'm doing, applied it and have been in there deleting unnecessary loops to keep that curved edge but lower the count. 25k is ridiculous and I don't ever want to be uploading things that are lagging everyone out. Thank you again for the help, this is a good one for me to learn from and think about upcoming modeling differently.

Good point. You know, I'm not sure...that bottom area on the collar that is scalloped or wavy, it's actually got pointed tips without adding a subsurf. Let me try to round each off and simplify it. You're making me think differently about how to model it. I'm assuming the high amount of triangles was the problem then.

Thanks Drongle, I'll take a look. _________________________________________ Okay: Material #1: Faces = 4,408 Material #2: Faces = 960 Material #3: Faces = 4,104 Material #4: Faces = 96 (this is the area that is showing invisible) Uploader traingle count on High = 150676 (before adjusting/dropping it down at all) That seems very, very high. Do I need to drop the detail - is this a retarded, massive amount? What I'm attempting has an area with flowers (see below) with a lot of petals, should I have built this differently? Maybe I can redo the actual collar area so that there is an edge but no inside and remove edge loops. I didn't realize it was so big - still trying to figure out how much detail is acceptable and such and am feeling like a complete noob atm.

Coming from the perspective of someone who is also pretty new to mesh, I think I know where you're at in the process. What really, really helped me was to make the same thing several times. I tried many different ways of making something simple to see what worked the best. I tested textures, I tried to make things with different approaches and each time I learned a little bit more. My advice (for what it's worth as I'm still learning myself) is to think about the shirt only as a learning process right now rather than getting a final product perfect. Make it 5 or even 10 times. Start with a box. Next time start with a plane. Etc.

In blender my mesh looks fine. When I go to upload it to second life however, a section of it appears invisible. A few things: 1.) I only have 4 materials. 2.) I checked the normals on the area that appears invisible and they seemed fine. To be certain, I reversed them and tried to upload the mesh again with the same result. 3.) I have no textures applied to the mesh. I'm not sure why this is happening but I'm thinking it's something simple I'm overlooking. Is there something I might have selected that would make this area invisible? In blender: In SL Preview:

Would it work if I were to have added a solidify modifier to the collar only (before joining), applied the modifier, then joined the collar to the other pieces (the heart and chain)? (I ended up finishing the project by copying the collar area only, then flipping the normals to create an inside.)

Thank you all, I did not know this. I also didn't know that you should apply modifiers before exporting. I was wondering if I should or not and experimented both ways to see if there was much of a difference. Everyday I learn more and more, it's been a ton of fun. Thank you thank you thank you thank you!