Tweekly Digest: 18-Jan – 24-Jan

New on #SecondLife Marketplace – Snappy Fedora in Macbeth Tartan Plaid

Snappy Mesh Fedora In Macbeth Tartan

Snappy fedora for the hipster and normcore AV on the go. This fuzzy wool plaid texture is one of the Macbeth plaids, given by a friend who will use the hats in her creative storytelling project.

Source: Second Life Marketplace – @LC@ Snappy Fedora 2015 – Macbeth Tartan Plaid

New on #SecondLife Marketplace – Snappy Fedora in Pink Linden Plaid

FedorasLelasPlacePinkLindenPlaid

Snappy fedora for the hipster and normcore AV on the go. This jazzy plaid number is about the only use I can find for the well-known library texture. You can darken the color or change it as you wish.

Source: Second Life Marketplace – @LC@ Snappy Fedora 2015 – Pink Linden Plaid

Second Life Marketplace – @LC@ Chameleonic Holiday Fedora 2015 for DINKIES and Tinies

Celebrate the holidays in style with this fun and festive green fedora for Dinkies and Tinies and other small avatars. The hat band looks like a candy cane – and after the holidays, you can retexture with any tileable or horizontal textures you have. Change the band and wear it for St Patrick’s Day, too.

Source: Second Life Marketplace – @LC@ Chameleonic Holiday Fedora 2015 for DINKIES and Tinies

Second Life Marketplace – @LC@Round Pet Bed Hawaiian Quilt Kahili

Traditional Victorian-era Hawaiian quilt design recalls the days of Hawaiian royalty – pets, petites, or tinies will sleep like little kings and queens. Contains a simple “sleep” animation suitable for Dinkies kitty avatars and other petite AVs. “Kahili” are the yellow or red feathered column-like staffs carried before Hawaiian royalty and people of noble birth. They have come to symbolize royal quality and are common in Hawaiian arts and crafts designs.

Source: Second Life Marketplace – @LC@Round Pet Bed Hawaiian Quilt Kahili

Some Meshy Progress in Blender

I’ve spent the weekend working on stuff, making headway and then hitting the wall (and occasionally screaming in frustration). Over the weekend, I worked for a long time on a “shell” shirt based on the Avastar addon, using an imported shape from my Open Sim standalone.

BikeJerseyMaterials
Don’t be too impressed. This is the “triangulated” version, I still have a version kept back that’s got regular quads and a mirror modifier. This is the “retopo” I did over the top of the rigged shell T-shirt, which is just a skintight version of the Avastar character model.

It was a lot of screaming and frustration, as I could not get something called “bsurfaces” to work in Blender. There have been changes in the last couple of updates and the version as shown in this video is no longer the same – there’s no panel to add something called “follows and crosses.”

I also read this – an even older version of Blender, but at least it’s text based. SPO Curriculum – Bsurfaces in Blender

Eventually, I just figured out how to snap a plane to the surface, turn on X-ray, and I started at the collar and worked down.

1-HappyHippoCrappyZippo
It LOOKS good, and I managed to produce a couple of different UV maps, the second one edited by hand to sort of follow the Second Life standard clothing template. But it’s crap. It looks better with the “retopo” UV map, but then that one won’t take standard SL clothing textures. It was sort of cute with a “student” shirt on it. I had to do something to delete the rigging, otherwise I couldn’t do the mirror modify, so it’ll have to be re-rigged once I can get it to even upload. I also probably need to do some low LOD models. Grr.

 

I thought I was doing well, but there are problems – loose unconnected mesh. I can’t upload it to Second Life or Opensim, and forget about rigging it. I think it’s best to start over.

UVMapBikeJerseyRetopo

I spent hours moving verts (vertices) by hand on Saturday and learned more than I wanted to know about some other methods to make the UV map sit right, but then this weird thing started happening. Some of the vertices were “connected” or welded to each other and they kept moving IN THE UV MAP even after being pinned. No pictures on that.

The screaming. It was very loud.

I mentioned it on G+ and the endlessly patient +Chic Aeon thought it might be the “keep UV and edit mesh selection in sync” button still being ticked, which it was, and so was I. But I’m a n00b and this is my time to make n00b errors.

This Bike Jersey project will have to be reworked – fortunately I kept a separate .blend file with the original quad version and the mirror modifier. The back topography was a mess and so I fooled around with it for a little while.

MirrorModel

This is sort of goofy but it’s better than it was. I probably have too many faces over the tops of the sleeves and need to adjust them for better deforming under animation. I removed a couple of poles, used the K-knife tool to cut a new edge to reduce stretching down the middle of the back, but I don’t know, is this useable, or is it still messed up in the back? I may go back and cut an edge into that one wide faceloop up from the scapula, next to the 5-pole. I have many 5-poles but managed to take 2 or three out and straighten some of the area under and over the arm and collar.

Bike Jersey WIP

The front looks okay, but there are issues with the join at the shoulder, and the edges should be less vertical over the shoulder and angle toward the armpit more. I figured out that “GG” is the G-grab tool for “grab edge and slide” so that was a good trick. I don’t know if I need more curves around the bust and “6-pack” area, probably would deform better if I moved some of the edges on the side to relax into where the body bends.

Meanwhile the AO bake still won’t work. WHAT?? am I doing wrong?Those damn black triangles! It’s probably to do with my settings, which are screwed up. I need a clear list of things to leave checked and unchecked and settings to set and not change.

I can’t even get that to save out. No pictures.

I also had issues with my new base top hat, to replace a an old sculpty I bought in a kit. ALL my top hats will eventually be switched over to the mesh (mess) base.

AO Bake of mesh top hat shows black triangles

What the HELL did I do wrong? there are the dreaded black triangles. That’s when I went on a “vert hunt” to track down broken edges, double vertices, and general nastiness.

Meanwhile, I found some issues – a “stutter” edge under the hatband section where my hand had shaken a bit and the whole edge had looped back on itself. I’ve done that before and knew to look for it, and also there are these WEIRD “folded” faces up on the corners of the top, where I had done a “grid fill” in order to get around the problem of having a single pole with 16 or 32 edges.

EdgeOfGridFillProblemArea

The folded faces are hard to see except from a side angle.

DistortedFaces2

No matter how I adjust the verts or try flipping normals (AKA “those FLIPPING NORMALS”) the faces remain folded. At one point I found a duplicate face (probably another errant mouse squiggle) and cleaned that out, but can’t find the same thing happening here even in wireframe.

VertHUnt

VertHuntComplete

But otherwise the mesh now looks clean, I’m not seeing any more stutters and there don’t appear to be any places where faces from the underside of the brim touch or poke through the upper brim faces.

Mesh Analysis Window

I found this mesh analysis thing to check, which was somewhat interesting as far as displaying the edges.

MardiGrasHatLelas

And there’s detail on the inside of this one, because it’ll be a relatively high poly display version. It may get used in the St John Parish “always marching” Mardi Gras parade.

For actual use I would probably delete some of the inner faces. I deleted most of them for the mesh fedora, but test-victims said they could see the inside was invisible when they rezzed it out. So when I left the inner faces and uploaded to the Beta Grid, it came back with 9LI, higher than I wanted. That grid fill on the outer and inner top is probably the culprit, but it takes textures well. I could probably go with a different grid fill that’s all quads, though.

I have some updating to do on current products:

  1. Pet Beds – want to add simple sleep pose and recast for Dinkies and Tinies, and covers!
  2. Hawaiian Quilts – once I learns me some clothifying, they’ll replace old sculpties
  3. All the hats that are currently sculpty-based – redo by hand rather than export.
  4. Necklaces – really need to get on this. Saw a technique with single vert extrude and bevel.
  5. Kit mesh clothing – need to tweak some texture settings.

 

Tweekly Digest: 11-Jan – 17-Jan

  • Ahah! @radioriel now playing Gryphon. I see what they did there. ->
  • RT @jediskywalker01: @HamillHimself My favorite quote from #TheForceAwakens Has got to be this one👌🏻 https://t.co/9KSOHjR9GD ->
  • ♫ "David Bowie – Dead Man Walking (Moby Mix 2 US Promo 12") – 05:22" on A_A Bowie (Tunemark Radio) weird, but in a good way. ->
  • ♫ "David Bowie – Sue (Or in a Season of Crime) " on Polygon of Voracious Audio (Tunemark Radio) ->
  • ♫ "David Bowie – Lazarus " on Polygon of Voracious Audio (Tunemark Radio) #Blackstar ->
  • ♫ "David Bowie – 'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore " on Polygon of Voracious Audio (Tunemark) Another literary reference… ->
  • ♫ "David Bowie – Space Oddity" on Devil's Night Radio! (Tunemark) ->
  • ♫ "David Bowie – Fame ('90 Remix)" on Devil's Night Radio! (Tunemark) ->

Tweekly Digest: 28-Dec – 03-Jan

New Year’s Lesson: Keep Trying And Ask Questions

Thanks to the extremely helpful and patient +Aine Caoimhe, I learned a thing or two today about Blender.

Regarding a question I had about the mesh plant prim I made to replace a legacy plant sculpt, I almost got it right. My original mesh has 4 planes, which means 8 faces once uploaded:

You definitely want to keep the mesh version rather than the sculpt for 3 reasons:

– far lower face count
– easier control over texture
– if you don’t make them phantom, vastly lower physics impact

I would make it in Blender by:

1. Add > plane
2. Make the plane as per the way you did it (one of the three)
3. Unwrap it
4. With the pane selected in Object mode, use the hotkey sequence shift D R Z 60 which will duplicate it and rotate the duplicate 60 degrees on the z-axis.
5. Repeat that to duplicate and rotate again, giving you three of them

(when you duplicate an object it also duplicates any modifiers and UV mapping)

7. Join all three pieces making them a single mesh
8. Add a solidify modifier with thickness of 0.0005, offset of 0.0, and un-check the fill edges option…this will make them double-sided and you don’t need the edges filled when they’re that narrow in spacing

That gives you a single mapped mesh object with the minimum 6 faces (12 after triangulation) where it’s all nicely mapped. The physics after import will a shape with only 12 faces too, making it extremely light on the region resources.

The “identical” sculptie would be at least 128 faces and if set to non-phantom has a much more complex and less sim-friendly physics shape.

I was SO CLOSE. THISCLOSE to getting it right. So I went back and redid a new one with 3 planes, 6 faces. This is the old sculpt on the left, new mesh with 4 planes on the right. There are edge artifacts on the Legacy sculpty, where the creator (LK) was not careful about cleaning up the edges or having them scaled all the way down.
Compare Sculpt to Orig Mesh_001

And this is the new one, on the smaller plant.
New 3plane vs 4 plane_001

Next, it looks like I’ll have to go back and redo the crates later, maybe when I need them for props again. I’ll be building a survival shelter and of course the boxes and crates and pallets are fair game.

+Aine Caoimhe again:

I would recreate them in Blender since you can really cut down on the face count if you keep them simple boxes (don’t add bevels, etc.).

I can’t tell from your pictures if you’re using Blender render or Cycles but I suspect that’s Blender render. I’d suggest getting used to Cycles materials set-up since as you become more advanced you’ll likely want some of the additional controls/features of Cycles that the older Blender render engine doesn’t allow.

General method:

Make 1 box.
Mark seams and unwrap it
Assign a material to it (maybe “box1”)
Duplicate it
On the duplicate, delete the material and assign it a different one…it will still preserve its UV mapping so you shouldn’t need to do anything further
Continue doing this, each time with a new object and each time assigning it a new material (unless you want two or more boxes to share the same material, in which case just assign it that mat).

You are allowed to import a single mesh with a maximum of 8 different materials so you can join your boxes into a single mesh object provided it doesn’t exceed this. If not, you can join 8 materials worth of boxes as one object, then another 8 materials into a second, etc… On import each material is a “face” from an in-world texturing standpoint.

You can select multiple objects at time of export which will take them out as a single dae and, on import, come in as a linkset.

Doing it this way, each box ought to be only 6 quads = 12 tri which makes it easier on graphics cards. Because of the way SL calculates LI (to inflate the cost of mesh artificially) there’s likely not going to be much/any savings on that level.

You can find more detailed info about cycles materials assignments and unwrapping in my intro series of tutorials (http://ainetutorials.blogspot.ca/p/list-of-tutorials.html) or +Chic Aeon has done some great ones too.

I’ve read everything Aine and Chic have posted recently on G+ and I also see posts on the official SL forum for mesh, though I don’t go there often. They are extremely helpful and generous with their hard-earned expertise.

I did want to make a couple of “hero crates” that are more detailed, with inset faces and raised edges. That can wait for another free day. The next time, it all begins with a single box, in Blender. Don’t worry, I always delete the default cube automatically and start fresh. 😉

Exporting builds from SL or OpenSim so far is of limited use, as the prims come in with triangles everywhere and hidden faces that have to be deleted. I learned when I imported various other objects (my old store, a Victrola that I made in class) that the triangle count gets CRAZY on small, tightly curved sections, and the corners of buildings are a mess. I managed to learn where to find the “tris to quads” in the Face menu, but the shortcut in Edit mode is Alt-J, need to commit that to memory. It’s nice to bring in a build for reference purposes, though. With the box assemblage, I really could have gone in and dissolved all the unnecessary faces and verts, though.

A friend of mine from Steelhead, Zaida Gearbox, has been doing wonders with mesh conversions – her Mission style furniture is GORGEOUS; I think she uses Mesh Studio to clean it up – I can only hope to produce nice things like that someday. Her store is on the Marketplace, and she has a location in St John. I thought maybe I’d be able to do conversions like that, too, but there’s more to it in getting it right.

I didn’t get much done IRL today, but did at least start the “castaway” narrative. Now I can think about the next part of the story, which involves salvaging some useful and repurposing some wacky items, and I need to think about adding some geology (not geometry) to my island refuge, which means finally getting that rock project correctly done and building some lava and tufa cliffs.

Don’t worry, there’s a twist for how I get started making clothes, hats, and other survival gear – and later on, a reason for making vintage stuff, too.