Tag: SL

That said…

Far be it from me to poo poo people from using Blender and not actually provide help.

Many many people complain about Blender’s interface being too complicated etc etc. As a noob, i felt that too, yet ended up pushing through the initial learning curve and ended up finding Blender is actually really flexible. I’m still a noob! But I do find Blender very comfortable to work with and find it provides the most options towards creating things that I want.

Towards that end, I did a bit of searching for tutorial videos today and here is what I found:

Introducing the Blender 3D Environment by Glen Moyes is a clear and concise example of how you can make the Blender interface work for you (and not the other way around). In particular, the Blender Interface video is most useful to those who are starting out with the interface and are confused at how to make it work.

Lex Zhaoying’s tutorial teaches how to make a simple martini glass using a NURBs sphere and how to convert it to a sculptie texture you can then import in to SL. This is the tutorial that I held as a touchstone when I was first starting out because the process towards generating a sculptie texture was initially long and confusing. Nevertheless, it was necessary to understand the *how* of making them in order to properly edit them later.

Domino Marama’s Blender Scripts are explained here(SL Building Tips forum – requires verified payment info) and include utilities that allow the import of sculptie maps in to Blender for editing, as well as a utility that makes the mesh to UV texture process go MUCH faster.

The Second Life Building Tips Forum is also extremely useful to be a part of, but can only be accessed if you have verified your Av’s payment info. If your account is verified, make sure you’re logged in to get in on this wealth of information. There are a lot of tips and tricks provided that have helped me more than a few times when i’ve gotten in to ruts.

Additionally, as far as general process tips with Blender:

1) I always start with a NURBs object, whether sphere, torus (Blender calls them donuts), plane or cylinder. These are the four fundamental shapes SL will recognize. Starting out with these shapes when making sculpties will save you the headache of having to recreate them later in the long run.

2) Subdivide these shapes in order to add additional control points, but DO NOT add or extrude points from these shapes. SL requires a square texture to create your sculptie, and adding/extruding points outside of your object will prevent this! If you must add additional shapes outside of your first object, simply create another object and export that as a sculptie as well.

3) Many people stress the need for sculpties to be modelled in NURBs mode. This is not necessarily true. Modelling exclusively with NURBs is recommended because NURBs is the method SL uses to create its sculpties… BUT it needs to use a UV map that was created from a mesh anyway. NURBs can be rather clumsy to work with if you’re not familiar with them, and due to the manner in which they control an object’s mesh, it’s easier to make smooth, basic objects with them. IF however, you require greater detail, converting the object to a Mesh and manipulating points and vertices may provide you with greater flexibility. Personally, I start out with NURBs, block out the major shapes that I want, then convert to mesh and edit vertices individually until I get what I want. I then map the object to a UV Map using Domino’s ‘Render – Bake Second Life Sculpties’ tool to get Blender to generate a sculptie.

That’s what i can think of at the moment. At some point I’d like to make a short video describing this process that might help. That’s going to be dependent on what software I can find that will help me do this.

The Sculptie Hype.

It’s sorta funny that, as someone who makes much of her sales off sculpties, I don’t personally find the hype over sculpties to be all that big a deal. To be clear, I love sculpties – I think they are a great organic alternative to the prims we’ve come to know and love. But I *don’t* think they’re the be-all and end-all to content creation in Second Life.

Case in point? Gutterboots by Gutterblood Spoonhammer. Yes, he does use some sculpties in his boots, but by and large I’ve found the thing I like most about his work is that they are not solely dependent on them and as such stand on their own as *good products*, sculpty or not. They are solidly constructed and incredibly textured with every smidgen of detail paid attention to – from the laces to the soles, which would rarely see the light of day. I own 3-4 pairs of his boots and while each do use sculpties in some way, the sculpties are not integral to the design and could have easily been replaced with normal prims, but for the chance to give sculpties a try.

Many times I see content creators trying to get in to the sculptie-mania and becoming frustrated because the tools recommended for the job are difficult to use or learn, and feeling like they are somehow ‘behind’ because they haven’t spent ‘X’ amount of time to become masters of this new area that has been opened up. To be sure, in the last year, SL has undergone a lot of changes so that it might compete on an aesthetic level comparative to other MMO and VW platforms… but that doesn’t mean that products NOT created with sculpties are in any way inferior or less able to stand up on their own as products.

For that matter, my biggest gripe about sculptie use as it stands now is that they are often slow to load to their full quality (even at 32x32px), and as such, sculpted materials are often unloaded still after all normal textures in the area have loaded.

While this is not as big a problem for my own products given that it’s expected that they will load slower under existing conditions in SL, I find it particularly irksome to find that the majority of an attachable product – such as shoes or hair – is made with sculpties… and just *will not load* in areas that are highly populated. As a result, the wearer often looks like they’ve got odd tumors growing out of various areas on the body. In other instances, furniture and living spaces made with sculpties have issues too – I’ve experienced this with my own creations and have to say it’s something I disliked enough to disuade me from selling. (If your video card selectively screwed up sculptie textures to the point where your sculpted couches looked like pincushions, would YOU want to sit on them?)

With the increasing difficulty Residents are having in the battle against lag (whether from the client or the server side), this is increasingly abundant and in my opinion, unnecessary. After all – SL has seen what… 4 years? of fabulous content creation using normal prims? While *yes* sculpties provide a reasonable outlet for people who are willing to put in the time and effort to use them effectively, let us not forget that amazing work has come about through the use of normal prims already, and can continue to do so if the product being made is a good one.

In other words – yay! if sculpties help you make a good product you wouldn’t otherwise be able to make. Boo! if you’re getting in on sculpties because it’s a fad.  Use ’em well if you can but don’t use ’em if you don’t have to would be my suggestion.