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…
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.
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,…
The next video in Goon’s series covers Object Mode tools. I’m going to try to speed up for these and spend less time looking for funny Blender memes to replace the “featured image.” BUT THEY ARE SO FUNNY… Ten or thirty minutes later I finally watched the video! And then started playing around with the Annotate tool and got horsed up trying to get a Wacom tablet working. More watching, less going down rabbit holes. 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 next video in Goon’s tutorial series goes over viewport navigation, whether using the gizmos in the upper right corner, or keyboard shortcuts. I have struggled in the past with some of these and with some shortcuts, they just don’t “stick” in my head, like Shift-C to re-center my cursor. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Other shortcuts (the numpad keys to change from front, right, left, top, bottom views) come easily. Goon has a pleasant presentation voice – and has a quirky sense of humor. He often hosts live workshop videos on Discord that are a lot of fun. You can support…
The next video in Goon’s series goes over the #Blender user interface in a clear and logical manner. A lot of the time we tend to just jump into the middle of trying to make something in Blender without knowing what-the-hell we are doing. This video series gets us started on the right foot. At least, at this point, I always feel positive, before the confusion sets in about which hotkey to use, or how not to fold mesh over, or how to avoid horrible horrible n-gons, and wearing out my Z key from undoing so much. Goon (Goonther Blackcinder)…
I’m going to watch every one of #BlenderGoon ‘s #Blender tutorials in order, because I keep getting frustrated by my lack of grounding in the fundamentals. 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. There are 2 schoolrooms – Goon’s and also Celestine Ghiardie has a dedicated schoolroom that’s geared more for clothing design and instruction. This first video is a short “How to Install Blender” instructional.
As I’m on a sort of vacation from my RL job this week and next week, I’ve been able to spend more time attending classes, fooling around with Blender, and thinking about what I want to make for fun, for creativity, and maybe for some $Lindens. After attending the PBR class the other day in the #BlenderSchool classroom in Second Life, I tinkered with the assignment we were given – download and install the official SL PBR viewer (which is now an RC “release candidate” version), then go to the “Rumpus Room” sims on either the main grid or the…