Before you start modelling you will have to decide if you want your ladder to behave well with LOD (level of Detail) or not:

• If you want a stable behaviour you can make 6 steps at maximum plus 2 sides of the ladder.
• If you want good behaviour you can go up to 14 steps plus 2 sides.
• If you dont care about LOD, you can get even more steps. I don’t know the exact theoretical numbers you can achieve…

Step 1: The initial sculptie

Lets keep things moderate and try with the secnd option. In that case you will want to start with a sculptie as follows:

• type: cylinder
• 4 x-faces
• 64 y-faces
• no subdivision levels.

You may want to rotate the object by 45 degrees along the z-axis.  Now you will create the “pieces” of the ladder by collapsing every third row of faces as follows:

You will want to flatten each piece so that it gets the shape of a perfect rectangular solid and you will end up with a stack of 16 pieces all connected by a tiny little string in the center:

Step 2: Now let us turn to the UV editor for a moment. When you open the view -> image properties then you will see that the UV map associated to this sculptie is right now of size 8*128 pixels.

We will change that to 8*256 pixels now. This can be done right in the properties popup window. You will end up with:

Why have we done this modification of the UV-map ? Well, the baker now is going to recalculate the mesh due to the new image size. It will yield a sculptie with 4 faces in x and now 128 faces in y. This has several implications. But let us first reimport the baked sculptie to see the effect:

You see that now the tiny vertical string which connects the blocks has got intermediate vertices. Also the blocks have become more faces. So how does that help us ? Well, these additional vertices help us to keep the whole object in a good LOD balance. Remember that LOD means nothing else than:

“With moving away from the object the number of rendered vertices gets reduced more and more”.

In other words: You need vertices to “feed” the LOD daemon so that it keeps your ladder from collapsing into a wreck. So these vertices along the vertical line get eaten first. And the way how the object is constructed at the moment, this first consumption of vertices won’t harm because we cant see the tiny string anyways in SL. Of course we could have started with a sculptie of that size. But that would have forced us to deal with many more vertices during Step 1…

Step 3: We can go even one step further now. Due to a property of the Primstar baker we are allowed to remove(!) vertices in special cases. Especially we can remove isolated vertices as we can find in the vertical string. So lets do that and we end up with:

On the left we see which vertices i have selected for deletion. On the right we see the object after deletion.

Step 4: So now we do have 16 visually fully separated blocks of vertices. And we now can move these blocks around as we like. So lets make the ladder now:

I just took the top and bottom solid, rotated them by 90 degrees and scaled them along z.

Step 5: Now in the final step we bake the sculptie again. And then we reimport the baked sculptie for inspection:

So here you see the “original” sculptie with the removed vertices on the left. And the baked and reimported sculptie on the right. The zig-zag line in the middle of the ladder has been brought in by the baker tool. But do not chocke on that. That is again the tiny little but invisible string which connects the pieces of the sculptie all together.

This tutorial was quick and dirty and it does not explain an awfull lot. But if you work through it and inspect your object closely at each step in the process you will eventually understand how the baker does its job and what you can achieve with this technique concerning “complex objects from single sculptie”.

And be aware that texturiong these sculpties can be done but is not at all trivial.

Have fun
Gaia

2.3.3 New and fixed (01-september-2010):

• FIX: WIN problems when switching between PRO and PUB versions of jass
• FIX: WIN internal usage of PYTHONPATH/PYTHONHOME caused problems
• NEW: WIN-Installer now has 2 fully supported installation modes:
  1. appdata installation (best for multi user installs)
  2. central installation (best for parallel jass/blender installs)
• NEW: WIN new utility program factorySettings resets to the Jass
  installation settings. Good for rescue reset. The program can be called from:
  Start -> Programs -> Jass-PRO -> factorySettings
• FIX: Windows installer now installs correctly again.
• FIX: MAC-OSX Wrong file permission settings have been fixed.
• FIX: Mac-OSX Compatibility code for Mac was missing.
• FIX: Bake of multiple parts with “Keep Center” was broken.
• FIX: Import of .obj files did not auto-create the UV-maps.
• NEW: “Optimize Resolution” OPTION now always visible  in baker.

2.3.2 New and Fixed:

• NEW: PRO-Support for MAC-OSX (Jass-2.3.2-PRO).
• NEW: Scripts archive separately available.
• FIXED: Bug in Bake Sculpties when “keep center” was checked.

Known bugs in 2.3.3:

Bake tool: When you are baking multi-part objects and if you do
not want to use “Keep Center” then you must apply

Object -> Transform -> Center New

to each part before baking. Otherwise weird results can happen.
It is not yet clear what causes this problem.

Detailed descriptions

01-sep-2010 FIX: WIN problems when switching between PRO and PUB versions of jass

When you want to use JASS-PRO and JASS-PUB on the same computer you might have faced some weird baheviour. The main problem is that all versions of Jass and blender share the same application folder. This is a limitation introduced by blender itself and we did not want to fix blender at this time. Instead we now check during startup of Jass if the Jass version matches the version stored in the application folders. When Jass detects a missmatch, it will fix the application folder on the fly by copying the matching scripts version from the installation directory. During this process Jass also detects if you have modified your default start page and in that case it asks you if you want to migrate your start page.

NOTE: This fix is only partial and it does not solve all problems with sharing of application folders between different applications. We eventually will fix blender’s behaviour and the way it searches for its application data directory right in the blender code base. Such that it will become fully independent from the blender data.

01-sep-2010 FIX: WIN: internal usage of PYTHONPATH/PYTHONHOME caused problems

We have been told that JASS does not cooperate well with other tools which also use an embedded PYTHON. In particular users have reported that the parallel usage of blender 2.5 was broken. We have taken care about that and we have completely removed any usage of environment variables from JASS. Furthermore Jass will now automatically decide if it will use the embedded python interpreter (which is installed by default together with JASS) or the python installed on your system. Note that if both are available Jass will use the embedded interpreter.

28-aug-2010 NEW: WIN-Installer now has 2 fully supported installation modes

In previous releases the installation of blender often was a problem on Windows-7 and Vista-systems. We now have sorted out most of the issues and have created a new installer which supports 2 installation strategies:

Multi User Installation

In this installation mode the application data of blender is copied on demand to each users application data folder. Each user can then modify and customize the application data separately from all others. i.e. it becomes possible to customize different default start pages for different accounts. Or add different sets of scripts to different accounts.

Single user mode

In this installation mode the entire application data is copied into the installation directory. In order to avoid permission issues the application data folder has been “unsecured” by granting full access to all authorised users.

Please note that you can switch between the 2 installation modes by rerunning the Jass-installer.

28-aug-2010 NEW: WIN new utility program factorySettings resets to the Jass

When you are operating in multi user mode, then an update of Jass will not automatically update the user application data. Or sometimes you might have corrupted your application data and want to return to the factory settings of Jass ? For these cases we have added the new program “factorySettings”. This program does a copy from the safe (and never touched) factory application data and overwrites your personal applicationData folder.

Important note: After a reinstallation of Jass or after an update of Jass in multi user mode the existing application data folders of the users are NOT automatically updated. So in order to get the newest scripts each user must run the factorySettings script once after upgrade.

The script is available from:

Start -> Programs -> Jass-PRO -> factorySettings

FIX: MAC-OSX Wrong file permission.

The repackaging of blender/jass for Mac-OSX introduced wrong file permissions on the scripts folders. Blender could not open these files and thus they where not accessible in the program.

FIX: Mac-OSX Compatibility code for Mac was missing.

The MAC-OSX code for Jass-2.1.2 has never been stored in our versioning system. Hence

FIX: Bake of multiple parts with “Keep Center” was broken.

The size of objects was calculated wrong when “keep Center” was selected together with “Optimize Reolution”. Now you can Use “Keep Center” together with “Optimize Resolution”. However there is a remaining bug, see below.

FIX: Import of .obj files did not auto-create the UV-maps

The File -> Import -> Second Life sculptie is able to import from an .obj file. We have changed the API for the sculptify object tool and forgot to propagate this change to the import function.

NEW: “Optimize Resolution” now always visible but disabled
The “Optimize Resolution” feature is only usefull in multi üpart bakes. In 2.3.2 the function has been hidden from the GUI for single sculptie bakes. This caused a bit of confusion. Hence i have changed the GUI such that now the option always displays but is disabled for single sculptie bakes.

NEW (MAC Support for JASS-2.3.2-PRO) :

I managed to eventually release the JASS-2.3.2 MAC-OSX PRO version, so MAC users are now also up to date. MAC-Users please just go to the Jass-Shop and buy the JASS-PRO version as everybody else too. The vendor will provide you a Download-link containing 2 separate binaries, one for Windows users, the other for MAC users. The MAC installation video still applies. Only the release number has changed.

IMPORTANT: If you have already purchased JASS-PRO for Windows, JASS-PRO For MAC is free for you. All Customers please either use your received Inventory link, or if you do not know what that is, go to the Shop and click on the Update Vendor to obtain you personal Inventory link!

NEW(Separate Scripts archive):

If you just want to get the PRO scripts, we now provide a third binary containing just that. So if you are running on Unix, Linux or any other operating system which we do not directly support, but which is capable to run blender, again buy the PRO edition and then download and unzip the scripts archive. Then install the scripts into the scripts directory of your blender-instance and you are done.

FIXED (Bug with Baker tool):

A customer found a bug in the JASS-PRO-2.3.1 release when baking sculpties with “Keep center” checked. This broke the sculptmesh in a very odd way such that only one half of the sculptie was baked. This problem has been fixed.

please report back if anything is broken. In that case we are either going to fix your issues as soon as possible or we will refund you if you prefer.

Enjoy Jass-Pro

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Jass/145/193/25

The items i have placed on the Donation tablet shown above are mostly meant as donation goodies.

• The big versions are full perm and grant all rights to the buyer so they are also good for resellers.
• The small versions are copy/notrans and meant for people who like to donate to us and get an item back as thank you.
• The ipad-like Donation box on the floor is meant for just paying JASS-PRO or any other arbitrary donations.

In any case feel free to contact me when you have questions about how the items where built or if you got issues with primstar/Jass.

Please also feel free to comment on the (admittedly very small) shop.  Especially if you would do things in a different way then your comment will help me to improve your shopping experience.

Important Note: The shop contains 2 Media prims which only work with Viewer-2. I have decided to do that because i am tired of cutting our SIM into tiny little land pieces just to support multiple video boxes.

Have fun and i hope to see you soon in the Shop.

Gaia

Film is currently Rendering …

Transcription

Hello and welcome!

Here is the next tutorial from our series about sculpted prims with blender.  This time we will take a closer look into texturing.  Our main goal will be  to let the top-hat  look much more  glamorous. So far we have created a very basic material for our hat. We have baked the texture and got an almost completely black image  with a red area  for the hat-band.  We will proceed from here, by introducing a few new texturing  techniques.

In particular:

• we add ambient occlusion to the object.
• We will take a brief look into the blender light system,
• and eventually we will add   light-dependent shadows
• and colored light effects.
• We will see how we can add a shiny effect into the textures.
• And at the end we will see how we can improve the look and feel even more,  by creating  and adding   bump-maps to our textures.

Part I: Ambient Occlusion

Ambient occlusion describes the illumination of your scene with only diffuse light. Since diffuse light is independent from the angle of incidence, the AO-calculation is independent from the camera position and independent from your light setup.  The only variation on the object lighting is produced by occlusion either from near-by objects or from self-occlusion as demonstrated here.

With decreasing aperture-angle, the edge between the two surfaces gets less and less ambient light hence it renders darker  and darker.  Although ambient occlusion is an artificial calculation, it helps us to make an object look more realistic and since it is not depending on the camera position, it can safely be baked into a texture.

Now let us see, how we can use ambient occlusion on our hat. Unfortunately the hat is totally black at the moment, and thus the whole effect of ambient occlusion will be mostly invisible.  So let us change the hat color to white for now, and switch back to black later.

• Select the hat body and go to edit mode.
• Ensure that you are in the edit button section
• Select the black material using the material index selector.
• Click on the black color area and change the color to white. the hat will become gray.

In the following sequence we will add some slight modifications on the model to optimise the texture baking. It is always a good idea to keep your model as it is,  and work on a copy of it.

• So let us go back to object mode  and select the hat,
• then shift-select the tie  and the bow.
• Now copy the selection by pressing: shift   D,
• and immediately click  the-left mouse-button.

Now we have 2 separate objects precisely intersecting-each-other. We will move one of the objects to another layer and keep this copy as our reference model.

• Press the M-key. A small layer selector box opens.
• Choose layer 6.
• Now you have one copy of your object on layer 6 and another copy on layer one.  Go to  layer-one, and select the object there.
• Ensure that you also have selected the UV-Tex map which was introduced in the previous tutorial. We will use this map for the proceeding work.
• go to edit mode and select all vertices of the hat.
• In the UV image editor create a new image.
• Be gracious, and make this image large. For our purpose a size of 1024 pixels in each dimension is sufficient.  However  you may want to use an even higher value when your object has got many fine de-tails.
• rename your image to “AO-map”.
• Switch to the shading tab, and there select the world buttons.
• Locate the Ambient Occlusion-button, and enable it.
• Keep everything to the defaults, and just bake the ambient occlusion map by navigating to:
• render, bake render meshes, ambient occlusion. It may take a few seconds to generate the map.

Let us take a closer look at the map.  If you see black triangles ,this is most probably because we have introduced a pole  at the top of the hat.
We will correct this in a moment.  If you look close to the map, you see that the neighbour objects do have an influence on the amount of darkness.  This is so, because the ambient light gets occluded by near-by objects. Here in particular by the bow and the tie. You also can clearly see the border of the brim.  But the whole image looks a bit grainy. For a good ambient occlusion map, we will want to correct this too.

So let us first take care of the triangles.

• go to edit mode
• switch to the edit button section
• Locate the pole, and select its vertices.

You can look at the top menu-bar to see how many vertices  edges  and faces you currently have selected. There should be eight vertices in the current selection.

• Then switch to the edit buttons, and click the smooth button once.
• You have now introduced a hole   at the top of the hat. But don’t care about that. We will close it again later.
• Now go back to the Shading section and within the  world-buttons locate the ambient occlusion tab again.
• change the number of samples to 20.  This number will determine the degree of smoothness of your map. But it will also make the map calculation take much longer. Don’t fear, you only need to do this once at least as long as you do not change your model any more.
• Now bake ambient occlusion again. Go for a cup of coffee in the mean time.

Later you might decide to make the map even bigger or use even more samples. For now, our occlusion map is good enough. It is a good idea to store your image on disk now. Otherwise you will have to recreate the map later and you probably do not want to do that often because it is a time consuming task.
Well, now we have baked the ambient occlusion into an AO-map. We can take this map,  reduce it to a reasonable size of  let us say 512 by 512 ,
and use the result as texture for our hat in second life.  Then we can use the Second Life color picker to colorise the hat and we are done.  But what if we wanted back the red color band? It is not included in the AO map?

So let us see, how we can bake the texture and the AO map all together:

• go to edit mode
• and select all vertices.
• now change to your hat texture.
• You possibly may want to create a new image now with a reasonable size. 512 by 512 pixels should be ok.
• and finally Bake the texture only.

Ok, we somehow expected this to happen.  when enabling draw type textured a totally white hat with a red band is what we get. See how different the model looks now ? All three-dimensional information is almost gone. Switch forward and backward between the AO-map and the texture. See how nicely the model’s 3 dimensional characteristics get supported with the ambient occlusion map ? Now wouldn’t it be  nice to have both ? in the texture ? The color and the ambient occlusion ? Here is the trick:

• check that you are in edit mode, and all vertices are selected.
• also check  that you have the hat-body texture selected in the image editor.
• Then go to the shading section,
• select the material buttons.
• Now locate the texture stack, and add a new texture to it.
• Name it  AO-texture.
• go to the texture buttons and select the texture type (image).
• From the upcoming selector box select the AO-map.

By now we have added the AO-map to the texture stack and it is again time to render, bake render meshes, texture only.

So this  is not what we expected. What is missing here ? The ambient occlusion was generated by using the sculpties UV-map. This was automatically and silently done, when we baked the AO-map. And this was a good decision because you just can use the AO-map on your sculptie without modifications. But  now we apply this texture as an image. So blender needs to know how to wrap it correctly around your model. And this is done as follows:

• Go to the material buttons,
• Select the AO texture (if it is not yet selected).
• switch to the map input tab,
• enable the UV-button, and specify which UV-map shall be used for baking.  Of course it is the same map  which we implicitly used before  when we baked the AO-map namely “UV-Tex”.
• Now bake texture only again.

And the result is your base material texture plus the ambient occlusion map, both smoothely merged. But wait, we are not yet done!  The red color band does not show any ambient occlusion yet. Why is this so ?  Well, until now you have only applied the AO-map to your  black material.  And the hat-band-material does not see it yet.  So Let us correct this now :

• go to the edit-section.
• now select the hat-band-material by using the material index selector.
• go to the material buttons,
• From the texture-selection box  select the already existing AO-texture. By doing this the previously created ambient-occlusion texture gets reused for the hat-band. But we still need to switch to the map input tab and …
• Enable the UV-button, and tell blender again  to use the UV-Tex map.
• And finally do another render, bake render meshes, texture only.

And the frustration is big, The hat-band is gone again. Why that? Well, we have fallen into a trap. Something slipped through our attention. Let us go back to the Shading buttons and check the Map-too section of the material.  We see  that the blend type is set to  mix. So what gets mixed here ? Everything on the stack   above the current texture will be mixed with the current texture.  But since there is nothing above the current texture in the stack the base material settings are taken instead. The amount of mixing is defined by the value of the color variable. Currently this value is set to 1, and thus the current texture on the stack  completely replaces  what was there before.

So neither the hat-band, nor the white hat body is rendered.  And only the AO-map is seen at the moment.  We have several options to proceed from here.  The simple solution is to change the mix-value to 0.5 which would do what the name implies.  It mixes the base material and the Ambient-occlusion-map, both with an amount of 50 percent. But this option creates washed-out  textures.

An enhancement could be  to use blend mode  “overlay”  for the hat-band.  And set the color-value to 1. This will result in a much crisper color definition,  and still contain the ambient occlusion.

Another  and probably the best option  would be to use the Ambient-occlusion-map as multiplier on the hat band.   So it does only affect the light-intensity of the texture.  You will need to play with the color-value until you get a convenient result. Finally let us make the material black again:

• go to the edit button section
• switch to the hat-base material
• and make the hat-base black.
• In the  Map-too-setting  of the hat body  set the color value to 0.5.

This will eventually result in a dark grey hat with still visible ambient occlusion.

So far we have created a texture which contains our basic material settings namely the black hat-body and the hat-band. We have added ambient occlusion  by justusing the AO-map as a texture on the texture stack.  And Now we want to add some extra lights.  And bake those lights into the texture.

Light setup

So let us first check what we can see right now with blender’s default light setting. Do this by clicking on: Render, bake render meshes, full render.
Ok, this  is disappointing.  We obviously will have to add some lights. Please note  that normally we will setup light in such a way that all objects look nice from the camera location. You would not necessarily take care about parts of your object which point away from the camera. But for baking textures this is no longer exactly true. You will want the object to be illuminated in a different way. Here is one possible way to go:

We will use 4 lights in total.  While proceeding, we want to get a rough idea about how the lighting will influence our texture. We can use the draw type (shaded) here. This mode simulates the light effects in real time. But take care here. If your computer is not fast or if your model contains many faces or you got many lights in your scene shading mode can start to consume lots of your computer resources. So if your blender is freezing you have to reduce either of the before mentioned settings.

• With your draw type set to shaded, go to the shading section.
• there, switch to the lamp buttons.
• go to top view. This will help you to find good locations.
• Finally add a new hemi-light  by clicking on add, lamp, hemi.
• Place this light  besides the camera, and slightly above the hat and rotate it so, that it points towards the hat. You will switch the view-point between top, front and side-view for this adjustment.
• Now reduce the Dist value such that the pink line  is as-long-as the distance  between the lamp and the model.
• go to top view and add 2 more hemi-lights at an angle of plus 120 degrees, and -120 degrees, both  relative to the first lamp.

Here is a quick way to get this done:

• place the 3D-cursor on top of the hat.
• Set the 3D-cursor as Pivot.
• Select the Hemi-light  and make a copy of it by pressing: SHIFT-D,
• Immediately followed by a left mouse-click.
• press the r-key, and enter 120 on the key-board.
• Make yet another copy of the just created light and rotate it again by 120 degrees.
• Finally add a fourth light, which will iluminate the hat  straight from the top.
• Now set draw type to texture, to see what you will bake.
• Then select the hat and start another full bake  to see what changed.

Ok, still not too much of enhancements. The model still looks very artificial. What really is missing here, is an interesting structure of the material.  And we can do a lot with texturing here. But before we do this, let us first add a bit of shiny-ness  and con-tour to the hat.

Baking Specularity

Go back to draw type  solid. you now see some specular reflections on the hat.  These reflections are fully dependent on the camera view-point. On the other hand  we can only add static information to the texture which is independent of the camera view-point.  But we can use a trick here. We will create a node based material
and use the specularity information to modify the texture. But beware, the trick may not always create the expected results. You will need-to-do some experiments to figure out how you must set the light to get the reflections where you want them to be.  If used carefully  this trick can add interesting effects to your final result. But at the end allways remember that this is a fake reflection which probably interferes with the Second Life rendering engine.

Anyways  let us try this out now. If you don’t get it at the first time, then try it again and again. It is by far simpler  as it appears to be. So here we go:

• ensure that you have selected the black hat body material,
• go to the shading section,
• locate the link and pipeline tab, and there  enable Nodes.
• Now this material is node based and you can modify it by using the node editor.
• So let us split the screen and open the node editor.

You see two boxes. The left box is the material node. The other box is an output monitor which displays the resulting material.
Now we will replace the material node by an extended material.  We do that  because the simple material does not have a specularity channel  while the enhanced material has got  one.

• So remove the material node by first  selecting it,
• and then press “x”, or the delete-key.
• And add an extended material from the add, input, section.
• Now add a mixer by pressing the space bar, then   add, color, mix. We need the mixer to mix specularity information and color information.
• You see that the mixer node has allready been connected to the material node.  We will change the connection slightly  by moving the defuse connector to the specularity connector.  Actually we simply click on the specularity connection then drag to the secnd color-input  of the mixer node, then release the mouse. The connection has now been changed.
• We connect the mixer to the out-node  by clicking on the color output of the mixer,
• then drag the mouse to the color input of the out-node,
• and finally release the mouse.

Now the nodes have been setup but the material node still-must-be connected to an existing material.  Go to the material-node  and there select the black material from the selection box.  Now the node based material is ready to go.  Finally render, bake render meshes, full bake again and see your results. Ensure that you are in Draw type texture to see the results of your bake.

Now we get  some-where. There is still much room for improvement but now the look of the hat has become much more interesting. So with applying specularity  the hat gets much more contour.

Lets do yet another enhancement. Look at the top-edge of the hat body.  There you see a specular effect but it is not very well defined.  The reason is that the model is using a low poly mesh but the texture should be created with a much finer mesh and then “baked to the low poly mesh”.  We will come to this technique later.  For now we can just increase the number of subsurf levels  by one or two, and then full bake again.

• Go to the edit section.
• locate the modifier stack.
• increase the number of render-levels by 2.
• And now bake. This will already give you a significant improvement.

After baking  all the fine details are visible in the texture  and so you can get very fine details without increasing the mesh face count by just baking them into the texture, and using this texture on your low poly model.  Now play around with the lights  and see  how your specular effect changes with the light settings.

For example you could get a bit adventurous and colorise your lights. Check that you are in draw type “shaded”  to monitor your changes in real time. Also take care  that the sum of all lights mixes more or less to white.  As an example use one light with red, the secnd with green and the third with blue.
And effectively “paint” on your hat with your light sources.  Check the results by going to draw type  textured and start another full bake.

And now it is time to examine the texture stack and add more structure to your surface.  A realistic top hat will be made out of felt or a comparable material.  So let us try to get such a texture for our hat now. We will try a procedural texture here.

• select the black material in the edit button section,
• Then go to the shading-button section,
• and there switch to the texture stack, create a new texture, and Name it “felt”.
• switch to the texture buttons, and select texture type (woro-noi)

Now make a full bake to see what happens. ok, this  is yet another surprise. Why the hat has become dark-pink  with black spots on it ?

Now…Why is this hat pink ? For some reason the developers of blender have choosen to use pink as the default color for any texture. We will change this in a moment. But let us remember  what we wanted to achieve in first place. The hat should look like made out of felt. So also the size of the dark spots seems wrong and we want to get a much finer result.

Now lets go:

• locate the noise size setting in the texture button section.
• change the value to 0.02 or any other value to your taste.
• switch to the material button section.
• in the map-too tab  change the secondary color from pink to white.
• Then bake again.

The spot size is still much too big. So let us change that in the map-input section.

• change the size settings from 1 to 40 in all dimensions.
• Then bake again.

Now the hat is almost like we want it but it has become light grey. This was because we have choosen the secondary texture color to white. We could have used grey instead, and thus keep the hat darker. But we will do another much better trick:

• go to the map-too section,
• there disable color and enable “nor”.  This means the texture no longer changes the color of your model but now affects the normals.
• The amount of the effect can be set with the Nor-value which we will set to around 1.5.
• Now bake again  and see.
• ok, try to reduce the specu-larity, Felt is not shiny.
• And bake again.

So  by using a noise-texture as normal map we created a material  resembling felt.  We still can find improvements, and there may even be much better approaches. If you know an interesting approach feel free to tell it to us.

Bump Maps

Now let us turn back to the red-color-band.  It still looks like it was painted  on the hat. We will now try to let it appear as if it has been wrapped around the hat. Of course we could model this detail easily into the mesh itself. But i will demonstrate instead how we can add higher resolution details to a low poly mesh by using a  bump-map. But before we get practical i will give you a brief idea about what is going on behind the curtain:

Please remember, that this hat has been created with 8 faces in x, and 8 faces in y. Hence in blender it is made out of only 64 faces. But in second life, we count 32 times 32 faces hence we see 1024 faces there. All these extra faces have been calculated by means of a subsurf-modifier. Then they have been converted into the final sculptie-map during the sculptie-baking process.

In order to see what happens we will tell blender now to show us these extra faces right on the model. But instead of using the original model, we will create yet another copy and work on the copy instead.

• go to object mode
• Ensure, that the hat is selected.
• Also select the lights. We will need them in a few seconds.
• then press SHIFT-D, and immediately click the left mouse button.
• Press the M-key, and move the copy to layer 5.

Now we have copied our model  plus our light setup to layer 5. Switch to layer 5, and select the hat-body.

• go to the edit button section, and locate the modifier stack.
• You will find one subsurf modifier there. Ensure that the number of levels is set to 2.
• Then click the modifier’s apply-button.
• and finally switch to edit mode.

What you see now is almost identical to what will later be imported to secnd life. The model is now made out of 32 times 32 faces. So there is not much more room for finer detailed modelling.  But let us make an experiment. Let us add another subsurf modifie and add 3 more levels of subdivision, and then apply the modifier.
Now we do have a very high poly model, which contains more than 64 thousand faces. Indeed  i have choosen the numbers such that we coulduse a texture of size 256 times 256 and end up with exactly one image pixel per model face.

Now let us apply a bit of noise to the high-poly model. We enable the proportional edit tool, and select the random fall-off. Then we select just one vertex, and scale up or down while we increase the edit range more and more. Once the hat looks like a hedge hog, we stop and full bake, what we have right now. Now the texture contains the light effects of the noisy surface.

Now switch to layer one and see how the same texture looks on the low poly hat. So the low poly hat looks similar to the high poly model, at least up to a certain extent. You see, that you can at least in principle use the texture to add some fine details to your object without actually adding more vertices and faces to your mesh.

But we also can turn the whole process head over heels. Instead of using the high poly model as our source and bake the results to a texture we also could use a special, typically a black and white texture where the color value of each pixel of the texture defines a certain displacement of the surface along the face normal of the corresponding location.

Blender introduces bump-maps,normal-maps,and displacement-maps.

bump-maps can be used to simulate what we just have shown with our high-poly model. Blender will create a virtual mesh point   for each pixel of the bump map,  and raises  or lowers  this virtual meshpoint  along its vertex-normal depending on the pixel’s color.  As a result a bump-map simulates a surface with much richer detail then the actual mesh supports. So Bump maps can enhance low-poly meshes and let them appear much more structured as they actually are.

Normal-maps are very similar to bump-map but instead of a grey scale image they use an RGB-image for the vertex dispositions.  Hence Normal-maps can be used to move the virtual mesh points in an arbitrary way . So we can say, that bump-maps are a special case of normal-maps where the modification only takes place along the vertex normals.

Displacement-maps directly modify the mesh during bake time.  And in contradiction to bump-maps this map type  can-not  add fine details into the texture.  The amount of displacement is again directly coupled to the grey-scale value of corresponding pixels in the map. Black will displace a vertex in-wards  along its vertex-normal while white will displace the vertex outwards.

So the effect of displacement-maps can always also be achieved  by directly modelling the mesh itself. Displacement maps are of less concern  when dealing with texture baking. But nevertheless i will show you a nice example where we can use them for our purpose. Note that your model is not modified at all. Only during baking the baker will apply the displacement map calculate the texture map due to the modified mesh and either renders the result to the render window or (as in our case) to the baked texture.

So in short the bump-map adds virtual bumps and wrinkles to your mesh with the bump direction always along the vertex normals. The resolution is directly proportional to the texture size of the bump-map. The  normal-map is like a bump-map but allows arbitrary bump-directions. The displacement map directly manipulates the mesh-vertex points and thus does not add more details.

We already used bump-maps when we created the felt-surface-texture. There we have configured blender to use a noise-texture as a Normal-map.and by means of this  we simulated a high poly surface.

So, now we are ready to take care of the hat-band. We will create a texture, which is completely white at the locations  which correspond to the hat-band. And completely black elsewhere. This map will simulate a small raise of the band  above the hat. We create this texture as follows:

• remove the high-poly hat from layer 5. We do no longer need it.
• select the hat on layer 1,
• make a copy of the hat-base and place this copy on layer 5
• Select the hat on layer 5, and go to edit mode.
• switch to the red hat-band material.
• Switch to the shading button section.
• create a new material named white-hat-band and make it white.

• disable the Nodes button and disable all textures on the texture stack.
• in edit mode verify that the hat-band vertices are now assigned to the new material.
• switch over to the black material.
• Again go to the shading button section, create a new material, disable the Nodes button and disable all textures in the texture stack.
• Now select all vertices, and in the image editor,
• create a new image of size 1024 times 1024. Name it band-bump-map.
• then render, bake render meshes, texture only.

Now we have constructed the bump-map. we only need to apply the map to the hat now:

• switch back to object mode, and then select layer one.
• Select the hat
• then select the hat-band material
• and switch to the shading-buttons section.
• There, add a new texture  and name it  band-bump-map.
• go to the texture settings.
• there, set texture type: image.
• And load the band-bump-map.
• now switch to the shade buttons.
• in the Map-input tab, enable UV, and specify “UV-Tex”.
• in the map-too section, disable color, and enable Normals.
• Use a value of about 20  for nor.

Now you can render, bake render meshes, full render. The effect is not very prominent, but it works. However we can get a bit advantereous, and try to use this map as displacement map. Remember, that the baker will first apply the modifier stack before baking. Hence we actually have 32 times 32 faces available for the displacement.

• So reduce the nor-value to something below 2,
• and enable the disp-button in the map-too settings.
• Set the displacement value to something about 0.15
• then full bake yet another time.

And at the end the hat band looks like it actualy was modelled in 3D. And this is what we wanted to achieve.  Let us add some horizontal stripes to the band.

• in the edit-section, ensure that you have the red hat-band-material selected.
• in the shading section add another texture. Name it silk.
• go to the texture section, set the texture type to: clouds.
• go back to the shading section, then in the map-input-tab, set all values to Y in the coordinate map.
• Also enable UV and set UV-Tex  as the map.
• finally set the y-size to 10. This setting will create horizontal stripes.
• In the map-too-section, disable color and enable normals.
• use a value of 5 for nor.
• Now render, bake render meshes, full bake.

Mischief accomplished. The final texture of this tutorial is ready for import to Secnd Life.

From here you can take a long time to experiment and improve. I have not shown all available texturing-options in blender.  I just scratched the surface.

In particular,

• we have created an ambient-occlusion map for the object.
• We have taken a brief look into the blender light system,
• and we added   light-dependent shadows
• and colored light effects.
• We found a way to bake a specular-reflection effect.
• And at the end we have improved the look and feel even more by creating  and adding   bump-maps to our textures.

You can find hundreds of good texturing tutorials in the internet. And once you have mastered the basics of this tutorial you should be able to follow those other tutorials without problems.

And now enjoy texturing. and have fun.
see you later!

Extra hints

If suddenly the baked textures do no longer show up in the 3D viewer, then you have become the victim of a blender bug which happens occasionally.
Here is what happens: Sometimes when you are in texture mode you do not see any effect on your model directly after you baked your texture.
And here is a way how you can get around this problem if it happens to you:

• go to edit mode
• in the UV image editor enable paint mode,
• and click once  on the texture. Now you have added a color spot on the texture and as a side effect  the entire texture will also be visible on the model.
• use control-z  to revert the just created small spot in the image.

This is annoying, but it helps at least to get further.
An even better alternative to handle this problem is to save your work into a .blend file (File -> save) then stop blender  and restart it, and reopen the just saved blend-file. The problem will also be gone.

Read more on the Jass download page.

Transcription

Hello and welcome my dear !
In this tutorial I will introduce the proportional-edit tool
to add some bumps and wrinkles to the top-hat
and make it look a 60 bit more interesting.

I will add some more sculpties to the hat
and during the ongoing course of this tutorial
i will also introduce global-view and local-view.
And i show you how you can add vertices to your object
by using the loop-subdivide tool.
We will also see how we can temporarily hide vertices.
and once we are finished with our model
we will see how we can examine a sculptmap on-the-fly
and how we can transfer a complex object from blender to Second life with almost no effort.

Let us start with proportional-edit. So what can we do with it
and where can we find it?
The function can be enabled in edit mode
by clicking on the circular icon at the bottom of the 3D-viewer
and then selecting connected in the upcoming selection box.

Let us select a single vertex to see the tool in action.
As soon as the vertex is moved or scaled
a white circle appears around the center of the selection.
The mesh behaves as if it where made out of rubber
and the circle shows the influence range of the tool.
You can change the range with the middle mouse roller.
The bigger the radius of the circle is,
the more vertices will be moved along with your selection.
So this function allows us to move single vertices around
and move adjacent but un-selected vertices very smoothly
along with our selection.

proportional-edit also applies to rotations and scaling.

Until now we have used smooth Falloff
which happens to be just the default setting for the proportional edit-tool.
Now i will enable random Falloff
which will give me an easy way to introduce some random-buckles to the object.

I select one vertical column of vertices.
Then i scale the column down a tiny bit.
At the same time i roll the middle mouse wheel downwards towards me
until the mesh starts to bump up and down randomly.

I turn the wheel slowly until i find a pleasing shape.
Now i click on the left mouse button
and as result we eventually get a bumpy top-hat.

Let us do one more tweek and switch the tool to linear Falloff.
I select the top edge-loop and scale it up a bit.
You might need to reduce the influence range now
by rolling the middle mouse button upwards
until you can see the white circle again.
Adjust the influence range to your needs.
But be warned. It may take some experimentation time until you can work with it fluently.

Remember that you always can press the escape key to revert your last modification.

Now turn off proportional-edit.

And also take a look at the top pole.
The pole vertices have unintentionally been separated while we randomised the hat.
Let us correct this by selecting the pole vertices and scale them down to zero.
Maybe we also need to move the vertices up or down a bit
to avoid a large bump on the top.

And at the end we get sort of a western top-hat.
It now looks like it is owned by doctor Doolittle.

Now let us add a sculpted bow and let us start with a torus shape.
Go to object mode

Then press the space bar to open the mesh menu
and navigate to add – mesh – sculpt mesh.

Change the shape selector to torus X.
And set the torus radius to 0.1
Then build it.

Well, the new object is partially hidden by the hat.
so let us move it along x until it is infront of the hat
and then go on with modelling.
But we also can hide the hat for a moment.
blender has got something for you here.

Go to view and there you see
that currently Global View is selected.
In Global View all objects of the current scene are displayed.
as soon as we change to Local View
blender will hide all unselected objects.

Hence since it is currently the only selected object
we only see the torus now.
Of course all hidden objects unhide again as soon as we switch back to Global View.
If you have a number pad then you also can use the division-key (%) to toggle between the views.

Now while keeping in Local View go to edit-mode and select side-view.
Ensure that all vertices are selected
and flatten the object along the z-axis by a factor of 0.25.
You can do this by first pressing the s-key, then enter z ,
and finally enter the value 0.25 directly from the keyboard.
Proceed in the same way for all subsequent modifications.

Now scale the object up along the x-axis by a factor of 4.

go back to side-view, select only the middle vertices at the top
and move them down to the object-center.
Do the same with the middle vertices at the bottom. This time move the vertices
up towards the center.
Now go to top view, grab all of the middle vertices
and scale them down along the x-axis by a factor of 0.3 .

Go back to object mode and add another torus.
This time set the radius to 0.2 and build it .
rotate the object along z by 90 degrees.
scale the object down by a factor of 0.25
then scale it up along the y-axis by 4.
Also scale it up along the x-axis by 1.3
and finally scale it down along the z-axis by 0.5 .

Now examine what we got so far.
we face a problem here.
We see an undesired intersection of the objects.
So let us try to correct this now.

To solve this issue
it would be nice to get some more vertices near the intersection.
And again blender has got a helper tool for us named Loop Subdivide.

But hold on! We have to keep in mind that sculpted prims have a fixed face count.
We can not simply add vertices because this would violate the rules.
On the other hand we are currently not working with the sculptmesh but with
a control mesh. The final sculptmesh will be created during bake time.

And the good news is that the primstar baker tool will take care about the correct
transformation from the mesh to the final sculpt-map
so that the Second Life constraints are fulfilled at the end.

But this does not mean that you can add or remove arbitrary vertices in your model.
However the Loop Ssubdivide tool is sculptie friendly
and we can use it without getting into trouble.

We also can use the image editor to directly monitor the changes in the sculpt-map.

Select the bow and go to edit mode.

Go to the UV-image editor and enable the button “Sync UV-and-mesh selection”.
This makes it easy to see what happens.

Now we will see the Loop Subdivide tool in action.
go to mesh – edges – Loop Subdivide
Or use a shortcut by pressing the control-key, followed by the R-key.

Every time when you position the mouse near to an edge
blender will calculate a new loop which passes through this edge
and cuts it into two pieces.
Move along your object until you find a convenient loop.
Then click the left mouse-button. Now the new loop will be created.
And again by moving the mouse you can move the loop around
until it is located exactly where you want to place it.
then left click and your new loop is added to the mesh.

Deselect all vertices and watch what happened to your sculpt-map.
The new loop is seen in the sculptmap as additional row of vertices.
You immediately see that we have increased the vertex-density
where we added the loop.
And this is exactly what we wanted to achieve:
Have more vertices along the critical areas of the sculptie.

I will show you this again in a moment.
But let me introduce another very usefull feature of blender beforehand.
We can temporarily hide selected vertices of an object.
And this can help us here
to get a clearer view of what happens on the model.

deselect all vertices.
then select all vertices which you want to hide.
You can do this at best in Side View.
Now press the h-key. Immediately all selected vertices disappear
and now it is much simpler to work with the remaining faces.

Please select again the Loop Division Tool by pressing the control-key
followed by the r-key.
Now it is much easier to find good loop locations.
click the left mouse button again and shift the new loop to your desired
location.

Now select both loops. Hold down alt
and right-click on the first loop.
Then hold down alt and shift,
and right-click on the second loop.

Scale up both selected loops along x
until they touch the adjacent sculptie.
then select the outer vertices of the loops,
move them along z,
and scale them along x until they fit nicely.
You also can select the top-most vertices of the loops,
enable proportional edit
and move them up a bit so that the bow fits even better.

At the end press the alt-key, followed by the h-key,
to unhide the hidden edges.
You can add some more enhancements to the bow if you like
but that is up to your personal taste.
For me it is good enough as it is by now.

Let us now bake the sculptmap, and see what happens.
After you have baked the sculptie, there is a nice trick to immediately
see the results. go to object mode. and select top-view.

then go to image, import as sculptie.
Move the new object a bit along x.

This is almost what we can expect to see in Second Life later.
But there is a small but important difference about
how the objects interact with the environmental lighting-system.
but blender has yet another option to help us here.

Please locate the link and Materials tab.
There select the set smooth button.

Now your object sometimes turns partially black. This seems to be a blender-bug.
If you see this to happen then switch to edit mode
and immediately return to object mode.
The black parts should be gone.

Now we see what we will get in second life and that does not look
too different from the original object.

Please be aware
that the smooth-button not only
makes your sculptie look much better in the viewer.
there is another very important issue here
which you must know about.

The “set-solid”
and “set-smooth” buttons
define two different lighting models.
And this setting directly influences the way how textures are baked.

For the moment let us say, that the “set-smooth” option will make the sculptie look
very much similar to how it would be seen in second life.
And let us keep with this mode for now.
I will get back to this in the next tutorial.

Let us now go back to Global View and adjust the size
and rotation of the bow relative to the hat.

I will go to top view first, then also try to scale, rotate,
and align the objects in other views.
It may take some time until the objects are all in position.

Ok, we have eventually created a satisfying shape for the hat. It is made out of 3 sculpties
instead of only one. And this is the moment where we start getting into real trouble.
How can we transfer the 3 sculpties into second life ?
And how can we keep their relative positions , sizes , and rotations intact?

Now there is another nice trick which is again introduced by primstar.
You can automate the setup of your sculpties in second life, but We need to do some
preparations beforehand.

first, go to object mode.
then select all your objects by holding down the SHIFT key
and then right-click them one by one.
Now go to object – parent – make parent.

This makes the least selected object the parent of the others.
if you select only this parent-object,
then all its children will follow any subsequent transformation.

Now we will prepare the export of the entire object group.
select all objects by right clicking on them
and holding down the SHIFT key at the same time.
Then go to: object – transform properties.
a small window opens.

There you see the current rotation and scaling values of your parent object.
The rotation values should all be zero here and scaling should be set to 1.
If these values are different we might end up
with unexpected rotations when later rezzing the objects in second life.

You can clear the values without modifying the object itself as follows:

go to: object – clear-apply – apply scale/rotation to Object-data.
Now all object rotations have been set to 0 and scaling is set exactly to 1.

And now the primstar baker can do all the rest for you.
still keep all objects selected.
then: render – bake sculpt meshes.
Keep with the default settings and bake.
It is important that the objects get baked at the same time,
because now primstar will calculate a precise vertex-alignment of the objects.
This is not very important for the hat but later we will see
that we can use this feature to create precisely fitting multiple sculpties.
I will get back to this in a later tutorial when we examine precise sculpting.

After the baker has finished you can control the results by examining the sculptmaps
one by one. Just select each individual object then go to edit mode and see that the sculptmaps have been created.

Now go to your local disk and create a new directory. You can create it at any place in your system.
go back to blender. then navigate to: File – export – second life LSL.
A file selector opens. Navigate to your just created empty directory.
Then click on the export-LSL button.
If you now check your just created directory,
you will find all sculptmaps there
and besides them
there will be one single LSL-script.

It is time to enter Second Life and create a prim.
Rename this prim to “Primstar”. take care to name it with a capital P, and take it to your inventory.

Now Create another prim and place a copy of the primstar-prim into it.

Then import the sculptmaps and put them into the inventory of the primstar-object.
finally create a new script in the object.

Open the generated LSL-script on your disk by using any text-editor of your choice
then cut’n paste the script content into the just created script inside the prim.

save the script and close the second life editor.
The Prim-Generator will immediately ask for the permission to link objects.
Answer “yes”.

Now click on the primstar-object to start the generator.
And watch how the object will be created from scratch.
finished. Your object has been rezzed and all proportions are intact.
And even the parent/child relations have been used
to create the corresponding link set .

We are now at the end of this tutorial.
We have learned about the proportional edit tool.
We have used Local View and Global View for easy editing.
We have used the Loop Subdivide tool
to add more vertices at critical areas.
We know how we can temporarily hide vertices.
We can examine a sculptmap on the fly.
And we can get back smooth surfaces after reimporting a sculpt-map to blender.
And we can transport a set of objects from blender to Second Life.

The next tutorial will entirely be dedicated to texturing the model.
Until then please take your time and improve your modelling skills by applying
what you have learned in this tutorial.

Have fun, and see you later!

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Thank you very much!

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Transcription

Hello and welcome again! We will now proceed with our top-hat and optimize its shape. Then we are going to try an easy way to texturise it. We will create a simple black surface, and add a colored band to it. But let us begin by examining what we already have by now. We see that the top-edge of the hat is not well defined, so we want to sharpen it a bit. The same is true for the edge between the brim and the body. We can do this by using the Crease-function.

To understand how crease works, let us Look at this simple plane for a moment. I will select the left-half of it and rotate it along the x-axis. As you can see, the plane gets bended in a smooth way and the surface moves-away from the control points. So we can immediately see, that the control-points are not always located right on the surface of the object. Right now their influence on the surface is weak to keep the surface very smooth and organic.

With the crease-function we can change the amount of this influence and thus we can create sharper edges. It is important to know that crease only works on edges, and never on single vertices. So you need to select at least one edge, before you can apply crease. Let us select one single edge, and then enable Crease.

You find Crease under:

mesh -> edges -> crease-subsurf

As a short-cut you also can press SHIFT-”e”, to enable it. A dashed-line appears. You can enlarge or shorten this line by moving the mouse. The longer the line is, the stronger the edges pull on the surface until it touches the edges. You can select any set of edges and adjust the crease value for each edge differently. You can of course select many edges at once, and set their crease-value in one single operation.

Turning back to our hat we will want to apply the Crease-option along the  top-edge and along the lower edge between the brim and the hat-body. So let us try that  out-now.

• go to edit-mode.
• Then select the top edge-loop: Press the alt-key then right-click on an arbitrary edge of the loop.
• After the  edge-loop is selected, press SHIFT-”E” and then enlarge the appearing handle until the edge looks clean-cut.
• After you have adjusted the top of the hat, we can proceed with the brim. Again select the appropriate edge-loop. Then invoke the crease function, and sharpen the edge exactly as you did before.
• At the end let us compress the hat along-one-axis to give it a more vivid touch.

The basic model is completed by now. So let us give a first try on texturizing. Well, this is a very complex topic. But we will choose a simple approach here and proceed in small steps only.

With blender you will first need to learn how to work with materials. Which in first place means, you must know how to create materials and how to assign them to your objects. So please always remember, that Working with materials
is the key to create textures for your models in blender.

And Here we go:

• Select your object and ensure that you have selected draw-type “solid”, or draw-type “shaded”. Then you can immediately see the effects of your material settings.
• Now go to the shading-panel. You can do this by pressing F5.
• In the Links-and-pipeline tab, find the label: “Link to Object”.
• There click on add-new, to create and automatically  assign a new material to your model.

As soon as your first material is created, a multitude of new buttons appears. But you can ignore most of these buttons for now. We will get back to them later. Right now your material has been automatically named  material. Since this is not very meaningfull, please rename the material to something more recognizable, like  “hat-base” for example. That will save you a lot of time when you want to look-up your material again later.

Now we will modify the material to serve our purpose:

• In the material tab click on the color-selector and use the upcoming color-picker window to turn the color from light grey to very dark grey. Just click on an appropriate area in the  color-picker, then move the mouse out of the color-picker without any further clicking. Note that you should see a  dark-grey sphere in the preview window. And also your object should have turned very dark.
• By now the entire object has been assigned to  the-same material. Let us now take care about the hat-band, and let us make it red.
• For this purpose we will first create a second material. Look-up again the label: “link to object” then click on the up-and-down arrow keys and Add a new material.
• Rename this material to: hat-band.
• Then change the material-color to a light red.

By now we have created 2 separate materials. You can switch the material for the entire object by simply selecting the appropriate material here. Right now the  hat-band material is also applied to the whole object when it is selected. But we want to apply it only to a few faces, and keep the  majority of faces assigned to the base material. So how can we make this assignment ?

ok, this is done as follows:

• let us select the base material again, to make the entire object black.
• Then go to edit mode, And also go to the edit-buttons-panel. You can use F9 for this.
• Under link and materials, find the material button. Right below the material button you should now see the text:”1  Mat 1″.This means, that exactly one material is assigned to the object and this material has the material-index 1.

• Select a row of faces on the hat. Move the faces along z, until they are located where you want the band to appear later.
• In the material selector select “hat-band”. The selected faces now should become red. And the before mentioned text should have changed to:”2 Mat 2″This consequently means: We now have 2 materials assigned to the object and the second material with material-index 2 is currently assigned to the selected vertices.

The model has now been assigned to 2 different materials. One material for the hat itself using a dark-grey color. The other material used for the band using a light red color. In edit-mode we have selected a subset of faces for the band, and assigned the hat-band material to these faces.

Now we are almost ready to make our first texture out of this model. In fact we could bake the texture  right-now, but We will make another preparation for convenience. So please go to object mode now. Ensure that you do this, because otherwise you will end up with a wrong UV-map. ok. So we are in object-mode now ? Your hat might look very dark at this moment. Ignore that for now.

• Open the editing buttons-screen by clicking on F9. Then locate the Mesh tab.
• There create a new UV texture by clicking on: New.
• rename the new texture to: “texture”.
• Now enable the buttons: “set active UV-texture”, and “set rendering UV-texture”.

By now you have created a copy of the sculptie map. You will use this copy for your texturing purposes. The good thing about this approach is, that you never mess up your sculptmap with your texture. You can switch between your sculptmap and your texture by selecting the appropriate active UV-texture.

• Please go back to edit mode now.
• There select all vertices. If you don’t select all vertices here you will not be able to proceed with the next step.
• Go to the UV-editor, and there create a new image of size 64 times 64. Just click on: image, new. Then enter width and height. Please use 64 times 64 for now, even if you think that this is a very low resolution texture. We will come back to this issue in the next tutorial of this series.
• Please rename the just created image to : “texture”, so that it later becomes easier to locate it in the list of images.

And now finally we can bake the texture as follows: Click on

Render -> Bake render meshes ->  texture-only.

You will end up with a mostly black image containing a red horizontal stripe. This is your very first and very primitive texture for your sculptie. Save this texture to your hard disk and examine how it appears on your object in second life. After you have uploaded the surface-texture, just drag it onto your sculptie. It should correctly wrap around the object.
If you think that something is wrong, then please

• check in the texture tab that you have enabled default-mapping.
• Also look at the repeats  per face. Ensure that their values are set to 1 in U and in V.
• And check,  that the offsets have been set to 0.
• You should also set the color of your sculptie to white. Otherwise you will get a  mixture between the SL color settings and your texture.
• Please  also check that full-bright is disabled for now.

Now take a closer look at the sculptie. You can see that indeed the red band is now visible. But it does not  appear where we placed it in blender. Also the sharpened edges at the top and at the brim are not visible.

Please remember, that we have changed the model when we applied the  crease-function and we also moved the vertices for the band along the z-axis. Hence We have to re-bake the sculpt-map of the current model. Take care to select the sculptie texture, before you bake the sculptmap. Otherwise you will overwrite the previously created surface-texture of your sculptie. And now finally, the band appears at the correct location.

We are now at the end of the second sculptie tutorial. I have shown you

• how you can use the Crease-function to make sharp edges.
• After we have finished the basic model
• i have given you a very light-weighted introduction into blender’s material system
• and how you can use it to create textures based on multiple materials.

In the next tutorial We will proceed by introducing some more fancy texturing techniques including shadow-maps and procedural textures. Until then, stay tuned and have fun.

See you later!

Transcription

Welcome to our blender tutorial series about sculpted prims. I assume that you are new to blender and maybe this is even your first attempt to make 3D-artwork. So i will guide you through the process of creating a sculpted prim in easy-to-follow steps. I have choosen to create a top-hat. This is not a very complex task, but i can show you many important details about modelling and texturing. At the end of this video you will know the most important concepts about blender, sculpted prims, and about the primstar tool which i will introduce now.

I assume that you have already downloaded and installed blender 2.49b (the current stable release).
And i assume that you have downloaded and installed the primstar tool from the Domino-designs website.

We have already covered these preliminary steps in our basic blender tutorials. And please take your time to watch our blender-primer-tutorial at least once. That will help you find your way through this video. You can find all mentioned tutorials on the machinimatrix-website.

We will use blenders plain and simple out of the box configuration here. I will modify the configuration later to optimize blender for the creation of sculpted prims. So let us first remove the default-cube by pressing ‘x’, and then click on: ‘erase selected objects’. Now we are ready to create a new object by pressing the space bar on the keyboard , and then,

add -> mesh -> sculpt mesh

A dialog opens where you can access a set of parameters for your sculptie. The most important parameter is the base shape to be used. You can choose among 6 base shapesand a couple of more complex pre-defined shapes. Since we want to create a top-hat we will select the most natural starting shape here, a cylinder. For now keep the other parameters with their default values. We will come back to them later.

But please note, that we are working with

• 8 faces in x
• 8 faces in y
• 2 subdivision levels.

We will see later, what that is about and why this is one of the coolest features of prim-star. Ok, it is time to Click on the build-button and create your first blender object.

You can use the middle mouse roll-button to zoom-in and out. This pink outline of the object tells you that it is currently selected. You can hold down the middle mouse button and drag the mouse to examine the object in the 3D-space.

As expected, it is a cylinder and we want to modify it now. So let us switch from Object-mode to edit-mode. You can do that in the mode-selection menu in the bottom line of the current screen. When in edit-mode, you notice a few more interesting things here:

1. first, you see a mesh made out of 9 octagons stacked on top of each other. This corresponds to 8 faces in x, and 8 faces in y. If you selected another set of values in the add-sculptie-menu, you would now see a different mesh-configuration here.
2. You also see the cylinder rendered as a smooth object. Indeed the mesh is used as a set of control-points for the cylinder. The number of vertices on the cylinder controlled by each mesh-point is determined by the subdivision level. Each level adds a factor of 4, hence with 2 subdivision levels, each mesh-point controls 16 cylinder vertices.

For now we just work with the control points. We will learn later, how to take more control, even full control over each individual vertex of the cylinder. For now we are happy with just modifying the controlpoints.

Ok, the first thing we need to do is closing the top of the cylinder. For this purpose we switch to front-view. You can do that in the view-selection menu in the bottom line of the current screen. Now i deselect all vertices of the mesh by pressing ‘a’ once.

Now i want to select the top vertices. Press ‘b’ to open the border-select-tool, then click the left mouse-key and while holding the mouse key down drag the rubber-band around the vertices which you want to select. When i now release the left mouse-key all enclosed vertices get selected.

Now i will scale all vertices down to 0. Press “s”, then drag the mouse towards the center of the selected octagon.
As a shortcut simply enter “0″ on the key-board and press the Enter button.

Now the cylinder-top is closed. But we want to make the top more flat. I go back to front view, and then i grab the selected vertices by pressing “g” followed by “z”. Now i can move the vertices along the z-axis until they align with the next lower octagon of vertices. By now we are almost finished. We only need to model the brim.

I select the bottom row of vertices and scale them up a bit. Again i use the border-select tool by pressing “b”, left click, drag, and release the left mouse button. Then i scale by pressing “s”, then drag the mouse and left click again. Finally i move the whole-set of selected vertices a bit upwards to align them with the next-higher row of vertices. finished. Now we need to know how this object can be transported to the target system namely second life.

The answer is: We must create a sculpt-map. A sculptmap is a 2D-mapping of the vertices in your object. This mapping is calculated by primstar, and automatically translated into an image. And this image can be accessed by use of the UV-image editor. All we have to do now, is to configure a split-screen and open the UV-image editor. This will become very handy in the course of this tutorial.

Move your mouse-button to the upper-part of the screen  until you see a double-headed arrow-key. After pressing the right mouse-button a small window appears. Select “split area”. A vertical line appears and follows your mouse-movement.
Move the line around until you have found your preferred split-point then click the left mouse-button.

Now you see two windows showing the same content. In the right window go to the “window-type-selector” and choose the UV-image editor. If the display is too small You can use the middle mouse roll-button to scale it up a bit

And now comes the magic part:

1. First, go to object-mode. This is important to see the sculptie-map immediately.
2. Then , Go to render , “bake sculpt meshes”.
3. There just klick on the bake-button, leaving the default settings untouched for the moment.
4. your sculptie-map appears in the window on the right-side.
5. And now finally open the image-sub-menu and save your sculpt-map to your hard-drive.

This map is what we have to import to our virtual world now. Note, that this image will by default be stored in TGA-format. Now go to your second-life viewer and import the just created image into your inventory. When you transmit the image, be sure, that you use loss-less compression, Otherwise your sculpted prim might look a bit broken.

For our first attempt to create a sculpted prim this result is not too bad, don’t you think ?

But hold on! Look what happens when i take a closer look under the hat. not good! The object is transparent from the inner side. The brim disappears. Now how can we explain this ?

Well, the reason is simple: sculpted prims have only one side. Look here. These are 4 basic shapes for sculpted prims. The plane, Nicely visible from one side. But fully transparent from the other side. The cylinder, The outside is ok, but the whole in-side is invisible. The sphere and the Torus. These two are ok. But this is only so because they do have only one side. The inner side simply does not exist, hence we see no problem here.

So what can we do to make this cylinder work better in our 3D-world ? Lets go back to the moment where i create the brim. Now we select the secnd lowest row of vertices and scale them up as we did before. And then we take the lowest row of vertices but now we scale them down a bit. Finally we scale down the three bottom-most rows in “z”. The effect is, that now we have modelled the brim with 2 sides instead of only one side. And now the hat also looks good from below.

Please note that i have not fully closed the hat. As long as the hat is placed on a head there is no problem here.

Only if you intend to hold the hat in your hands it may become necessary to model the full in-side part.

We are now at the end of this tutorial. I have shown you

• how to create a basic shape with primstar
• how to examine the objects
• how to select vertices with the border select tool
• how to scale parts of your model.
• You know how to bake a sculptmap
• and how to export it to Secnd-life.
• And now you also know why sometimes parts of a sculptie unexpectedly disappear and what you can do in order to avoid that.

In the next tutorial We will proceed with a few more-advanced modelling-tools,
and make this cylinder look more appealing.

Until then have fun.

See you later!

This time our contribution did not get as high ratings as the last times. We got the award for best graphics (again like in the previous 2 years, thanks to the wardrobiers and thanks to Ayesha Bisiani and her “Skin Within” project). And this time we also got the award for “best use of character”. All in all this time we sadly did not perform well compared to our very strong competitors. But we are still very happy with the results and we learned a lot since then. The first improvements can be seen in “The primstar“  movie also published on this Blog.

Enjoy.