Donate … (page)

Hussayn — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:28:20 +0000

Please donate at least 1 US Dollar per watched video. And certainly donate if you plan to ask Gaia Clary in Second Life for questions. Gaia will respond if ever possible.

Q: For what do we need donations ?

A: We need to spend time and money to improve our work, add new tutorials and better services. The more donations we get the more time we can spend on improvements and the more services you can receive from us!

Q: Why we do not sell our service?

A: Simple: We trust you! Name it “pay after view” if you like that more! We are not going to make you “pay in advance”. First watch and enjoy, then decide to support our work! And honestly, Your support is evident!

Q: What about micro payment?l

If you can not donate via Paypall for any reason, or if the amount of donations you can afford is less than 2 US$, then please donate Linden Dollars in Second Life. Gaia Clary is the one to receive your transaction in that case.

thank you all for your support
the Machinimatrix team

Blender Primer

Gaia Clary — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:25:00 +0000

Recently we have decided to create an absolute beginners tutorial, because so many people hesitate to at least try out blender due to rumours about complex GUI and non intuitive behaviour …
So, here it is… The blender beginners tutorial is published.

intended audience:

blender noobs

prerequisites:

none

related tutorials from other sites:

none

We are not showing any fancy techniques, or complicated stuff by any means. It only covers the absolute basics, like how to select vertices, move,scale, border select …
So we encourage you to watch the video, then (hopefully) decide to try out blender.

If you have the feeling, this video is too long, too trivial, or needs other enhancements, or things are missing (definitely there are things missing … ), please tell me/us…
BTW: if you want to learn more about sculpted prims with blender, you can watch our subsequent videos (see our video tutorials page for the links).

Transcription

Welcome to the exciting world off blender.

Everybody is talking about blender’s non intuitive user-interface.
We have been curious, and so we spent some time to work with this software.
And in complete contradiction to the expectations we have found,
that this program is an amazing tool with very high potential.

we will now show you some of the very basic features of blender.
At the end of this tutorial,
you will be able to use the object modification tools,
and find your way through the program.
And you might see that blender indeed is designed
for usage in a very intuitive way.

so, after installation, blender runs out of the box, and upon start,
you will see the following window.

This is the modelling view.
it is a bit like the swiss army knife for blender workers.
It provides a 3D-view for your objects,
and it provides an area with a set of buttons,
for context dependent functions, and settings.

There are other views available. At the top of the screen,
you find a pull-down box,
where you can select different views.
You even can customize your own view here.
Lets go to the material view for demonstration purposes.
This view contains 6 windows. When you move the mouse over thescreen,
sometimes the cursor changes to a double headed arrow.

Everytime, when this happens, you are crossing a window border.
you can now click the left mouse button,
and while holding the button down,
drag the window separation line, up, down, left or right .
This behaviour is unique over the whole application.
And this uniqueness is true for almost everything inside blender.
The idea is simple: learn once, and apply everywhere.

But lets get back to the modelling view for now.
by the way, this view contains 3 windows. One window is almost fully
hidden. It contains a whole bunch of system configuration parameters.
You do not need to know the full details at this time.
But it is good to remember that this window is here.

Now, lets do something, before we all fall asleep.
so what is this square, here in the middle of the window?
this is a primitive object.
in fact this is a 3D-cube. We just look at it from the top.
You want to see the other side ?
no problem, click your middle mouse button and drag the mouse.
immediately your view is rotated according to the mouse moves.

This happens until you release the middle mouse button.
You can reposition the mouse, click again and drag again.
Hence you can look at your object from any viewing angle you like.

When You want to go closer, just move your mouse wheel.
or use the plus and minus signs on your number-pad,
to zoom in and out.

Lets remove this object now, and then create a new one.

So, where do we find the object manipulation functions ?
Well, You get the most important functions,
by hitting the space bar, inside the 3D view.

Immediately a pop-up selector box opens,
and gives you all you need to proceed.

ets see, where we can find the delete-function.
ok, it is in the edit-section.
Look at the right side of the pop-up box.

The expressions you see there, are keyboard-shortcuts.
Here you see, that you also can delete the object by pressing: x.
lets do this and confirm,
that we definitely want to delete the object.

ok, you might say, this is not intuitive! Why can’t we simply
use the delete-key on the key-board? Well, you can!
Just press the delete-key. It works too.

Now get back to the function menu, by pressing the space bar again.
enter the add-section,
then jump to the mesh-section,
and there, choose a cube.

This new object is not different from what we had before.
But now, you know how to create new mesh-objects with blender,
And that was worss the effort, wasn’t it ?

Now lets go to edit mode,
and modify the object a bit.
You can select the modification mode from another pull-up box
within the 3d-view.
or just hit the tab-key on your key-board, .

By the way: almost every function in blender,
can be called either from the key-board,
or by selecting from menu options.
Once you get used to it, keyboard shortcuts will make you working much faster.

But the really amazing thing is,
that you can use the keyboard and the mouse in parallel.
And it is even possible, to use the space navigator from 3d connections,
which is a fabulous navigation hardware for 3D en-vironments.

So look at the object a bit closer now.
You see small dots colored in yellow,
straight lines also colored in yellow,
and some surfaces in a dark pink color.

The dots are called: “vertices” ,
the lines are named: “edges” ,
and the surfaces are called: “faces” .

This is the standard notation in 3D-content-creation.
So remember again:
vertices are points in space,
edges are lines in space,
and faces are surfaces in space.

by the way, in blender meshes, we only work with, square faces and triangle faces.
All objects are made out of them.
Square faces also are called: quads.
And triangle faces are named … well, they are just named: triangles.

Remember that our object is displayed, with all edges and vertices colorised in yellow?
This means, at the moment the object is fully selected.
And so, your now proceeding work will be applied to the entire object?

But we only want to select one single point now.
So we first have to de-select all vertices.
let us hit the space bar again ,
then probably we will click on : select

yes, here we find select and de-select all.
Aha, this sounds promising. let us click here.

Now the object is fully de-selected.
So, how can we select only one single ver-tex ?

As always, there are many possible ways to achieve that.

we choose a simple approach: place the cursor near to the vertex
which you want to select, then press the right mouse button.

there you are! you got your vertex selected.
Let us select an additional one.
ok, that works too, but now the first vertex gets deselected.

Let us try it again,
but lets also press the shift-key in parallel ?
yes, that was a correct guess.
Watch also, how the edges get high lighted in yellow,
when two adjacent vertices are selected.
Now select a whole quad

And as soon as all 4 vertices are selected,
the quad turns from gray to dark pink.
so far, this behaviour meets our expectations.
Now an entire side of the cube is selected.

So, how can we shift, scale, and rotate,
the selected vertices relative to the object?
We can look into our function pool again,
and search for suitable tools.
These tools will probably be located under the
transformation tab ?

But there is a much more intuitive way to go.
We can use 3D-manipulators.
Currently the translate manipulator is active.
Just click on one of the arrows,
and move your vertices along the choosen axis.
click again, to stop the translation mode.
You also can click at the white circle
at the center of the manipulator,
and move your vertices within the entire plane.

What about rotation? switch to the rotation manipulator,
and select your rotation axis.
Now the vertices will rotate,
around the weighted vertex center.

Move the mouse away from the object while scaling.
You will then get more fine control on the rotation angle.

Click on the white circle, and the rotation plane will be exactly
the same, as your current viewing-plane.

And scaling ?
Just select the scaling manuipulator and go ahead,
and as i said before: learn once, apply everywhere

that’s nice! but the object runs a bit out of controll now, don’t you think.
So what can we do ?

First, we can go and clean up this mess.
guess what ?
yes, there is an undo-function in our function pool.
But, of course there is also a keyboard-shortcut here.
just use control-z for this.
That is quite familiar, isn’t it ?

ok, so lets hit control-z, until we are back at the original shape.
by the way: of course there is also a redo, which can be accessed with control-y.

A few moments ago, i mentioned, that the transformation tools
can also be found in the function menu ,
and again there are key-board-shortcuts available.

In short, you can select: Grab, which is a synonym for shifting
or moving the vertices, just by pressing “g”, on the key-board.

Then you can scale: In this case, press “s”

And finally you can select: rotate, by pressing, “r”.

You see, that working with the key-board shortcuts,
can speed up your work significantly.

Now, lets go back to the top view,
from where we have seen the object at the beginning of its life.
So open the view menu.
Currently we are in user view mode.
That means: we have selected an arbitrary viewing angle.

You have the choice to switch to top view, front view, or side view.
I select top view.

and then try the transformation tools again.
lets move some vertices.
as an example we will take the lower left edge of the cube.

Just clicking the right mouse key, only selects one single vertex. We already have
seen this before.

well, after changing the viewing angle a bit, we can
select the 2 vertices by holding the shift key,
while clicking the right mouse button again.
But there is a much better option here.
we do have a border select mode, in our function menu.
As soon as you select this tool, you will see a cross hair cursor.
Now move the cross hair to any beginning position,
then click the left mouse button,
and while holding the button down, drag the mouse.

a rubber band opens up and follows your mouse.
As soon as you release the mouse button again,
all vertices inside the rubber band get selected.
Note, that the previously selected vertices do not get de-selected here.

Since, select, de-select, and rubber band select, are so commonly used,
they are associated to very prominent key-board short cuts, .
namely a, and b.

Pressing a, while other vertices are selected,
will de-select everything.

Pressing a, while nothing else is selected,
will select everything.

And finally, pressing b, opens the rubber band tool,
or in the blender notation: the border select tool.

so i go back to top view ,
then i press, “A”, to de-select all vertices.

i press, “B”, then drag the rubber band around the lower left vertices,
and ? indeed! They are selected!

now i want to move the vertices.
again press the space bar,
and search the move function.
remember, we find this tool under: transform, grab.

or, as we got a little experience by now, we directly use the keybord shortcut:g, and go ahead.

or, as we even got more experienced, just use the transform manipulator!

lets create a simple ramp now.
de-select all vertices by pressing: a,
then select the upper-left vertices by pressing: b,
and use the border select tool.
and finally use the transform manipulator, to move the vertices around.

And at the very end, scale up the lower part of the ramp a bit,
by de-selecting all vertices again,
then select the lower-left vertices using the border select tool,
then press: “s”, and scale the ramp
finished.

Now it is very important to know,
that all vertex-moves and rotations,
only take place in the current viewing plane.
So, if we look from the top, vertices will be moved in the X-Y, plane.
Look at the bottom-left corner of the 3D view.
There you see exactly, in which plane you are currently operating.

If we look from the front,
we are working in the x-z plane, and finally, when we are
looking from the side, we work in the y-z-plane.
And consequently, when we are looking from an arbitrary view,
the tools work again in exactly the corresponding plane.

Hence it is very important to select the correct viewing plane,
before moving and rotating your vertices.

It often is desirable to watch from an arbitrary viewing angle,
but restrict the position changes to a different plane.
again you simply can use the transform-manipulators in that case,
by first selecting the whole object by pressing: a, and then go ahead.

But you can also speed up your work significantly,
by using key-board-shortcuts and the mouse in parallel.

This can be achieved as follows:
Now you can move the object along the x-axis
by pressing: g, followed by, X.

Or, move the object along the y-axis,
by pressing: g, followed by, y.

And of course the same can be done along the z-axis.

And last but not least, these rules also apply to
rotation and scaling.

You think, that’s enough for now ? let me tell you a last goody, before we quit this tutorial?

try this: click somewhere into the view.
While holding the mouse button, drag the mouse along a straight line.
Then release the mouse button again.

Now the object follows the mouse on the viewing plane.
This is just another way to move the object.
Another left click will stop the transformation.

Now left click, and then move the mouse along a circular path.
then release the mouse button.
Now you are in rotation mode.
And again, the next left click, will stop the transformation.

left click again,
and move the mouse forwards and backwards along a straight line.
Then release the mouse button.
Now you are in scaling mode.
left click to stop the transformation again.

Until here, we have covered the most basic functions of blender.
Of course, there is so much more to say, but i think,
we should take a break now, and maybe watch the tutorial a second time,
or simply start doing a lot of practicing in blender.

If you want to know more about the usage of blender, we invite you, to watch our subsequent tutorials.
have a nice day!

Creating blender on windows XP (page)

Gaia Clary — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:54:26 +0000

Building blender

Open a windows sdk shell

Start -> Programs -> Microsoft Windows SDK v 7.0 -> CMD

Navigate to the build directory:
- g:
- cd blender_build
- cd blender
- python scons/scons.py
open eclipse and open the project “Jass-2.0″
open the file jass-2.0.0.vista.nsi
Compile script (calls nsis…)

You end up with a jass-2.0-RC4.exe, which contains the complete redistributable installer.

meshes trail (page)

Gaia Clary — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 11:13:41 +0000

Creating meshes for Second Life with blender

Important Note: Please take a minute to read the Tutorial license terms.

The Kettle Quest (July 2011, in progress)abstract: The Kettle Quest is an attempt to show you the differences between creations based on Sculpted Prims and meshes. I tried to keep the tutorial mostly tool independent. The original tutorial is text based, but meanwhile most of the tutorial is also available in the video tutorial series “The Kettle Quest”
read more …

The Shoe Quest ( August 2011, in progress)
abstract: The Shoe Quest describes how you can create a basic shoe model using Box modelling. Once the basic model is created i show you a methid for creating various variations of the basic model with little effort.
read more …

Overview about meshes ( May 2010, partially outdated )
abstract:In this tutorial I have recorded a preview about the creation of meshes using blender. This tutorial does not reflect the current state of the development. So there may be differences to the actual release when meshes are published in beta.
read more …

Static meshes Part I ( 12-October-2010 )
abstract:The tutorial shows in easy steps, how to create an arbitrary mesh with blender and export it as a Collada-1.4 file for usage in Second Life. We assume, that you have basic knowledge about the blender user interface. But we still provide enough background information, so that even blender newbies can follow the process. The tutorial works best with Jass-2.3 (either pub or pro), but any blender 2.4* version up to the release 2.49b is suitable. You also can use blender release 2.5. A blender-2.5 tutorial is planned in the near future.
read more …

Static meshes Part II ( 12-October-2010 )
abstract:The tutorial shows in easy steps, how to upload a Collada-1.4 file to Second Life. This part is independent from blender. The only prerequisite is to have a Collada-1.4 file ready to use. Note that zou are obliged to take care about license policies. You best choice is to only upload your own creative artwork to Second Life!
read more …

Static meshes Part III ( coming soon )
abstract:The tutorial shows in easy steps, how to refine the mesh created in Part I and II of this tutorial series. We try to make the initial object less blocky, yet preserve sharp edges where necessary. And we will show how you can add up to 8 textures to different parts of your model. This video only shows how to define the “texture faces”. The actual texturing starts in the next part.
read more …

Static meshes Part IV ( coming soon )
abstract:We finish the texturing. We add several levels of LOD and an optimized physiscs mesh. The goal will be to reduce the Prim costs as much as possible.

Static meshes Part V ( coming soon )
abstract:We will create a multi-part scene using 3 detailed objects in our scene. The goal is to make the scene look as close as possible like the original real life object.

Your feedback helps to constantly improve our work.So, Please tell us:

what you are missing
what we could do better.

Have fun.

Meshes Overview

Gaia Clary — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 20:28:18 +0000

abstract:In this tutorial I have recorded a preview about the creation of meshes using blender. This tutorial des not reflect the current state of the development. So there may be differences to the actual release when meshes are published in beta.

intended audience:

Creators of content for Second Life and similar environments

prerequisites (*):

related resources:

translator.py Warning: Do not use with Jass-Pro and Jass-magic (these products already have an improved Collada Exporter)

avatar.blend

FAQ (page)

Gaia Clary — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 20:13:41 +0000

I lost my Download Link … (The most frequently asked question)

You can not find your question answered here ? Please fill out the form below.

common

I lost my Download Link…

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

Where do i find my download ?

The Purchase from JASS-Shop

Right after you purchased one of our products a few things happen as follows:

Our purchaser will generate a purchase ID and create a download directory on our web server.
The purchaser gives you a notecard which contains some basic information about how to proceed.
The purchaser tells you the link to your directory on your chat window. You can diretly click on that link to get to your download directory.
An URL Window pops up from where you also can directly click to your download directory.

The Purchase from paypal

Rjght after you returned from the Paypal payment screen, you will be forwarded to a summary page about your purchase. On that page you will be informed about where you can find your download link.

Sometimes the comunication between paypal and our download servers is a bit slow. So it can happen that you have to wait for 1 minute until the download link finally is available.

Your download directory is organized into a folder hierarchy. You will find all your purchased products on your download page. Just click on the folder icons to open the hierarchy.

Please note: When you only have purchased one product from us, then your download folder will always be expanded and you will see all download files immediately. But as soon as you purchase a second product, then you will see the folder Hierarchy.

If you do not get the Download link

In World Purchase

If you have lost your download link or did not catch the information from the Purchaser, maybe because your viewer crashed during the purchase or whatever bad event happens, then please check this:

Verify that the payment has been processed. You can do that from the Secondlife Website by logging into your account on that page and check the transaction history.
Follow the instructions on the “I lost my download link” FAQ entry.

Paypal Purchase

If for some reason you do not get access to your download link, then please follow the “I lost my download link” FAQ entry.

Where do i find my updates ?

As soon as an update is available it will show up in your download folder. If you forgot about your download folder then please follow the instructions in the FAQ entry:

Where do i find my Download

And if you even lost your download link then please folow the instructions in the FAQ entry:

I lost my download link

How can i join the Avastar and Primstar-2 support groups ?

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 should i buy the Primstar 2 ?

This question is very hard to answer at this time (june-2011) because of several reasons:

Primstar-2 is not fully finished, so you will miss some helpfull parts, like the multi part exporter and the automatic error detections.
Blender-2.5 still lacks a good Collada support which is essential when you want to do meshes.
Blender-2.49 has some weaknesses including some (mostly knows) bugs and it is harder to learn than blender 2.5
Jass-Magic is still the most feature complete product from us.
Primstar-2 has got many new features and a few exciting new base shapes (bricks for example, good for fractional sculpting)
Blender-2.49b is no longer maintained
Blender 2.5 will be mostly error free starting with Blender 2.58 (coming in a few weeks as far as i know), and that affects Primstar seriously. Right now we suffer from 3 very bad Blender bugs and 2 of them have been fixed for 2.58. It is unclear if the remaining bug will find a fix in the next weeks.
And it is still not clear if Collada-support will be enhanced or not.

Now how to decide ?
Our way is to give away Jass-Magic for free when you upgrade to Primstar-2.
So in fact you would get Primstar-2 for Blender 2.5 AND Jass-Magic for Blender 2.49b.
And you will have to switch frequently between both blender versions.
A typicall workflow would be:

Build with Blender-2.5
Export single sculpties with blender 2.5
Export multi part sculpties with Jass-Magic
Export collada files with Jass-Magic

Fortunately you can run both programs in parallel.
So now it is your turn to decide.

Hint: If you plan to go with Blender on the long term, then get Primstar-2 now, because
we give a 15% price reduction until Primstar is fully finished (you will get all updates
plus the release version of Primstar-2 plus a fully working version of Jass-Magic)

And currently an upgrade from Pro or Magic fully counts the price of the product
which you already have purchased. So under no circumstances you will have extra costs.

Which Primstar-dev-2-???.zip file shall i install ?

When you open your Primstar-2 Jass-Inventory folder, then you will find a couple of zip files all

starting with “Primstar-2-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 Primstar-2-dev-???.zip files (possibly you can remember which version worked for you)
Proceed the installation document just as if it where a new Primstar-2 installation.
Restart Blender after you have installed. Otherwise Blender might get confused by its own cacheing system.

Features

Which platforms are suported by Primstar-2 and Avastar?

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

Can i install Primstar-2 and Avastar in parallel ?

Yes, you can do that.

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

Can Primstar-2 convert existing objects to Sculpted Prims ?

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:

installation/Runtime

My Primstar-2 / Avastar refuses to install in my Blender

Download is corrupt

We expect that the addon is contained in a .zip file. Sometimes this zip file is not downloaded completely for unknown reasons.

For MAC Users: We often get reported that the Download automatically unzips the downloaded file. This must be avoided!

Sometimes your download gets corrupted by an Anti Virus program.

Fixes:

Ensure that the downloaded file is a readable zip file. Try to read the content of the zip file. If your zip-reader can read the file, then all is well.
If your Browser tries to unzip the download, then try:
“right mouse click -> save as…”
You always can temporarily disable your anti virus program, download the file and finally let the download be checked by your antivirus program. How this is done is dependent on the anti virus software.

User name with special characters

Sometimes (especially on Windows?) Blender fails to install an addon when the username contains non ASCII characters like Umlauts for example.

Fixes:

Upgrade to a newer Blender release if you encounter this problem. Please report a bug to Blender if the newest released version of Blender does not work for you.
The only reliable workaround we know is to change the user name to contain only ASCII characters.

Path to zip file with special characters

this is actually a variation of the previous problem. Some versions of Blender have severe issues with non ASCII characters in Path names.

Fixes:

move your zip file to a folder with an “easy” path, like:

c:\downloads
/tmp/downloads

Note: After installing the addon you can safely remove the zip file again. But we recommend that you keep the file as backup somewhere on your disk or burn it to CDROM to be sure you keep your software “forever”.

Not an official Blender release

Although we try our best, we can not guarantee that our addons work on every Blender build.

So if you brave hearted and do your own builds,
or you are fan of GraphicAll and get your Blender from there,
or your operating system comes with a special Blender version, then you might run into troubles.

Fixes:

Make sure that you get an official Blender release from blender.org
Make sure that the addon version is released for your Blender version

Hint:the file name of the addon zip file contains the important information for you. For example:

avastar-1-dev-432_blender-2-59.zip

“avastar” is the product name
“1″ is the major product version
“dev” is the development version. other values are “beta” and “release”
“432″ is the update number (revision number”
“blender-2-59″ tells which Blender version you must have at least.

Warning message during installation

When you install Avastar/Primstar-2 then you will currently see a warning message. You can ignore this message.

Fixes:

No fix needed. We only inform you that we are not yet ready with our implementation. You have a prerelease. You will get informed when te release is ready. Then you can update to the release and the warning is gone.

Note: Once you have purchased Avastar-1 / Primstar-2 then you will get all subsequent maintenance releases for the major product version for free.

What if nothing helps ?

In very rare cases users reported that nothing helped. All problems could eventually be narrowed down to corrupted Blender installations.

Fixes:

Fix your Blender installation first. Double check that none of the above issues apply. If you can verify that you can install other addons, but not Primstar or Avastar, then please report this as a bug to us!
You always shoud get help from the Second Life chat groups:

Blender Primstar/jass
Blender Avastar

modelling

How do i prepare my sculptie for texturing ?

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.

How do I clear the list of images in the UV image editor ?

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

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.
save your current work to a blend file. Until nwo the image stack still contains all unused images
stop blender and restart it then. Just File -> new does not work!

Now your image stack should only contain used images.

My Sculpties look wrong in Viewer-1

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:

Width(Pixels)	height(Pixels)	Faces (U)	Faces (V)
16	256	8	128
32	128	16	64
64	64	32	32
128	32	64	16
256	16	128	8

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!

Why Precision sculpties get unprecise after baking ?

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.

my sculptie looks borked after upload

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.

How can i fix the inside-out problem on my sculptie ?

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.

Why do sometimes my sculpties get rendered black ?

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.

Can Primstar-2 convert existing objects to Sculpted Prims ?

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:

known bugs

Jass ( Pub Pro Magic )

“image not found” after moving my .blend file to another computer

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!

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

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

Why is my LSL Multi Part Export incomplete ?

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.

Can i install Jass pub/pro/magic in parallel

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.

Jass/Blender crashes right on startup

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

debug gui 000 – bake failed after *.*** sec.

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

Can Primstar-2 convert existing objects to Sculpted Prims ?

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:

Blend files made with jass-magic create script errors when opened in plain vanilla blender

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

Bake does not Bake (in edit mode)

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!)

QTCF.dll can not be found

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!

How do i reset to the default page in JASS ?

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 !!!

Why sometimes my sculpts jump way out of position during baking ?

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.

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Making a Ladder

Gaia Clary — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 02:17:38 +0000

Here is a small tutorial about how to make a reasonable ladder out of one sculptie.
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. (Please change that to 16*256 if you work with Phoenix or Emerald. These viewers are know to have problems with the 8*256 map) This can be done right in the properties popup window. You will end up with:

Now just rebake your sculptmap using Render -> bake sculpt meshes. The baker wil fill your sculptmap appropriately.

Why have we done this modification to the UV-map ? The baker will yield a sculptie with 4 faces in x and now 128 faces in y (8x, 128y if you used the 16*256 mapsize as mentione above). This has several implications. But let us first reimport the baked sculptie to see the effect:

Go to Object mode
put your initial ladder object aside
Now in the UV-image editor: image -> import as sculptie

This will actually take your freshly baked sculptmap and create a new blender object from it. The result should look like this:

You see that now the tiny vertical string which connects the blocks has got intermediate vertices. Also the blocks have gotmore 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.

If you use Emerald or Phoenix then ensure that you use the map size: 16*256 pixels. Otherwise the mentioned viewers display massive distortions. This is a known bug in Phoenix.

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

The Wineglass Problem

Gaia Clary — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 18:55:04 +0000

Important Note: Please take a minute to read the Tutorial license terms.

I am facing a few problems with texturing this wine glas. What you see here is a render output from blender.I use ray transparency with a fresnel value of 5. I think, this is very close to what i would expect from a wine glas to look alike. Now i want to bake a texture for this glas. I know that i can not create an exact look alike. But i expect to be able to create something very transparent with some highlights on top of it.

In order to get the highlights i use a node based material

and my very first bake ends up like you can see in the picture on the right. This is how it looks in texture mode and that does not look too far away from the expected results. The fact that the glas looks tinted in blue is because due to its transparency we can see the blue sky behind the glas, but the rest of the scene is rendered in gray, so it just appears as if the glas where blue, but in reality it is almost transparent.

Now lets take a closer look at the texture itself. The texture is of size 512*512. It has been rendered with 2 additional levels of subdivision to get smoother results. I also have enabled oversampling. All faces on the object are also set to smooth. So i also expect to see a very smooth texture. But no, quite a few issues apparently spring up:

what are these triangles at the top and bottom of the texture ? I do not expect to see this.
There are a few black horizontal lines in the texture. I did not expect so many of them.
The horizontal lines look somewhat blocky and rendered with less resolution.

Let us first take the whole sculptie to Second life and look, how it looks alike:

It is almost invisible except for some outlines at the top and at the bottom plus a few dark spots. That is not yet a good result. The major problem we face here is that the material lacks some physical properties like refraction. Hence the scene “behind” the glass should get a bit distorted due to the fact that light gets bended when passing through glass. But this effect is not implemented in the 3D environment. So the glass seems to disappear. Lets look at the bottom of the glas and zoom in a bit:

At the top center we see the transition of the shaft into the lower part of the glas. It is rendered in black and it looks very blocky. This is a close up of the top, the transition from shaft to bottom, bottom and bottom pole:

Let us now turn again to the texture. First i can now map the horizontal lines (black areas) to:

The inner pole inside the glass (top row of triangles in the texture)
the top of the glas.
the transition from the upper part into the shaft.
the transition from the shaft into the bottom.
the bottom outline.
The bottom pole (bottom row triangles in the texture)

The top and bottom problems are quickly to be explained. They come from the fact that at the poles the mesh is not made of quads, but of triangles. But we have modelled with quads all the time. So due to how the texture is created only half of each quad at the poles gets rendered. The other half of the quad is just folded into an edge. In principle the black triangles can be ignored, but in practice we still see dark areas bleeding into the visible area. So it is best to get rid of these artefacts. I show you further below how that can be done.

In order to understand the 4 other dark lines we need to go to blender and take a closer look into how light is rendered at all. And here i get stuck at the moment. I first need to find out, why this all happens, before i can explain it and continue with this article.

Modelling Sculpties

Gaia Clary — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 20:19:01 +0000

abstract:The tutorial shows in easy steps, how to create an object with blender and export it as a sculptie map (UV-texture) for usage in Second life. We assume, that you have basic knowledge about the blender user interface. But we still provide enough background information, so that even blender newbies can follow the process. The tutorial covers any recent blender-version up to release 2.49b. Note, that we not yet support blender release 2.5!

Important Note: Please take a minute to read the Tutorial license terms.

intended audience:

Creators of “sculpted prims” for Second Life and similar environments
Blender noobs (no/low level skills)

prerequisites:

download: blender (2.46 or newer, 2.49b recommended)
download: primstar (1.0.0 or newer) by Domino Designs
tutorial: Blender primer

related tutorials from other sites:

none

Downloads:

High quality video download sculptedPrims.wmv

Transcription

Welcome to our first blender tutorial. We want to show you how you can create sculpted prims for second life using blender. And besides this we will also show you how you can create surface textures for your sculpties.

We assume, that you have already downloaded blender and you got at least some experience with the

blender user interface. Furthermore we will assume that you use blender version 2.46 or newer (we recommend blender 2.49b)

Special thanks go to Amanda Levitsky who has provided a very good tutorial giving us a fair amount of
insight. But at the end it was the solution provided by Domino Marama, which we found the most convenient of all. Domino has created some very nicely working scripts and we are going to use them in this tutorial.

So let us begin by installing these scripts now. The scripts are available from domino’s website. The most recent version is available under the product name primstar
Note, that the most recent version of primstar has got a massively improved GUI. Unfortunately primstar faces some problems running on Mac OSX.

Once you have downloaded the zip file, you will have to extract the contained scripts to the blender scripts directory. If you are running on windows, this usualy can be found at

c://program files/blender foundation/blender/.blender/scripts

After you have installed the scripts, start blender and you can begin your sculpty art work right away. We have choosen to create a safety helmet which is very easy to make.

So we can concentrate on the technical part. We will use blenders plain and simple “out of the box” configuration in this tutorial. So let us first remove the default cube object by pressing ‘x’ and then click on, ‘erase selected objects’. Now we are ready to create a new object by clicking:

SPACE -> add -> mesh -> sculpt mesh.

A dialog opens where you can choose among 4 different sculptie types, namely sphere, torus , plane, and cylinder.

We recognize that a helmet is almost equal to the half of a sphere. So, here we go and begin our work with a full sphere, and then transform it until it looks like the desired result. We can make our life easy. Let us load a picture of our helmet. For this purpose click on

VIEW -> background image

A new dialog box opens. Here you verify that you want to “use background immage” . Now you can click on the upcoming load button, and select a background image from your hard disk. We have provided a picture of the helmet in this tutorial, so we are going to load it now.

Here it is. Let us now move and scale the object a bit.

Note, that a sculpted Prim always contains exactly 1024 vertices. Not less. and not more. Exactly 1024. The predefined sculptie shapes can in fact only be sculpted and bended but the mesh itself must be kept unchanged. But we will show you in a minute how to create a half sphere without changing the mesh topology. (remark: With Domino’s Script we have more freedom, since his algorithm automatically creates the correct sculptie maps, even if the source object has got “a wrong mesh”. We do not know the exact implications of this, so we will investigate this in our next tutorial)

Our object is currently seen from the top. Let us change this so that we can see the sphere from the front. This is achieved by clicking on

VIEW -> front.

Maybe it is time for a little more practical information about the blender user interface. You can select all vertices by pressing “a”, on the keyboard.

Pressing “s”, enables scaling up and down, in parallel to the mouse movement.
When all vertices of an object are selected, you can move the object by pressing “g”. The object then follows your mouse movement.
Stop moving by clicking the left mouse key.

Now we will take care of the lower half of the sphere. I will select proportional editing using the “connected” mode. This will move all selected vertices plus all vertices which are nearby.
Please check that you also have disabled the button, “limit selection to visible”.

Now i select some of the vertices at the bottom of the sphere and move them straight up, using the keyboard keys: g z .

I can change the deformation range with the page up, and page down keys. Do you see \stress=yes how the sphere gets deformed?

Now it already looks like a cap. We will make a few more changes until the helmet shape is finished.

You also can limit the scaling to one axis only. If you want to scale horizontal, press: “s”, followed by “x”, which constraints the scaling to the x-axis.
If you want to move the object along the x-axis, use the key “g”, followed by “x”.

You see here, how all these functions operate in concert.

By pressing “b”, you can select only one, or a few vertices. You will click the left mouse button, and hold it down, while dragging over the screen.
Remember: if proportional edit mode is on, moving the selected vertices

will also move all connected neighbours. The range of influence is controlled
with the page up, and page down buttons.

In a few moments we will have finished the sculpted prim. Then follows, what people normally find to be the most complex part in sculpty production: rendering the UV texture.
We promise, it has become very easy now. It is only one additional click away. Honestly. But we want to give you some more usefull details before.

since we are going to work with UV maps now, it is a good idea to also open the UV-image editor. We show you how to create a split screen, so we can see the UV map and our object at the same time.
This will become very handsome in the next part of the tutorial, but hold on.

First 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.

And now comes the magic part. Go to

Render -> “bake second life sculpties”.

Your sculpty map appears in the right side window. You can scale it up a bit to see some more details.
And now finally open the image sub-menu and save your map to your hard drive.

Now it is time to inspect the just created sculpty in second life. Be sure you use lossless compression, Otherwise your sculpted prim might look a bit broken.

Please send us your feedback to the SL forum at http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=257428 .

Thank you for reading,

The Machinimatrix

The Basics of Sculpted Prims

Gaia Clary — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 12:03:08 +0000

abstract: So you have been working with sculpted prims for a while, but still wonder why your methods sometimes work and sometimes fail ? You wonder what is right and what is wrong about all of this ?

In this tutorial i want to let you look behind the curtains
and explain what a sculpt-map really is and how it works in detail
and what you actualy can do with sculpted prims
and what you can never do with them.

The Basics of Sculpted Prims

If you want to build sculpted prims for Second Life, then you will first want to understand the basic principles. Independent whether you are a 3D Newbie or an experienced 3D modeller, you must be aware of:

Sculpted Prims need to be constructed from a very special and unchangeable mesh!
Sculpted Prims must be mappable to a very special and unchangeable UV-map!
Sculpted Prims can have no more than 1024 faces.

I already have created some video tutorials especially addressed to newbies. About 105 minutes of video spread over 5 tutorials and covering a lot of informal knowledge. Enough to get you started within a weekend or two.

Please take your time and watch these videos! Please!!! You will not regret. Find the tutorial links in the left column of this page.

You can jumpstart to the basic tutorials now and return here later to watch the video below. I really recommend to watch this video at some time. You will get to know some interesting and important facts about sculpted prims which you might not have know before.

Regardless of how you proceed from here, enjoy your adventure.

Contact:

Register to the SL Chat group “blender primstar/jass”
Contact me in Second Life: “Gaia Clary”
Send me an email: gaia.clary@machinimatrix.org

Transcription

So you have been working with sculpted prims for a while,
but still wonder why your methods sometimes work and sometimes fail ?
You wonder what is right and what is wrong about all of this ?

In this tutorial i want to let you look behind the curtains
and explain what a sculpt-map really is and how it works in detail
and what you actualy can do with sculpted prims
and what you can never do with them.

hello and welcome!

Let me show you the most basic sculpted prim first a simple plane surface.
This surface has 2 dimensions which we will call X, and Y.
And the surface is made out of rectangular faces.
These faces are also called quads.

This special surface here is actually made out of 32 faces along X, and 32 faces along Y.
Hence the total number of faces for this surface is 32 times 32 so it has 1024 faces.

A closer inspection shows that each face of this mesh is made out of 4 vertices and 4 edges.
Each 2 adjacent faces share one edge and 2 vertices.
This very specific arrangement is the most simple and
the most regular mesh that you can define on a surface.

As a matter of fact exactly this mesh topology is used by-all sculpted prims in the world.
And because the mesh topology is pre-defined
we only need to specify an enumerated list of points in 3D-space.
And because the mesh is strictly rectangular we can use
the vertex-row and the vertex-column as list indexes.
We will talk about the implications of this in a few moments.

As an example the bottom-left point could be addressed by the coordinates [0,0].
This means that it is located in the first row counting from bottom up,
and in the first column counting from left to right.

This enumeration is universal.
That means, as long as you keep the mesh topology intact,
you can rearrange the vertices as much as-you-like, and
You can bend and stretch the mesh within all 3 dimensions.
As long as the connecting edges are not changed and
as long as you do not add new vertices to the mesh
or remove existing vertices from it,
the object can always be transformed into a sculpted prim.

With other words:

the bottom left vertex of the original surface will always be vertex number [0,0].
Even if it has been moved to the top-right position of the mesh.
And this works as long as the edges are not removed.

And in very clear words:

When you cut or rearrange the edges,
then the object is no longer a sculpted prim!

Ok,
we have now learned that each mesh is made out of a set of adjacent faces
arranged in a number of rows and columns.
And we have seen that this mesh topology is universal for
all sculpted prims in the world.

The default sculpted prim contains 32 rows with 32 faces on each row.
And how the mesh is woven is strictly defined and stored in a separate map.

There is an unchangeable one to one relationship between the vertices
on the map and the vertices on the mesh.
It is convention that the horizontal axis on the map is named “U“,
and the vertical axis is named “V“.
The map itself is called “UV-map“.

While you can move the vertices around on the mesh to whichever location you like,
the UV-map always remains constant! So even if you change your mesh to a
true 3 dimensional surface the UV-map does not change.
And each vertex on the mesh can always be looked up on the UV-map.

Let us proceed now by creating a basic cylinder.
We simply bend the plane along a full circle of 360 degrees.

Now this is interesting:
after bending it the plane touches itself along one entire side.
In other words: some of the vertices share the exact same location.
And so we have introduced our first seam here.

Let us take a look at the UV-map:
Indeed we see that the entire leftmost column of vertices
and the corresponding rightmost column both match up.
We now can stitch the plane along the seam.
In principle this-is done by merging the vertices from the left-most side
with those from the right-most side of the UV-map.

In fact this removal of vertices does not change the UV-map significantly.
we only have forced the model to always use the same locations for the rightmost
column and the left-most column of the UV-map. And this is called a cylinder-stitching.

When we now select one single vertex along the seam we actually have selected
two separate entry-points within the UV-map.
In fact the color-representation (sculptmap, see below) of this mesh
does not change at all after we stitched the seam.

However when we transfer this mesh to Second Life we have the
option to set the stitching type to Cylinder in accordance to the mesh-topology.

Let us go on with our cylinder now,
and let us bend it to the form of a torus like i show you here…
Well somehow we expected this to happen:
Now the topmost and bottommost row match up on the model
and can be stitched just like we did for the cylinder a few moments ago.

And by now the torus is ready to use.
And we also must not forget to set the stitching type to “Torus”
after importing it to Secnd-Life.

Let us go back to our Cylinder and let us close the top and bottom
by collapsing the top row and the bottom row of vertices into single poles.
Then let us deform it to a spherical shape and finally the sculptie-sphere is created.

Until here i have introduced the basics of sculpted prims.
Starting with a simple surface i have shown you:

how you can derive a cylinder, a torus and a sphere.
I also have shown you that the basic layout of the mesh
namely the UV-map remains the same for all sculpted prims in the world,
regardless of their shape.

Now you may ask yourself:

“How can the UV-map be constant and still contain the mesh-data of my sculpties ?
Apparently the mesh differs from object to object.
So where in the UV-map can i find the location information
for all the faces of my object ?”

The answer is simple: The UV-map does not contain this information.
The data is stored in another construct, namely the sculpt-map.
And that is simply a 2 dimensional image.

So when we look in more detail to our UV-map, then we see that it is indeed associated to an image.
And currently this image is entirely black. We will store the location of each vertex of the mesh
into exactly one corresponding pixel of the sculptmap.

The exact mapping between vertices on the mesh and pixels on the sculptmap is defined by the UV map.
In Blender we can create the sculpt-map by using the Primstar baker which generates the pixel data for us.

I will explain in the next tutorial how a vertex location corresponds to the pixel color.
But for now we only need to remember that each vertex on the mesh is stored in one pixel on the image.

Now look at the image size.
We see 64 pixels in x,
and 64 pixels in y. Why that ?

We only have to provide 33* 33 pixels to store the mesh.
So in principle we can provide an image of that size and we are done.

But the height and the width of any sculpt-map must be in the set of power of 2 numbers.
We only can use either, 8,16,32,64,128,256, or 512 pixels per side.
Any other size is not supported and it will be scaled to the nearest accepted power-of-two-number.

So the smallest possible image size we can use to store 33 *33 vertex-locations
is a 64 * 64 pixel image.
And this implies, that we only use 1089 of the provided 4096 pixels to store our sculpt-map.

It is clearly defined where the important pixels-are placed on the map.
They are located on each second row and on each secnd column
counting from the bottom-left edge of the image.

All pixels wich i have colorized in black are not used for this particular map.
You see that only one out of 4 pixels is actually used.
The entire rest of the map is wasted space.

Note that this pattern-is broken at the top-most row and on the right-most column.
That is where the 33rd pixelrow and pixelcolumn are stored.
And finally you should always remember that the number of vertices provided for a particular UV-map
is constant and can not be changed.

Hence a sculptmap of size 64 * 64 pixels stores exactly 1089 vertices,
which translates to 1024 faces.
And every map must provide the vertex data in exactly the marked pixels.
And even if the map has enough place to store 3007 more vertices within
the black parts of the map, that does not work with sculpted prims
because the pixels which are marked in black are never used.

Sculpted prims are not limited to square meshes and square UV-maps.
You can use any combination of power-of-two values for U-faces and V-Faces,
as long as

U-faces * V-faces

Also you may not have less than 4 faces on each side of the mesh.

You can calculate the pixel size of a sculptmap by taking the product of faces in width and height times 4:

PixelCount = UFaces * VFaces * 4

This is not always true but it works for most ratios.

You can have extreme meshes up to the size of 4 * 256 faces.
And the smallest supported sculptmap-size is an image with 4 * 4 faces.
From what we learned a minute ago the sculptmap of this object
has a size of 8 times 8 pixels. That is a perfectly valid sculpted prim
and it can be uploaded to Secnd life without problems as long as you use
any version of the Viewer-2.

I am now at the end of this tutorial.

We have introduced the UV-map and the Sculpt-map
and how these maps relate to meshes and sculpted prims.

Next time we will continue with a working example and show
how the principles of sculpted prims can be used in practice.

See you later!

Further sources of Information:

Here are 3 excellent schat groups about Blender in Second Life:

Blender Jass/Primstar (our official group. Many good and responsive sculpters)
Blender Users
Blender

I am booked to all of them.

All the best wishes!
Gaia

Sculpties older tutorials (page)

Gaia Clary — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 12:09:08 +0000

This page will contain excerpts from the old tutorials

Sculpties advanced tutorials

Gaia Clary — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 12:12:17 +0000

This page will contain excerpts from the advanced tutorials

NURBS Sphere to Cube

Gaia Clary — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 22:44:31 +0000

Important Note: Please take a minute to read the Tutorial license terms.

abstract:A quick tutorial for NURBS adicted: How to turn a NURBS sphere into a sculptie cube.
The tutorial covers any recent blender-version up to the currently recommended release 2.49b and Jass-2.
The tutorial was made with Jass-2.3.6-PRO

intended audience:

Creators of “sculpted prims” for Second Life and similar environments
Blender user (mid level skills)

prerequisites (*):

download: jass-2 (binary distribution, contains blender-2.49b, python-2.6.4, primstar-1.0.0 and more)

related tutorials:

Blender primer (First steps in blender)

Separate Downloads:

(*) If Jass-2 is not an option for you, you can download the prerequisites separately:

download: blender (2.46 or newer, 2.49b recommended)
download: python (2.6.4 for Windows, 2.5.2 for Mac OS)
download: primstar (1.0.0 or newer) by Domino Designs

Jass-Magic

Gaia Clary — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 16:18:24 +0000

Thank you for choosing Jass Magic

New customer:

Go to the JASS-Shop in SL(*)
Locate the "Buy JASS MAGIC" Vendor and buy (4000 L$)
The Vendor creates your personal Download link
Follow the link and Download the product(**)

Already purchased MAGIC and lost your download link:

Go to the JASS-Shop in SL(*)
Locate the Octopus in center of Shop
Recover your download link
The Vendor creates your personal Download link
Follow the link and Download the update

Back to JASS Forward to the tutorials

(*) Also check the description of the purchase process
(**) You find downloads for WIN, MAC-OSX and a separate zip-file for linux users in your jass-inventory!
And you can install the software as often as you like.

Note, that we will refund anybody who is not satisfied with the MAGIC-edition within 30 days!
In that case please contact Gaia Clary in Secondlife (IM)

Welcome to Jass-Magic-1.0

Jass-Magic is now available for download in our Jass-Shop. Jass-Magic is a superset of our Jass-Pro edition.
Further below you find the complete list of what you will get with Jass-Magic. Here is a teaser video:

See also our feature-matrix where you can find the comparison between all available jass-produts and Primstar.

Feature list

Fully functional and complete binary distribution (using an installer)
embedded blender-2.49b
embedded python-2.6.5 (MAC-OSX version comes with no python as it is already installed)
embedded primstar-1.1.0 (separately avilable from the Jass-Shop)
Grid-Align Tool (Mapping to a unit-cube of 2.55 blender units per dimension no longer required for precision sculpting)
Additional documentation in the blender Help Menu (Links to the machinimatrix videos)
Additional blender Theme "Jass Theme"
Jass Library of Sculpts (ported from Jass-1.4) additional basic sculptie shapes
Blender now reports its data directory in the console window.
From now on you will never ask again where is my scripts folder!
All Bonus features and fixes of the JASS-PRO edition

The following Bonus features are only included in Jass-MAGIC :

Comfortable sculpty preview option (supports preview of multi-part bakes)
Error detector (with auto correction mode) for common errors:
- unintentional reusage of sculptmap.
- insie-out detection
- missing images
- mirrored objects

Intended audience:

Everybody who wants to make sculpted prims with more efficiency
Everybody who wants to get continued support from the machinimatrix via IM and Email.

Upgrade option

Jass-Pro users can upgrade from Jass-Pro to Jass-Magic by paying the price difference to Jass-Magic.

How you can help:

Whenever you encounter a problem, please report it to us. Enclose a short description of what you tried to do and how Jass-Magic failed. Please include a blend file whenever possible. This helps us to track your issue much faster!

About your creations made with our products

In general your own creations which are made with our packages fully belong to you. However some of our packages contain data from third parties. We especially use data from

Linden Labs (The SL avatar mesh, morph data, weight data)
MakeHuman (The mesh data, default texture)

Any work based on the above mentioned data may be copyrighted under special license terms. For MakeHuman, please check the essentials of the MakeHuman license. For the SL default Avatar please check with Linden Labs. As far as we are concerned the data can be redistributed under a creative Common shareable license. We do not know which license terms apply to any work which is directly based on the SL Default Avatar data.

About redistribution of our products

Primstar-1, Jass-1, Jass-2

The Python scripts in these products are published under GPL license terms. However this does not extend to the Windows installers, data files and other items we provide for your convenience. If you plan to redistribute modified versions of our products, then please take care to strip down the packages to the GPL parts only. The general rule applies:

All parts which are not explicitly marked as GPL are not distributed according to GPL license terms and may not be redistributed.

In particular you are not allowed to redistribute:

The Jass-installers executables themself
the blenderloader.exe
data files such as the library sculpt maps (*.png) and Blend files (*.blend) (except avatar.blend)

For more detailed information please examine the installed software in detail and check the readme files.

Primstar-2

Primstar-2 is distributed under the Primstar-2 End User License Agreement. Primstar-2 can not be redistributed in any way.

Avastar

Avastar is distributed under the Avastar End User License Agreement. Avastar can not be redistributed in any way.

The features of Jass-Magic

For the brand new features here is a first little bit of explanation:

The Baker tool has been changed a bit. You still have the "old" baker where you can set some baking parameters. But now there is now also a "quick bake" button which you find under:Render -> Quick Bake Sculpt MeshesThe Quick bake simple reuses the "most recent settings" of the baker tool. For me it turns out that i almost never change the baker settings, so in 90 percent of my work i just use the Quickbake and that's one click less ;-)
The baker has been made a bit more aware of what it does. It will now try to solve following problems right when baking:
1. When it finds a mirrored sculptie, it checks if the sculptmap has been flipped and if not it will do that automatically. This ensures that mirrored objects get displayed without the inside-out effect.
  It is important to keep the baker doing its job all by itself. When you apply scale/Rotate by hand before baking, the baker will fail (and will no longer check for a flipped sculptmap)
2. When a set of objects is baked, the baker keeps track on which object will be baked to which sculptmap. It autmatically finds out if an object needs a separate sculptmap or if 2 objectrs may share one sculptmap.
In object mode you now can "preview" a multi part sculptie easily:Object -> Scripts -> "Reimport Selection as sculpties"This function will create a "sculptie" copy for each object in the set and do correct scale/rotate/translate the parts. So you now can do with two clicks what had to be done before as follows:
```
for each part do:
    select the part in object mode
    go to edit mode
    in the uv editor: Image reimport as Sculptie
    move the part to its corect location by hand
```
Note that this function only will create sculpties for the selected objects.
Please understand that the objects created by the "previewer" are usually ment to be deleted once you have verified that your multi part object looks like expected. You will always work on the originals (those objects which you have baked in step 1.) above.

Recent changes

Jass-Magic-1.1.3 (26-may-2011):

ENHANCED: Logoutput now less verbose
FIXED: LSL Export: image file names sometimes incompatible with SL-importer
FIXED: Checker for duplicate usage of Sculptmaps sometimes did not check
ENHANCED: LSL Export now checks that part sizes are in range [0.01 cm, 10 meter]
Note: If your parts are too far away, this may still cause issues with the generator-script!

The Machimatrix.

Tips and Tricks

Gaia Clary — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 13:30:41 +0000

See which tips& tricks we have to offer on the rightmost column of this page.

Spikes after Mesh upload

Gaia Clary — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 18:49:31 +0000

Important Note: Please take a minute to read the Tutorial license terms.

We have created a modified Collada Exporter for Blender-2.49b that supports:

Setting the measurement unit
Checking if a rigged mesh has got weighted vertices

The modified Collada Exporter is distributed and ready installed with Jass-Pro and Jass-Magic. If you only have Jass-pub or a plain vanilla Blender-2.49b then you can install the scripts manually as follows:

(more…)

Protected: Jass-Magic 1.0 RC1 Downloads

Gaia Clary — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 23:27:48 +0000

Jass-Feature Matrix

Gaia Clary — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 06:36:04 +0000

Feature comparison matrix for all Jass-products, Primstar-1.1.0 and Primstar-2:

Feature	2.49b	Jass			2.59/2.6
Feature	Primstar-1	Pub	Pro	Magic	Primstar-2(1)

Environment
Supported Blender Version	2.49b	2.49b			2.59/2.6
Contains Blender binaries
Installs as AddOn Module
Multi Language support

Creation of Primitives
Basic sculptie shapes (Plane,Cylinder,Sphere,Torus)
Sculptie Shape Hemi
Sculptie Shapes Bricks, Cone, Ring, Star, Steps, Cylisphere
Extended sculptie shapes (library)
Regular primitives (Second Life Prims)
Interactive display during creation
UV rotation (for sculpties, depends on shape!)
UV Curve (non linear face density!)

Modelling features
Multires and Subsurf for Modeling
Oblong support
Sculptify Objects
Grid Align Tool		(2)
Optimized Multi Part Baker
Correct center adjustment

Sculptmap baking
Single Sculptie Baking
Multi Sculptie Baking (Preserves Scaling)
Precise Sculptie Baker (preserves vertex positioning)

Export features
Export as image (store scultpmap as image)
Export sculptie collection (creates LSL script)
Export sculptie&prim collection (scene to SL)

Import features
Import from File
Change sculptie parameters during import
Sculptie from Image
Update from Sculptie (file)
Create sculptie from .obj (file)					(6)
Create sculptie from .dae (file)					(6)
Change stitching type during import
Import sculptie & prim collection (Scene to Blender)

Advanced Features
Nano Sculpties support
Alpha Mask “outline”
Alpha Mask “fully transparent”
Alpha Mask “custom” from image
Jass-library of sculpts
Jass-library of meshes (3)
Multipart previewer
Detection of flipped faces (demo)
Auto fix of lost sculptie images
Auto reassignment of ambiguous sculptmaps
Auto handling of mirrored Objects (demo)
Auto recalculation of outside normals

Terrain support
SL Terrain import
import from height map
SL Terrain export

Mesh related features
Collada fix for wrong unit scales (for meshes)					n.a.
Collada dynamic settable unit scales (for meshes)					n.a.
Collada unweighted vertex detection (for meshes)					n.a.

Supported Operating Systems
Windows	scripts	installer	installer	installer	addon
MAC	scripts	bundle	bundle	bundle	addon
linux, unix, all systems with blender-2.49 ports	scripts	scripts	scripts	scripts	addon

Support offer
Support via IM (1 free incident)
Support email (1 free incident)
Updates (as available)	n.a	free	free	free	free

Prices
Price (US$) (4)	0	donation	7.5	15	25
Price (€) (4)	0	donation	5.0	10	17.5
Price (L$)	0	donation	2000	4000	7000(5)
All payments will be used to finance the development of Primstar-2 and its documentation.

installer : Jass on windows is distributed as a pre configured package containing blender, python and the Jass scripts. The installer does the whole job for you.
scripts : If your operating system can run blender, you can use the distributed sources to install primstar/jass
bundle : We have repacked blender with a working configuration. just unpack it and go.
addon : Primstar-2 is designed to be plugged into Blender-2.5 as a Blender addon Module.

(1) : Primstar-2 is under development. We have not yet documented all expected features here. Note that Features labeled with a Question mark (?) probably will be replaced by more suitable functions. Features labeled with a gray checkmark have either been scheduled for implementation or are currently under construction.
(2) : Can be installed separately, sources freely available
(3) : The library of meshes contains the library of sculpts. Note: Right now there is not much in it. More and better content will come soon. The Jass-Library of meshes might be distributed independently from Primstar-2 but as a separate and independent addon module.
(4) : prices are very approximate and only meant as guideline. The Linden$ prices are exact.
(5) : With the Early Adopters Program we give a discount of L$1000
(6) : You can import your objects, then use Object -> Sculptify to convert your imported Object to a Sculpty. This only works if the imported Object IS already a sculpted Prim created wih another tool and just transported to Blender. Note: Ensure that your object has got the seams marked or mark the seams by hand before you try sculptify.

Jass-Magic: Auto handling of mirrored Objects

Gaia Clary — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 02:08:28 +0000

Until today mirrored Objects typically have got a few issues:

They share the same sculptmap as the non mirrored sculptie.
Their normals are flipped
They render in black
In SL they show up as inside/out objects

You can fix all of these issues. But you need to know how to do that. And it takes some time to do it. Especially when you are working on a multi part object with many mirrored elements, you may soon want to find an easier way to go.

With Jass-Magic these problems no longer occur. Jass-magic just detects all issues and automatically corrects them. The video shows you how easy going Jass-Magic is compared to Jass-Pub.

Jass-Magic is just magic.

Have Fun!

Jass Magic: Auto Detection of flipped Sculpties

Gaia Clary — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 03:08:47 +0000

Sometimes your sculpties get flipped. They typically render in black inside blender and show the “inside Out” problem when rezzed in Second Life. You can just ignore that and correct it directly in SL. You find the checkmark for “inside/out” sculpties in the SL object editor and there in the sculptie section.

You can correct this problem right in blender. But you must know what you do here. the task is not easy:

Basically you have to flip the UV-map horizontally
And in order to keep the original object from beeing rendered in black you have to recalculate the normals too

And it takes some time to do it. Especially when you are working on a multi part object with many mirrored elements, you may soon want to find an easier way to go. And what about tracking which sculptmaps you have flipped and which ones are still broken ?

With Jass-Magic this problem gets solved on the fly. Jass-magic detects flipped sculpties and can correct them automatically. The video shows you first how you would do it today. Ok, i show you all pitfalls here and how all you think that should work actually does not work here. But in the last minute of the video Jass-Magic steps in and shows how easy going it can be to create sculptied prims.

Jass-Magic is just magic.

Have Fun!