Learning #Blender with #BlenderGoon – Edit mode tools and hotkeys

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.

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.

Learning #Blender with #BlenderGoon – Intro to Edit Mode

Next up – how to get in and out of edit mode, and also some recommendations for setting up your Blender in the Preferences menu.

Currently I prefer to use the Light theme and have the Scale for the interface set to about 1.25 so I can see it better. I may want to go in later and increase the vertex size a bit. I also took his recommendation to UNcheck the Load UI preference when opening someone else’s .blend file. Scene statistics are also now turned on – these are all reasonable beginner settings, especially for creating efficient mesh for #SecondLife (or any game engine, really).

He gets into face orientation – how to display it in Overlays, and how the “backward” facing normals of each face look transparent in #SecondLife – which bit me in the butt last night with the “build a fridge” exercise. These are all good fundamentals to get down EARLY in the learning process in order to try to avoid them.

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.

Learning #Blender with #BlenderGoon – V1.5 Building in Object Mode, uploading to #SecondLife

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 fancy French Door fridge, not so much. The normals are flipped on the hinges and “handles” – or maybe I forgot to uncheck an Alpha setting when going through the materials process.

#ALTTEXT 3D Objects uploaded into Second Life – a soda cup with straw and a refrigerator.

3D Objects uploaded into Second Life - a soda cup with straw and a refrigerator.

Yes, it was flipped normals, fixed it with Shift+N. I always keep my PDF copy of Blender Secrets open as it’s searchable.

#ALTTEXT – overlay view of 3D objects shows the parts of my “fridge” that have flipped “normals” and are facing the wrong way out.

Blender Overlay showing flipped normals - correct with shift+N
This is easily fixed by selecting the object in Edit Mode and pressing Ctrl+N, so now my fridge looks less stupid. This whole lesson was on creating completely in Object Mode, and eventually I got handles put on, materials assigned, and so on. It seemed the thing to do to use my own fridge as an example – I didn’t bother to tackle the ice/water dispenser!

#ALTTEXT – Refrigerator object now displays “right side out”

3D Fridge object now faces the right way out

(I’m adding extra alt text to avoid having to go into Mastodon later and update my autoposts).

Thanks to Goon, learned a few things today (that I’ll probably forget unless I make a lotta stuffs soon). It’s late so I don’t think I’ll complete the next lesson in the series until tomorrow.

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.

How To Sign Up for #SecondLife

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 inworld currency) rather than buying them. He also recommends downloading and installing the Firestorm viewer, which is much better for creating, building, and uploading mesh from than the standard SL viewer.

CaledonOxbridge University Gateway to Second Life - learn how to move, buy, find free things
Interesting – that “Gentleman Jim (boxed) is a free Animation Overrider – my business associate Dhughan Froobert used to make prim-built walking sticks that were compatible with that AO. He’d better get “on the stick” and start making mesh ones!

Learning #Blender with #BlenderGoon – V1.4 Blender Object Mode Tools

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 school landing area. You can support his work on Patreon at this link.

Yes We Are Calm now SHUT THE FUCK UP

Learning #Blender with #BlenderGoon – Viewport Navigation

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 his work at Patreon at this link, and get access to exclusive tutorial content. He tries to do all the #SecondLife mesh creation without paid addons, which is commendable, and a little bit crazy. Just now in Discord he was editing a cute female outfit for Second Life, and doing some weight painting – something WAY OVER MY HEAD at the moment. Previously he made a really nice men’s leather jacket, working on it in live videos. You really get a sense of how the process works when you see someone trying different methods before hitting on the right workflow.

He also uses really good screencast keys that are very highly visible, and has the scale of his installation of Blender set a bit higher than normal, with large-size vertices. It reduces the frustration level you get with some “speedrun” Blender vids that are just… not very helpful for learners.

As I start to get to the meatier “Let’s Make A…” videos I’ll post images of my attempts. There could be some comedy gold there to mine.

https://youtu.be/VCWvtl-RMko?si=KMekM6lkgkKFmGci

Blender logo with “keep calm and don’t ragequit”

Have to remember to keep calm and don’t rage-quit when I get there.

Learning #Blender with #BlenderGoon – Blender User Interface

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) 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.

Learning #Blender with #BlenderGoon – Install Blender

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.

Playing Around With #PBR in #SecondLife – Safety Not Guaranteed

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 “test grid,” and do a little testing of the changes to the edit floater for adding/tweaking the PBR textures. I didn’t have a “set” with everything in the new format, but I had 4 different test textures from class, so I used those.

There’s a snapshot from my Second Life profile feed here. It gives the location of one of the Rumpus Room sims where the PBR stuff is enabled. There’s a lot of interesting stuff rezzed out that people were testing, so I took a copy of a shader ball and played around with it. There was a large “SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED” sign rezzed out in the main grid

#AltText – A Gyazo.com snapshot of a jumble of Second Life objects with various reflective materials applied, with a “Safety Not Guaranteed” sign showing in the background.

When I logged in to the “test” grid and went to roughly the same area, there was a LOT more stuff rezzed out, and many people had laid things out in an orderly way, with floating text above each object giving the different settings they used in the new PBR Materials edit floater. Other people loaded up “shader balls” with textures they added. Apparently Blender is capable of exporting a single file that contains the “set” of PBR maps, that can be dragged and dropped on objects. Or we can pay to upload each of 3 or 4 maps separately or in a batch (that’s going to make uploading textures more expensive for anyone who never got around to playing with the old “Blinn-Phong” systems that is how we’ll refer to the previous SL materials system.

Image from Gyazo

#AltText – a closeup of a slightly differently textured “shaderball” showing a golden inner color and a copper-patina outer color, next to a Second Life avatar wearing a top hat.

This picture doesn’t show the shininess of the 2 colors, but just changing the tints in the “Emissive” mask was fun. Other people were obviously working on more advanced objects in both the main and test grids. My old hat still shows the little golden glints in it from the old Blinn-Phong materials I had set up in it – there’s a bit of lacy texture that’s about as shiny-metallic as the old system could get, but as it’s just very open Victorian lace, it’s not too stupid looking.

Resources:

An approved HDRI lighting texture for testing purposes (also a couple of “node trees” for Blender in the .zip file from GitHub

Link to the PBR Materials Project RC viewer, and Release Notes

Link to the SL PBR Materials Wiki.

Link to the Firestorm viewer blog that discusses PBR/glTF

No #SecondLife #Senra #Devkits distributed yet – still learning Blender

As of right now, no SDKs (Senra development kits for the new starter avatars) have been distributed, according to Patch Linden.

We anticipate the updated versions of the bodies and heads to be released within a few weeks. In the meantime, we still have all submitted applications saved on file, and new applicants are continued to be welcomed. When the dev kit is ready for distribution, we will release it in batches, beginning with our earliest applicants. – Senra Applications from Second Life Community Board 

Okay, then. I was wondering if my application was incomplete or messed up, as I had had NO acknowledgement or response. They’re holding up the applications because, of course, some issues were identified in the bodies they did release and they have to adjust them before sending out the creator kits. Guess I still have time to figure out Blender, then. Really, I don’t plan on making clothes, just unrigged accessories, but was hoping to have the option just in case.

I’ve been making progress in Blender classes recently, because the ones that I wanted to take inworld have been held at times that I could actually ATTEND. Some of the last series of classes were held during my RL work hours, and weren’t repeated during either the evening or early morning or weekend time that I’m not logged in for work.

This class, on the coming update to Second Life’s mesh texturing pipleline, was particularly helpful. When it’s finally released, it’ll use the glTF workflow, which has slightly different terms and names for the various kinds of texture maps. Instead of being called “Diffuse” for the color map, it’s called “Albedo,” and there’s a “Metalness” and “Roughness” map in addition to the familiar “Normal” map that SL currently recognizes. There’s a 5th map called “Emissive” that we’ll have to use as a work-around for other kinds of maps. But it was so cool when I succeeded in plugging the right little wires into the correct little color-coded ports and the model lamp suddenly became all shiny.

Currently I’m attending classes through 2 different “content creator” groups that focus on teaching Blender. I still have all the old YouTube links from before, too. I’ve tried buying books, too, but most of the books out now are either outdated, or self-published crap that’s even more outdated. I got one recently from Amazon that’s terribly poor in print quality, but it included a full PDF of everything in the book, so that was a bit more acceptable.

At the “Blender School” classroom there’s a kit to make a “Blender is Easy!” button… people were pressing it a lot the other night when things were going well (and not so well). I may try to make that too.

Not sharing this to Mastodon – I already posted a similar link.