General FAQ

You had a hard drive crash ?
Or bought a new computer and now want to reinstall Jass or Primstar ?
Or you have forgotten to bookmark your download page ?

For Paypal Purchasers: Enter your paypal email here: If for any reason you no longer have this paypal adresss, then send an email to purchase@machinimatrix.org and give us as many information as possible to retrieve your download link. The paypal transaction code and date of purchase is normally sufficient.	For in world purchases: Go to the JASS-Shop in Second Life. Locate the purple Octopus in the back of the Shop (behind the Avastar Vendor) Click on the purple Octopus and get your link

We needed to take some precaution to fight spammers. Therefore we have installed a group joiner based on a Bot. All you need to do is to visit the JASS shop and locate the group joiner for Avastar or Primstar:

Then simply left click on the group joiner for which group you want to be invited. You will instantly receive an invite from our Bot “Botichita”.

When you open your download folder, then you will find a couple of zip files all

• starting with “Primstar-2-dev-” or “avastar-1-dev-”
• followed by a release number
• followed by “.zip”

You only need to download and install the zip file with the highest release number, which is the newest release we offer. Only when you find something broken in the newest release, you may want to switch back to an older version. Only in that case (!) proceed as follows:

• Download an older version of the zip files (Try to downgrade to a version that worked for you)
• Proceed the installation document just as if it where a new Addon installation.
• Restart Blender after you have installed. Otherwise Blender might get confused by its own module cache.

Important: If you want to use Avastar and Primstar side by side, then simply add them to the same Blender installation. The Addons do not disturb each other.

Primstar-2 is mainly focussed on modelling of sculpted prims + terrain support. Primstar-2 has very limited support for mesh. That is: the Sculpty base objects can be used as mesh template objects. The advantage of doing this is that the sculpty base objects already have a very simple even spaced UV map. This can possibly help you making simple textures.

Avastar-1 is mainly focussed on animating of mesh based characters (Avatars). Avastar also has good support for mesh based  character modelling and attachment creations. Avastar comes with its own Collada exporter. The advantage of this: The Avastar Collada Exporter is optimized for usage with Second Life and it creates the most acurate results (An object model appears in blender exactly like it appears in Second Life). However note that textured objects may look very different, because Second Life lacks a couple of important texture features (normal maps, materials…) hence textures always look much better in Blender than in SL.

Primstar-2 and Avastar are supposed to work on every officially released blender version on any operating system with 32 bits or 64 bits. The supported range of Blender versions is from 2.59 up to 2.62. We will publish fixes for newer versions of blender whenever this is necessary and we will do that just in time.

If you know of any bugs with Primstar-2 (even if they are related to the operating system or to blender itself), then please report your issue to gaia.clary@machinimatrix.org

Yes, you can do that.

Note: You also can install Primstar-2 and Avastar into the same Blender installation. Both addons cooperate seamless.

This coan not be done in general. However Jass and Primstar supply a “sculptify Objects…” function. This function can convert meshes to sculpted prims if they comply to the following constraints:

• The mesh does not contain any holes.
• The mesh can be unwrapped to a UV Map with only one island.
• The mesh can be unfolded to a checker board like map.
• The mesh only contains Quads.

Note: In some cases the “sculptify object” function can create an “initial UV Map” which would need some manual tweeking in order to work properly as sculpted prim.

Here are some tutorials:

• Sculptify Objects
• Fix the UV Map
• Modelling with Outlines

Detail:

You want to create a sculptie and you already know that you want to texturize it with Blender? So you like to prepare your sculptie accrordingly right from the beginning…

Answer:

You can create your sculptie AND an appropriate UV texture at the same time. However there is no need to prepare this during creation time. You can always add a UV Texture to an already existing sculptie.

Create sculptie with UVTex You can advise Primstar to add the UVTexture. Within the operator panel you find a checkmark named “Add UVTex” This is unchecked by default. Hint: You could create a sculptie without sculptmap by unchecking the “Sculpt Map 64 x 64″. This may become interesting when you want to use the Primstar shapes as mesh objects where you do not need sculpt-maps. You always can find the UV textures for your object in the U/V Image Editor by scrolling the footer menu to the far right. there you find a popup menu from where you can select which UV texture shall be displayed in the UV editor: By default you will see the “sculptie” UV texture. In the image above i have switched to the “UVTex” UV texture.

Create  UV Tex for existing sculptie You can always add a new UV Texture to your object from the Object Data Properties section. Navigate down to the UV Texture Tab. Within the Tab you see a list of the currently available UV Textures for your object. Add a new UV Texture by clicking on the white Plus sign. Side note: As you can see the “sculptie” is just another UV Texture for Blender. This sometimes leads to confusion: In Blender “sculptie” is a map which maps faces on the 3D object to faces on a 2D-texture. This 2D texture is typically a “rainbow colored” image. We name this image “Sculpt-map”. The Sculpt-Map (the rainbow image) is what you transport to SL. And there it is interpreted as a map which maps every color pixel in the Sculpt-Map to a location in 3D space.

You can not directly clear the list. the only way to clean up is as follows:

1. Ensure that all “unsued” images are really unused. No hidden usage from a texture or a material exists. this step is tedious and i do not know of any way to force an image to be decoupled from all its users.
2. save your current work to a blend file. Until nwo the image stack still contains all unused images
3. stop blender and restart it then. Just File -> new does not work!

Now your image stack should only contain used images.

The symptom is:
I have created a sculptesd Prim and uploaded it with Viewer-2. I can see it without problems. But when i look at the same object with Viewer-1 the object is borked.

The cause is:

Viewer-2 allows more combinations of sculptmap ratios and sculptmap sizes than viewer-1

The solution is:

When you want to create compatible sculpties for Viewer-1, then use only the following sculptmap sizes:

Here is the brief description of what each column in the table above means:

• Width(Pixels): The width of your image
• Height(Pixels): The height of your image
• Faces(U) : The number of faces on the Horizontal axis of your image
• Faces(V): The number of faces on the vertical axis of your image

Just to remind you: The values above are used by Second Life. You can use multiples of these number like 256*256 pixels, but you will neither gain precision nor more faces by doing this. You typically get the most precise results whan you just use the image sizes as shown above.

And always check “lossless compression” when you import!

Details:
I am making precision sculpties in Blender.  The outcome is being adversely affected by the transform orientation at the time that the sculpty is being bakes by the Jass Script.  Is there a place where I can read >about Transform Orientation and it’s affects on the sculpt baking process? Is there somewhere that describes how to set it up prior to baking the sculpt map?  I was advised to align it, but I am stumpling around by trial and error and I am never sure when it is really ready to to bake.

Answer:

Before the baker starts, it creates an internal copy of your object (you will never see that)
and on this object it applies

• Object scale
• Object rotation
• All modifiers

Then it bakes. This implies that you can align to the axes as much as you like.
It will have no effect if your object is rotated in Object space.
You can check if an object is rotated in object space:

• go to object mode
• select your object
• Object -> Transform Properties

In the popup you can check for the rotation values for x,y, and z.
If they all are null (0.00) then your alignments to the axes wll help
to make the sculpted prim look better.

You can reset the object rotation without actually rotating the object
as follows:

• go to object mode
• Object -> Clear/Apply -> Apply Scale/Rotation to ObData

Hint:

If you use the GridAlign Tool, then you get best results only when you apply scale and rotation and all modifiers before starting with gridAlign.Maybe it is a good idea to work on a copy of your original object for the precision alignments…

Please understand that gridAlign is really the very last step in your modelling activities. And usually you do not need to do that. But if you are working with precision sculpts, then you probably can not avoid this additional step in your workflow.

symptom:

In the 3D-editor the sculptie looks correct. but after i imported to SL all gets messed up.

cause:

The only reasons that i can imagine why this happens to you are:

• you have not uploaded with “lossless compression” checked
• your sculptmap has less than 4096 pixels
• your sculptmap has more than 8192 pixels

details:

you have not uploaded with “lossless compression” checked

If you do not check “lossless compression” then the importer attempts to compress your image by optimizing for the best visual results. This means it will use a compression algorythm that actually changes the image pixels later when the image is inflated again. For sculpties this is very bad. The reason is that the actual vertex position information is stored in the color code of the image. When you do any image processing on a sculptmap your vertex locations will shift around in a uncontrollable way. And thus you most probably will get very borked results when you forget to check “lossless compression”.

On the other hand when you check “lossless compression”, then the used compresison algorythm ensures that your image will be precisely the same after inflation than the original that you uploaded. And this is actually what you need to get your sculpties up to SL.

your sculptmap has less than 4096 pixels

it is not important whether you use an oblong or a default squared sculptmap. Only the total number of pixels in the map counts. a 8*512 map works as well as a 64*64 map. This is true for all third party viewers which rely on the 1.3 source code. If you use viewer-2 or third parties based on viewer-2, then actually you can upload smaller sculptmaps with less faces, see below.

your sculptmap has more than 8192 pixels

This is a bit weird, but once you understand where it comes from it turns out “logical”. The problem is when you want a very special oblong that has a ratio of 2:1. You must know that the image width and height HAVE to be power of 2 values.  When you create a sculptmap for the ratio 2:1 then the smallest possible map that supports 1024 faces is of size 64*32.

Now this is actually equivalent to 2048 faces. But SL scales down the map such that you end up with 46*22 faces = 1012 faces for this situation. And this is the optimal solution regarding the hard constraint of “sculpties can have 1024 faces at maximum” AND getting a ratio of 2:1 (46/22 is close to that ratio).

The next smaller map size with the same ratio and based on power of 2 image dimensions would be 32*16 and that map will only contain 512 faces and that is not what you want. So at the end LL decided to support the 64*32 faces sculptmap with a certain loss of precision due to the downscaling. The last bit of what you need is that a sculptmap must be double the size of the number of faces in each dimension. Hence a sculptmap with 64*32 faces must use an image of size 128*64 = 8192 pixels. And there you are. That is why the maximum pixelcount for sculpties is 8192.

About viewers

For Viewer-2 or third party viewers based on viewer-2 the smallest reliable sculptmap size seems to be 1024 pixels although this varies over time. The actual supported smallest size is not known. You have to experiment. Please note that it may be possible that your third party viewer displays the sculptie as a messed up bulk of spikes and wrongly placed faces, while viewer-2 has no problems with showing it. That seems to be an issue with one of the open source image libraries. Please look at the Phoenix wiki and at kirsten’s viewer.

Once a sculptmap has been uploaded with success (from any viewer), it looks like it remains stable over time.

The Symptom:

Your object in Second Life looks like its surface is gone wrong. It looks hollow and when moving around the object it always looks like the surface is on the wrong side.
Also when you enter “Solid Mode” in blender, then you will see your object rendered in black in Blender.

The cause:

Your object has got its normals pointing in the wrong direction. This can happen when you mirrored your object along one axis or along all 3 axes. In that case all normals get flipped and thus you actually see (or better not see) the backside of the object surface. In fact your object is not textured at all on the outside. Instead of this it istextured on the inside. And since the backside of a face is never rendered at all, you get this weird visual effect, as if your object was “collapsed into itself”.

The Workaround:

In Second Life you can go to the object editor and checkmark the “Inside-Out” option. This will flip the faces and your problem is gone. But you may want to fix this issue where it happens. So here is how to do that:

A word of warning: People have reported that you simply have to “flip the normals”. But this is NOT sufficient to fix the issue. This does not help at all because the sculptie baker does not take the normal data into account at all. What you will need to do instead is this:

• go to edit mode
• select all vertices
• go to the uv editor
• again select all vertices
• now mirror the UV map along the x-axis: You can use “m” – “x” (“m” for Mirror and “x” for along the x-axis)
• Rebake your sculptie
• technically the problem is fixed by now, but the object still looks black. Although it won’t be of any concern you should fix that for consistency:

• in edit mode: Mesh -> Normals -> Flip
• Note: It seems as if nothing happened. This is most probably a bug in blender. It simply does not update the 3D view correctly after the flipping.
• Force a 3D repaint by hitting the tab-key twice (go to object mode and return to edit mode) and the the problem shold be fixed.

The Symptom:

When you enter “Solid mode” suddenly parts of your object or the whole object turn black. Also when you try to bake surface textures you get black results.

The cause:

Your object has got its normals pointing in the wrong direction. This can happen when you mirrored your object along one axis or along all 3 axes. In that case all normals get fipped and thus you actually see (or better not see) the backside of the object surface.

The Workaround:

It is not sufficient to just “flip the normals”. This does not help at all because the sculptie baker does not take the normal data into account at all. What you will need to do is this:

• go to edit mode
• select all vertices
• go to the uv editor
• again select all vertices
• now mirror the UV map along the x-axis: You can use “m” – “x” (“m” for Mirror and “x” for along the x-axis)
• Rebake your sculptie
• technically the problem is fixed by now, but the object still looks black. Although it won’t be of any concern you should fix that for consistency:

• in edit mode: Mesh -> Normals -> Flip
• Note: It seems as if nothing happened. This is most probably a bug in blender. It simply does not update the 3D view correctly after the flipping.
• Force a 3D repaint by hitting the tab-key twice (go to object mode and return to edit mode) and the the problem shold be fixed.

This coan not be done in general. However Jass and Primstar supply a “sculptify Objects…” function. This function can convert meshes to sculpted prims if they comply to the following constraints:

• The mesh does not contain any holes.
• The mesh can be unwrapped to a UV Map with only one island.
• The mesh can be unfolded to a checker board like map.
• The mesh only contains Quads.

Note: In some cases the “sculptify object” function can create an “initial UV Map” which would need some manual tweeking in order to work properly as sculpted prim.

Here are some tutorials:

• Sculptify Objects
• Fix the UV Map
• Modelling with Outlines

The symptom is:
Right after opening the Jass application the main screen of Blender looks black.
When you move the mouse you can see the Menus dropping in slowly while you hover
over them. There is no indication what is wrong and ther eis no error message in the

Blender Console window.

The cause is:

Your Graphic card may have been setup such that Blender has problems with
showing the display output. Most probably it is an incompatible Anti Alias setting.

The solution is:

Before you start Jass/Blender open your graphic card setup
There disable anti aliasing or…

For NVIDIA cards you can configure to let the Application specify the desired
Graphic settings. You will want to try that.

The symptom is:
I moved my .blend files to a new computer and now when I bake a sculpty i get an error of image not found.

The cause is:

Blender stores the file locations of all used files into the blend file. This includes pathes to the images used. When you move your blend file to another computer, the stored pathes to your image files will point to nowhere. The Baker tool however needs the image file to exist because the image size is not stored anywhere and thus it fails with “no image found”.

The solution is:

Before you move your files to another computer:

• Open the file(s) with Jass (or Blender) on the old Computer
• File ->External Data -> Pack Into Blend File
• Store the file
• Now you can move it safely to your other computer. It will contain all data.

If you have moved and your old computer does no longer exist:

• Open the File(s) with Jass (or Blender) on the new Computer
• for each affected sculpty do:
• Go to the image editor
• View -> Image Properties
• Change the image type from “Still” to “Generated”
• Now you can interactively change Image width and Height until the grid shows perfect squares. Please take care to use only power of 2 values!

Details:

When trying to export a rigged mesh from Blender 2.49b as Collada-1.4.1 (.dae), i get a python error:

‘nonetype’ object has no attribute ‘name’ (Collada Export 2.49b)

Answer: The problem is related to the material assignments. Your Object refers to a material which actually does (no longer) exist in your blend file. It is unclear how this situation can happen. It may be an error in the Jass-Library (if you created your character from the character templates in it). You can fix the problem as follows: go to object mode locate the material panel in the edit button section Remove all material indexes from the object by pressing the “delete” butto until The material index list contains “0 Mat 0″, see image on the right. go to the material section and add/create the materials you need. Now you can retry the export. It should work now.

Hints:

If someone can tell me a way how to reproduce this problem, i will try to fix it. Please send a Notecard to “Gaia Clary” in second Life or an email to mailto:gaia.clary@machinimatrix.org

symptom:

Everything looks right:

• All sculpties have a UVTexture named “sculptie”
• in the UV editor you can see a colored or a black rectangle when in edit mode

When you call File -> Export -> Second Life LSL (to dir), you find less sculptmaps in the export directory as  expected.

cause:

Some of your parts  share the same Scultp-map. So it is only exported once. The sharing of a sculptmap by 2 or more objects can be intentionall. For example if your build contains multiple parts with the exact same shape.  The 4 legs of a table for example would only need one sculptmap if they have the same shape (and only differ in rotation, scaling and location).

Sometimes however the sculpt-map sharing is unintentional. You get this unwanted sharing for example when you have duplicated your Object by using  “SHIFT D”. In that case both objects share the same sculpt-map.

If the sharing is intentional you do not need to do anything. The LSL Generator can handle this situation. Only if the sharing is not wanted, you need to fix it:

fix:

You only need to fix this when the sculpt-map sharing has happened unintentionally. In that case do this:

• Go to object mode
• Select one of the objects which share the same sculpt-map.
• go back to edit mode
• select all vertices
• in the uv image editor: Image -> new  Create an image of the exact same size as the sculptmap has.
• rename the new image to your needs

Do this for all parts which unintentionally share the same sculptmap. Then rebake the whole set and finalle export the set again.

You can install the 3 products in parallel on your computer. However you have to take care that during installation you have selected “installation directory” as your folder for runtime data. Otherwise you might end with a mixup of the product settings.

Note: Jass tries to avoid this mixup by checking the application folder content during startup, but it will fail if you run 2 jass instances of different jass products at the same time on your computer.

The answer is only applicable for Windows users:

This is most probably due to a missing Visual c++ runtime environment.
In most cases the following additional installs fix the problem:

for 32-bit windows: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=a5c84275-3b97-4ab7-a40d-3802b2af5fc2&displaylang=en
for 64-bit windows: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=BA9257CA-337F-4B40-8C14-157CFDFFEE4E&displaylang=en

symptom:

Your sculptmap does not show up after you bake. In the UV image editor you see the sculptmap as a grey rectangle:

cause:

you have unintentionally removed the association between the sculptmap and your sculptie-object

fix:

• go to edit mode
• select all vertices
• go to the uv image editor
• either select one of the existing images or create a new image with the correct size (64*64 pixels for a standard sculptie)

Now bake should work again

This coan not be done in general. However Jass and Primstar supply a “sculptify Objects…” function. This function can convert meshes to sculpted prims if they comply to the following constraints:

• The mesh does not contain any holes.
• The mesh can be unwrapped to a UV Map with only one island.
• The mesh can be unfolded to a checker board like map.
• The mesh only contains Quads.

Note: In some cases the “sculptify object” function can create an “initial UV Map” which would need some manual tweeking in order to work properly as sculpted prim.

Here are some tutorials:

• Sculptify Objects
• Fix the UV Map
• Modelling with Outlines

The symptom is:
I keep getting a stack of errors in the console when I try to work with a sculpt I started in Magic and wanted to complete in vanilla blender. In the Blender console i see following message:


Traceback File "sculptieBakeService.p" , Line 29, in ImportError: No module named bake_sculpt_mesh_util


The cause is:

Jass Pro/Magic use a “space handler script” to implement a keyboard shortcut (ALT+r) for “very quick baking” in edit mode. Thisscript is embeded in the blend file. When you open the same blend file from a plain vanilla Blender, the space handler script tries to call the Jass/Primstar scripts, but can not find them and yields the error described above.

As a side effect the object can not be moved.

The solution is:

Either during save in Jass Pro/Magic do:

• before you store your blend file with magic
• in the 3D View
• View -> Space Handler Scripts -> uncheck all entries
• Store your blend file
• View -> Space Handler Scripts -> enable all entries again

or after load from PLain Vanilla Blender do:

• After you opened the blend file with vanilla Blender
• in the 3D View
• View -> Space Handler Scripts -> uncheck all entries

If you neither use GridAlign nor the QuickBake shortcut, then you also can permanently disable the space handlers in your Jass Pro/Magic:

• In Pro/Magic:
• File -> New
• in the 3D View:
• View -> Space Handler Scripts -> uncheck all entries
• File -> Save Default Settings

symptom:

Everything looks right:

• the sculptie has a UVTexture named “sculptie”
• in the UV editor you can see a colored or a black rectangle when in edit mode
• Render -> Bake seems to succeed (it does not show an error in the blender window)
• on the console you can see a message: “debug gui 000 – bake failed after *.*** sec.” (1)

(1) You get the same sort of error when your sculptie has no image associated. But then the UV editor shows a grey rectangle! See also the faq entry about “debug gui 000 – bake failed after *.*** sec.“.

cause:

Although you are in edit mode, your object is NOT selected. For some unknown reason blender always jumps to the most recent selected object when you go to edit mode. This is even the case when you have currently not selected any object in object mode. Hence it may be possible that you are in edit mode and you even can modify your object. But when baking, the baker looks for the list of currently selected objects. And there it finds nothing and silently stops without error.

fix:

• Go to object mode
• Select your object
• go back to edit mode (this is NOT necessary as you always can bake in object mode!)

The Symptom:

During startup you see a message about a missing QTFC.dll

The cause:

Something went wrong with your Quicktime/Itunes installation. Maybe you have partly deinstalled these programs. Or they have never been fully installed.

The fix:

• In most know cases the fix was to deinstall Quicktime/Itunes and reinstall it.
• It also may be successfull to deactivate QuickTime/qttask.exe

Remark:

Please can anybody confirm if this fix works? Thanks a lot!

The simplest way to get back to the Jass default settings is as follows:

download/open this page:

for Jass-PUB: http://streaming.the-machinimatrix.com/pub/downloads/jass/pub/defaultscreen.blend
for Jass-PRO: http://streaming.the-machinimatrix.com/pub/downloads/jass/pro/defaultscreen.blend

Now immediately do a:

File -> Save Default settings

Thats all.

IMPORTANT: !!! The Startpage for the Jass-pro will NOT work on the Jass-pub release !!!

The symptom is:

During bake or right after bake some of the baked objects unintentionally reposition themself to arbitrary locations.

The cause is:

There is a bug in the underlaying primstar scripts which causes this behaviour when some of the object scale values are negative. You can test if this is the problem:

• In object mode open the “Object -> Trnasform Properties”
• Check that one or all three of the  ScaleX,ScaleY and ScaleZ values is negative.

If you have negative scales, then here is the workaround:

The workaround is:

• before you bake:
• go to object mode
• for each of your “infected” objects do:
• object -> Clear/apply -> Apply Scale/Rotation to ObData

You now will most probably see that the infected parts are inside/out (normals facing to the wrong side). You will need to fix this too. See also the FAQ entry named:

“Why do sometimes my sculpties get rendered black ?”

That should help.