Whoa! While browsing Rei’s site, stumbled on to this open-source tool. #SecondLife is moving to a PBR workflow “real soon now,” and the big content creators will have a painfully steep learning curve converting their products’ textures. This will help, expect SL to bury this info deep in the PBR wiki. aiaicapta.in/gltf-packer/
While doing homework for the coming #glTF workflow in #SecondLife I struggled with #channelpacking textures for manipulating how light reflects off of materials in a game engine. It’s easy in Photoshop, harder in GIMP. There used to be a plug-in for extracting different kinds of “maps” from images, but it was easy to screw up. The manual method is tedious; you can’t just plop a texture into an RGB channel, you have to make each greyscale. This open source tool might be helpful, and the aiaicapta.in is cited in the SL wiki as authoritative. The same site also has a…
I have both a self-hosted blog that uses WordPress, and a “backup” blog hosted at wordpress.com, and because WordPress’ “Jetpack” requires connecting for social media purposes, it’s sometimes too easy to double post to social media sites. Just now I made some adjustments because a single post to my self-hosted site created 2 Mastodon posts. I turned off the new built-in Mastodon connection, which apparently influenced both blogs, and will use the old Mastodon plug-in. Maybe later I’ll connect this blog to the Fediverse directly, but for now will see if Things Blow Up this way. The social crossposting part…
Here’s a simple old fashioned signpost that might be useful for someone in #SecondLife, created in #Blender. The tutorial covers inset, extrude, scaling on specific X Y or Z orientation, and other fundamentals. At the end Goon uploads his model to the test grid of Second Life (that is, the cost to upload is actually free, you use play money on the test grid). He’s still assigning simple colors to the object and not using images – that’s coming up. I’ve turned on more crossposting links so I’m really hoping this isn’t posting multiples to Mastodon, as I have a…
Now some more fundamentals for review. If you find this series of posts tedious - please filter on #BlenderGoon as I'm trying to watch all his instructional videos in order.
Next up - how to get in and out of edit mode, and also some recommendations for setting up your Blender in the Preferences menu.
The video is titled V2.1 Blender 3.0 enabling and installing add-ons, but these steps apply to ANY current version of Blender, don’t be put off by the low version number. Putting this post in my SideEye column. Goon (Goonther Blackcinder) is a #SecondLife resident who teaches at #BlenderSchool inworld at (SLURL) GoodVibes There’s an active Discord group – there’s an invite link in the school landing area. You can support his work on Patreon at this link.
Now we’re getting somewhere. I’ve recently created objects with the standard “primitives” in Blender, so for me this is still review. It was still a struggle but eventually I produced the required lesson objects and got them uploaded into the “test grid.” GREAT SUCCESS. After taking a long break for some RL errands yesterday, I was able to produce the two objects from the lesson… and during Goon’s discussion of uploading to SL, he mentioned he was skipping some “checklist” steps. And yep, one of those steps was to check for flipped normals. The soda cup and straw is fine,…
Goon Blackcinder’s discussion for how to navigate Discord and share screens, if you’re working in Blender and need his help. Actually it’s pretty helpful for any Discord server you’re on.
This is Goonther Blackcinder’s walkthrough for how to sign up for a free Second Life account. Personally, I recommend that you set up your account to go through the “community gateway” that most aligns with your area of interest – Firestorm Viewer’s is good, and my favorite is Caledon Oxbridge University (a Steampunk/Victorian mini-nation within Second Life. There are other community gateways listed here. Goon gives instructions for how to contact him, how to find the Blender School classrooms, how to access the Aditi “beta grid” to upload mesh models, and even a bit about how to earn Lindens (the…