Sculpted prims Part II (blender/jass2)

Gaia Clary — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:45:07 +0000

abstract:The tutorial shows in easy steps, how to sharpen the edges of your model and how to create a very simple texture by using multiple materials. 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 the currently recommended release 2.49b and Jass2.

intended audience:

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

prerequisites (*):

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

related tutorials:

none

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

Transcription

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

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

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

You find Crease under:

mesh -> edges -> crease-subsurf

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

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

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

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

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

And Here we go:

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

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

Now we will modify the material to serve our purpose:

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

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

ok, this is done as follows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you later!

Sculpted prims Part I (blender/jass2)

Gaia Clary — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:08:46 +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 the currently recommended release 2.49b. Note, that we not yet support blender release 2.5!

intended audience:

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

prerequisites(*):

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

related tutorials:

Modelling sculpted Prims (the old tutorial)
Sculpted prims Part II (follow up tutorial)

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

Transcription

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

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

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

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

add -> mesh -> sculpt mesh

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

But please note, that we are working with

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now comes the magic part:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until then have fun.

See you later!

Step by step to the new Machinimatrix

Gaia Clary — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:17:29 +0000

We have been working on the infrastructure of this blog now for a couple of days and introduced some new features here for your convenience. So we hope that effort will enhance the usability of this site. So the machinimatrix proudly presents …

Video entry points

Some of our videos now come along with a linklist (seen on the left of the video). The linklist serves 2 purposes:

At any moment in the video the currently played subsequence gets highlighted in the link list. So you always know which topic is currently shown in the video.
You always can click directly into the linklist and immediately will be “videoported” to the startpoint (cuepoint) of the clicked topic.

Random Access

All videos featuring “video entry points” can also be clicked directly at any point on the timeline. By this you immediately get access to the corresponding point in time in the video. Previously you always had to wait until the video was loaded up to the part where you clicked. Note that we will upgrade all our videos as soon as possible to support this feature.

User registration

We added the possibility for user registration. Currently this does not give you much more than just becoming a member of the machinimatrix. But here we plan for a lot more, like members section, special offers for members, enhanced functionality, etc. However one remarkable addition has already been added for registered users only:

File attachments on comments

Whenever you create a comment, you can now attach files to your text. Yes, you can attach .blend files here if you like. But lots of other data-formats are also supported. If you happen to attach images, they mostly get directly rendered on the comment. Please note, that this feature is only available for registered users. And please keep low with your data-volume. Our disk storage capacity is not the smallest but it is limited. We feel free to remove attachments of inadequate content and will abandon users who obviously use this feature for dishonest purposes.

Please report us back if you encounter any problems or if you have suggestions for improvement.

And have fun,

The machinimatrix team

Bobbie’s wedding cake (48hour 2009)

Hussayn — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 07:00:34 +0000

Finally i managed to publish our last year’s contribution to the 48hour film contest. Here is “Bobbie’s wedding cake”. Special thanks go to Barbara Gescher (our musician this time) who was so kind to help us improving the sound track for this director’s cut version. And thanks again also to all other participants.

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

Enjoy.

Machinimatrix moved to its own Blog host

Gaia Clary — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 03:05:39 +0000

Hi all.

We have been running our Blog for about 2 years now and we are happy to report that we had almost 200,000 page hits, over 40,000 Video downloads and about 600 user comments within that time. As of today we get about 100 visitors per day and see about 3500 Video downloads per month. So we want to thank you for your ongoing and even increasing interest by leveraging our Blog to a new level of usability. However this will not happen in a big bang attempt. But today we have taken the first step:

Since today we are running our own Bloghost. And your immediate benefits are already visible:

The new Bloghost is about 5 times faster
All of our videos have been resized (scaled up) to a size of 640 * 480
Now all videos can be switched to full screen mode

But there is more to come.

Until then enjoy the new site and have fun.
Gaia et. al.

Sculptie grid-align tool for blender

Gaia Clary — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 20:07:17 +0000

If you are interested in the standalone tool, please scroll down to the bottom of this article. There you find the download link and a quickstep guide for installation. Also note that JASS-2 comes with the ready installed grid-align tool and it should work out of the box. (ALT G in edit mode)

What is the problem …

Sculpties are encoded using a 2d-image containing a 32-bit image map, where each axis is encoded in an 8 bit value. Thus There are only 256 valid vertex positions available along each axis. This property of sculpties is equivalent to using a size dependent grid for each axis where the bounding box of the sculptie defines the grid spacing. It is not straight forward to make your model manually align to these constraints, although some clever solutions to the problem already exist:

The easiest way is to just bake your sculptmap and then reimport it to blender. The resulting object will have all its vertices located at valid positions along the sculptie grid. The pro is that you can examine exactly what you will get in Secondlife. The con is that you always have to make the sculptmap prior to be able to examine it.
You can use the linear grid of blender by rescaling your sculptie to a size of 2.55 in each axis. Then use a grid with a spacing of 0.1 and use snap to grid. The pro is that you can use the blender snap and align tools. The con is that you must work on a rescaled model.

What the grid-align tool does …

The tool determines the exact bounding box-size of your active object. Then it calculates the exact grid spacing for each space orientation (axis) that will be used within SL. Finally it moves all selected vertices to locations defined by the calculated grid. For the epxerts: Please note, that the tool works in edit mode and it does not take any object-intrinsic rotations into account.

What the tool does NOT …

The gridAlign tool does not improve your sculpties automatically. Nor does it solve any LOD problems or inprecision problems you may encounter with your sculptie. It simply can not do that. However it will modify your model. And what you will see will always be very close to what you will bake into your sculptmap. So do not blame us that we have added a “align to crap” tool. It is to the best an “Align to the truth” tool. It only can show you where you might have problems and it WILL do that independent whether you like the result or not. Remember: CTRL-z is your friend if you do not like what the tool calculated !

How to activate the grid-align tool …

In Jass-2 the grid align tool is allready activated for you. However we will explain below exactly how the activation and the deactivation is done, so that you are not lost when something unexpected occurs.

usage:
- Go to edit mode. We have provided a very simple example which will show you what the grid align tool can do for you very explicitly. Here is a wand with a rounded end made out of a perfect sphere:
  
  We will concentrate on the left part of the stick now.
- Select a set of vertices (or all vertices to align the whole object) You are free to select ANY number of vertices, even if it only one single vertex, it will be aligned. We selected the left half of the spherical endcap of the wand here:
- press ALT ‘G’ (the “ALT” key followed by the “G” key. Now all selected vertices are shifted to the locations which would be used if the sculpties would be baked NOW and imported into SL:
  
  Was i that what you expected ? If yes, then you already know why oblongs are sometimes not doing well… Because of the spatial resolution which clearly distorts the wand end here. Better know this in advance than after upload to SL…
Now the selected vertices should be realigned according to the SL grid. You can let the tool work on small sets of vertices time by time, or you can select all vertices to always align the whole object. At the end it depends on your personal workflow how you will use the tool.

NOTES:
- You can always press CTRL-z to get back to the previous state to cancel the effect.
- It does make not much sense to use the tool together with Subsurf enabled models (You can do it but since the grid align will only influence the control points it just makes no reasonable effect. However you can “apply” the subsurf modifier before(!) the grid-aling tool is applied…
- It makes sense to use the tool when you are in Multires mode. You can use it on all multires levels.
- Using the tool before baking does no harm. Indeed sometimes it even assures that the baker bakes what you want and not what it thinks should be the best to do. But in general the baker works just fine and produces the same results if you have used grid-align or not.
- You can use the tool selectively on parts of your sculptie. It does not matter in which order you grid align your vertices AS LONG AS you do not alter the vertex locations manually. So if you work on your sculptie after you grid aligned it, you better realign the vertices from time to time to be sure that what you see keeps what you get. Here is the fully grid aligned wand head:
Enable/disable the tool:
- The tool is a so called “space handler” and you will find it in the menu bar of your 3D view at “View -> Space Handler Scripts” There you should find an entry named “gridAlignService.py” And this service should be checked if you want it to be active:
- Similar you can deactivate the tool by unchecking the service.
When it got lost (Standalone installation and rescue description):
If you Have Jass-2 the tool is already installed. Otherwise if you want to integrate the grid-align tool into your official version of blender or if you have reset Jass-2 to the Blender factory settings, then here is what you need to do in order to get the tool to work for you:
- Download the grid-align tool separately, or locate it in the scripts folder of jass-2 (look at .blender/scripts/jass/gridAlignService.py
- Place the file anywhere you like on your hard disk. The best place however would be in a folder named jass which is located inside either your user scripts directory or your system scripts directory. Anything goes here!
- start blender (Please restart it if you had it already open!) Now you see your default screen. It may look like this:
- In one of the visible windows temporarily switch to the “Text Editor” by selecting it from the Window Type Selector
- In the Text editor click on text -> open , then navigate to where you have stored the gridAlignService.py and open it. Do NOT run it!!!
- Switch to the 3D view and there go to edit mode (You will need an object, so if none is present in the 3D view now then create one and then switch to Edit mode
- Right after opening it, the space handler is already available in the 3D-view under View -> spaceHandlers. You should check this now and set the checkmark left to the entry named “gridAlignService.py”.
- Now select at least one vertex of your object and press ALT “G” (Press the ALT key , hold it and the “G” key in addition!) Check that the gridAlign tool operates by looking at the Blender console. It should look similar to:
- Remember to save your default settings now if you want to keep the handler:
  File -> Save Default settings
- If you get lost during the process, just restart blender and start over again or forget the tool
- If you have already stored the handler in your settings and you want to return to scratch then:
  File-> Load Factory Settings is your friend.
If you follow the above description you will have added the gridAlignService as a space handler to your blender. Now whenever you open blender, the gridAlignTool is with you and waits to be activated with ALT – G as described above. Note that the space handler will consume a tiny bit of your CPU resources. If you think, this is not good, you always can disable it temporarily by unchecking the Space handler under View -> Space Handlers by unchecking the checkmark.

If you find any problems with the tool, please report here as a comment. We will take care of your problem as soon as we get to know it!

Have fun,
Gaia et all

JASS-2.0

Gaia Clary — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 07:55:26 +0000

The JASS-2.0 binary distribution (for 32-bit Windows operating systems) is out. JASS-2 is the one stop open source solution for everybody, who wants to use blender to create sculpted prims for Second life (and other compatible virtual worlds). more …

The Empty Mesh

Gaia Clary — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 22:57:39 +0000

The empty mesh is just what the name says: a mesh without vertices. You will use this mesh if you want to create your mesh completely from scratch by “drawing” vertex after vertex and or using other tools like spin to create rotation symmetric objects as constructed in the wineglass tutorial. The creation of the empty mesh is easy but because it is empty you won’t see much after it is created. So here is a small “pictured tutorial” how to do it:

GO TO OBJECT MODE!

There press the SPACE bar. You will see a popup menu where you can navigate to the “Empty Mesh” button:

After you clicked on the Empty Mesh button, you will see… nothing… Well indeed something has changed, but it is not very obvious. The Transform manipulator has appeared:

You simply can not see the object at the moment as it is hidden by the manipulator. So what you do next is disable the manipulator here:

Just click on the hand icon and disable so that it is “unchecked”. Now after the manipulator is removed you see this little tiny pink dot right in the middle of the 3D cursor ? This is the Empty Mesh. Well what did you expect ? An empty mesh is … empty:

Attention here! This pink dot is NOT a vertex. It is the object center!!! Currently “the center of nothing”…

Now go to Edit mode:

From now on hold down the CTRL key and then each left click will create a new vertex. it will automatically be connected with an edge to the previous vertex. So vertex for vertex you “draw” your outline :

This small tutorial should make it clear how to get the Empty mesh to live.

Have fun, Gaia

The wineglass problem

Gaia Clary — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 21:30:00 +0000

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 with Outlines

Gaia Clary — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 02:01:45 +0000

abstract: We show you, how you can start with an empty mesh, draw an outline of an object and eventually create the full 3D-model. In the final step the object will be turned into a Sculptie using some primstar magic.

The Primstar

Gaia Clary — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 21:17:02 +0000

Infotainment at its best. This is a short film about a builder who receives the order to create a five pointed star. Unfortunately she has not the slightest idea how to manage this built in the given time. So she activates her strongest weapon against lack of knowledge (again) …

Please note, that this video contains embedded knowledge. Any accidental perception is on your own risk! Have fun.

Sorry, there is no Transcription available for this tutorial.

The blender basic customization guide

Gaia Clary — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 14:12:57 +0000

abstract: The tutorial shows how you can customize blender to use your personal scripts location folder.

intended audience:

blender noobs

prerequisites:

none

related tutorials from other sites:

none

Transcription

One advantage of blender is the possibility to be expandable with customization scripts. blender contains a complete python-interpreter, so scripting works out of the box.

Many python-scripts are already bundled with blender but there are much more scripts available. And they have been created to make your work with blender much easier. Even if you are an non experienced user, you will probably need to install your own script collection. So i will show you now, how to do that in a convenient way.

First, i will create a script-directory on the file system. I will place it right into my personal directory. I have already downloaded a couple of scripts, and i place them now into the just created directory. By the way, these scripts contain primstar, an exporter, importer, and generator for second life sculpties. If you want to know more about that, please watch our follow up tutorials.

Ok! Now i start blender.

In the upper left corner you see the information icon. This is a hidden window. You can access it by placing the cursor on the window border, left mouse click and then drag the window down. The user preferences appear.
Go to the right side and click the button: “File Paths”. A set of input fields appear.
Locate the field labeled with: “python scripts”, and click on the associated folder icon. a file selector box appears.
Now navigate to your scripts directory.
Then select the directory by clicking on: “select script path” now blender immediately finds and recognizes all scripts, which we have placed into our personal directory.

Let’s navigate to some places, where you can now see, how nice the scripts integrate into the blender interface.

Now move the user preferences window out of sight.
One final task is still to be done. If you exit blender now, it will silently forget about your custom scripts directory. So we have to tell blender to preserve this information.
go to file -> save default settings.

From now on blender remembers your settings whenever you start it again. You can jump start into your blender art work creation now.
If you like to get more information about how to create sculpted prims with blender we invite you to also watch our other video tutorials. You can always find the newest videos on the machinimatrix website.

Have fun, and see you later!

The Primstar GUI – Bake mesh (unofficial)

Gaia Clary — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:40:52 +0000

preliminary note:

The following documentation is a short reference to primstar 0.9.23 This reference has not been created on behalf of Domino designs. Any erroneous description is entirely due to my lack of understanding. All screenshots have been made with blender 2.49a and primstar 0.9.23 on Windows XP. For more detailed information, original documentation and downloads of primstar please refer to the Domino Designs Website.

This post describes how the primstar baker is intended to be used and what its options are all about. This document is still under development but mostly ready for usage by now. Any feedback is appreciated. Especially if you do NOT understand parts of the document, please report that back!!!

GUI – Bake mesh

The following Popup Menu appears when you select the primstar baker from

Render -> bake sculpt meshes

The default settings of the baker are chosen in a meaningfull way, so you could in most cases end up with just hitting the “bake” button and keep the default settings. But sometimes life is a bit more complicated. In the remainder of this document you will find more in-depth descriptions about what the baker “also” can do for you. I believe it is a good idea to at least know about the options although you may not use them frequently at the end.

Bake

Keep center:

Off(default): When you create a new Sculpt-mesh, its initial object center will be equal to its geometric center. During working on your object in edit mode the object center will always keep at its place. With Keep Center Off (the default settings), the object center will be adjusted to its geometric center before baking. This correction ensures that the sculptmap can use the full color range and thus the highest possible spatial resolution. As a side effect the object center will be corrected as if you had called object -> Transform -> Center new And of course the corrected geometric center is also used for the sculpt-map. In world the geometric Object center is exactly at the rez-location.
On: If this option is checked, then the baker will keep the current object center untouched (in the blender file. In the sculpty the object center will still be placed into the center of the sculpty’s bounding box. But now the bounding box is no longer filled up to the max. Instead of this the used color range is reduced so that the visual object center gets the same offset from the geometric object center as in the blender object. The net effect is, that the spatial resolution of the sculpty degrades more and more as the current object center moves away from the geometric object center.

Notes:

You will want to bake with Keep center On if you need the visual center of the object to differ from the geometric center. This comes in very handy when you create rotating objects like swinging doors, which need their rotation center outside of the geometric center.

Keep Scale:

Off(default): The sculpty will be generated with a cubic bounding box (1 meter each axis). For multiple-sculptie bakes the baker determines the smallest possible bounding box that is capable to wrap around any partial sculptie in the set. Keep scale off typically creates the best results for single sculpties (the full resolution range is used). For multiple sculpty bakes the best possible resolution is calculated for the whole set. The most apparent benefit of a multiple sculpty bake is that all parts fit perfectly together on the level of vertices (all parts align!) while the full resolution is only achieved along the longest BBOX axis. In any case the single sculptie (or the whole set of partial sculpties) needs a rescaling in world.
On: the objects scaling is preserved by reducing the color range accordingly. Only the largest Axis uses the full color range. Hence with Keep scale On the resolution of the sculptie (or set of sculpties) can degrade significantly.

Notes:

For most scenarios a bake without Keep Scale is what you want.
The SL exporter is capable to create a LSL script that takes care about the automatic rescaling of the sculptie (or partial sculpties) in world

Keep seams:

Quote (Domino Marama):

Improvements to the baker have made this option almost useless. When this was added, all vertices falling on a single pixel were averaged to give the final 3D position that was baked to the sculpt map. By selecting “Keep Seams”, any edges that were only part of one face or that were marked as seams disabled this averaging and just the position from the seam is used.

Since then, the baker was improved and now gives preference to the vertices closest to the bottom left of the pixel rather than taking an average. This means that “Keep Seams” only has an effect when the UV layout has multiple edges aligned together.

This situation doesn’t occur with normal sculpties, but the feature was left for cases where manual unwrapping has given problems due to multiple edges clashing. In those cases, you can mark the edge you really want as a seam and enable “Keep Seams” so it’s given priority over the others.

Image

Clear:

On(default): the final image is cleared (all pixels set to [0,0,0] before bake)
Off: The image clearing does not take place.You typically disable Clear when you create your sculptmap in several stages. You might want to first create the left part of a sculpty. In the first bake you will check “Clear” which will leave one half of the sculptmap totally black. Then in a subsequent bake you might want to bake the other half which will fill the former black part of the sculptmap.

Fill:

On (Default): Your mesh might have holes. Such holes typically lead to massive distortions of the final sculptmap as they typically will be rendered to black. The baker can interpolate over the holes thus filling them with a reasonable mesh data. The final result is a full mesh without holes.
Off: Keep holes as they are. (holes rendered to black)

Finalize:

This option prepares the sculptmap in such a way that the mirror option in world will create an exact mirror of the sculpty. As a side effect the resulting sculptmap is more compressible.

On(default): You will enable finalize whenever you bake a sculptie in one step (just bake the sculptmap). This is the typical usage hence On is the default setting.
Off: You will disable finalize only when you are baking a sculptmap in multiple stages. Only in the last baking step finalize should be checked. If you just bake a sculpty in one step, finalize should be checked too.

Notes:

The name “finalize” comes from the fact, that this operation is the last thing that will be done before the sculptmap is ready to use.
In the case you have done your final sculptmap but forgot to finalize it during bake, you still can do that from the UV/image editor by calling the script “image -> finalize sculpty” But beware: finalizing twice will destroy the sculptmap. This is so because the baker uses the alpha channel intermediately as storage area for baking information. When baking with finalize for the first time, this intermediate information is used for the “finalization” and eventually it will be overwritten with the final alpha mask (see below). If you finalize again, the baker interprets the alpha mask as baking data and will severely fail.

Range

Red,Green,Blue settings:

Sculptmaps contain a set of vertex coordinates encoded as RGB-values. Each 3D axis corresponds to one axis in 3D space (x -> red,y -> green, z -> blue) The color range of each axis is [0,255] The default settings will force the usage of the best possible resolution on each axis. that is the reason why sculpties always render with perfect cubic Bounding boxes (all axes of the BBox have length 1m in world). As one matter of fact sculpties normaly can not be made smaller than 1 cm on each axis. And this is where the color range comes into play:

If you reduce the color range, the resulting sculptie will become visibly smaller because only a fraction of the available space is used. You can reduce the color space from 256 values (0,…255) down to a minimum of 4 (e.g. 0,1,2,3) on each axis. Thus the smallest possible cube you can create with this technique would be: 4/256 cm = 15.5 Microns

Note: The bounding box of the sculpty still remains the same as with full color range.
The sculptie only “appears to be smaller”.

Adjust Scale:

Adjust scale is only used in the context of the LSL exporter which also creates a script for scaling adjustments. Adjust scale also only applies when you have modified the color range (see above).

On(default): Due to the reduced color range the visible part of the sculpty will not fill out the whole object bounding box. So at the default size (1 m along each axis) the sculpty will look smaller. With this option checked, the sculptmap will be scaled up to the size it had if the full color range where used.
Off: If the option is turned of, the object will not be scaled to its “default size”, but it will keep the ratios as implied by the ratios of the color ranges.

Alpha

Preview: use a silouette of the shape for better recognition of the sculptmap.
Solid: use no Alpha at all (sculptmap will be seen as is)
Transparent: use full alpha (sculptmap will be rendered fully transparent)
File: use your own alpha mask (upload the mask from your file system)

Default settings

Save : if this option is checked, all current settings will be reused when you recall the GUI the next time within the SAME blender session. If the option is NOT checked, the GUI will always popup with the default settings regardless of what you have used during the previous call of the GUI. With other words: if checked, the GUI remembers what you wanted the last time.
Defaults : if this option is checked, the current settings will be used as default settings. The default settings are preserved over blender sessions.

The Primstar GUI – Add mesh (unofficial)

Gaia Clary — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 17:23:34 +0000

preliminary note:

The following documentation is a short reference to primstar 0.9.21 This reference has not been created on behalf of Domino designs. Any erroneous description is entirely due to my lack of understanding. All screenshots have been made with blender 2.49a and primstar 0.9.21 on Windows XP. For more detailed information, original documentation and downloads of primstar please refer to the Domino Designs Website

The GUI elements

The following GUI pops up when you add -> mesh -> Sculp mesh :

The GUI elements have the following meaning:

Shape

here you can select from a set of basic sculpt types (just click somewhere into the text field). After you clicked on the text field a selection menu pops up. Here you find the set of basic Sculptie types:

At the right hand of the Shape field you find a “File-upload” symbol. If you click on this symbol a file browser pops up. You can upload any sculptmap available on your file system.

Notes:

The Torus X and Torus Z are 2 flavours of Torus with different UV-mapping:

Torus-X: The marked seam on the image (the short seam) corresponds to the upper edge of the UV-map. When you cut along that seam you get the topology of a simple bended cylinder. For example you will use that torus flavor to create a collar.
Torus-Z: Now the marked seam on the image (the long seam) corresponds to the upper edge of the UV-map. When you cut along that seam you get the shape of a car tyre:

If you just need a torus, you can use either of them.

Geometry

X Faces: The number of faces in the U plane
Y Faces: The number of faces in the V plane
Radius: only for Torus sculpties. Tells the radius of the inner hole. value range: [0.05 - 0.5]m default value: 0.25
Clean LODs (only for non power of 2 Geometries)

Notes:

Remember that a sculpty always is born out of a simple plane. The numbers above give the numbers of faces in that plane.
The subdivision and the geometry determine the actual number of faces in the sculpty!
“Power of 2″ facecounts always have Clean LOD. Therefore the Clean LOD checkmark is disabled for “power of 2″ sculpties.
If “non power of 2″ facecounts are used, the LOD does no longer make use of “each secnd face” but some times odd LOD-jumps are introduced. If you want to keep hand on how your sculpty behaves with LOD, then you should check “Clean LOD”. If you prefer to keep an equal devided UV-map, uncheck “Clean LOD”.

Citation (Domino Marama):There are some sizes such as the 64 x 128 maps where having Clean LODs enabled is the wrong choice if you want the modelling mesh to match the final sculpt mesh. The “Clean LODs” option will turn black in the GUI if enabled in those cases. It’s also possible to select face counts where neither enabled or disabled will give a match between the modelling mesh and the sculptie. The “Clean LODs” option stays black for both then. You need to adjust face counts for correct adjustment.

Subdivision

Subdivision controls the number of sub hierarchies of nodes in your sculptie. It is directly coupled with the subdivision type
Subdivision type (Subsurf vs. Multires):
1. Subsurf uses a low poly cage (control points) around your sculptie while the Subdivision count determines how many vertices are manipulated with the control points of the cage.
2. Multires gives you the option to directly manipulate the mesh according to the first 3 LOD-levels of the Sculptie.
Subdivision type (Catmull vs. Simple):
1. With Simple the subdivision is calculated linearly. Hence straight edges remain straight but get subdivided into “sub edges”.
2. With Catmull each level of Subdivision adds more smoothness to the Object.

Notes:

You will use Catmull for smooth rounded shapes. Simple will be most usefull for sharp edged sculpties like cubes..
If you set Levels to “0″ then the number of faces is only determined by the Geometry (see above). In that case neither Multires nor Subsurf will be used for your sculptie.

Mesh type

Quads : all faces are Quads (rectangles)
Triangles: all faces are triangles (not yet implemented)

Note:

Domino stated that the development of triangles can be quickened up if you send him some donations.

Map Size

The map size is a read only GUI element. It shows you the number of pixels in x and in y! Below the top row you also find a table of LOD values. This table tells you how many faces you will have in each LOD level.

Note:

Geometry and Subdivision both influence the face count and the image size!

GUI default settings

The GUI comes with reasonable default settings. In order to support as many use cases as possible, the GUI allows to change the defaults. Below the “Build” button you find 2 checkmarks:

Save : if this option is checked, all current settings will be reused when you recall the GUI the next time within the SAME blender session. If the option is NOT checked, the GUI will always popup with the default settings regardless of what you have used during the previous call of the GUI. With other words: if checked, the GUI remembers what you wanted the last time.
Defaults : if this option is checked, the current settings will be used as default settings. The default settings are preserved over blender sessions.

General notes

The following notes may help you to understand some of the quirks of the GUI:

Sometimes GUI elements turn black. This is generally meant as warning. You need to review the settings and be sure that what you set is what you mean. One typical scenario is when you have selected non power of 2 face counts. In that case the “Clean LODs” checkmark turns black. That means: “Take care here! You may need to choose if you want Clean LOD’s or not…”
The Clean LODs Checkmark is only relevant when you use non power of 2 maps.
Independently of the used facecount, any generated sculptmap will always have power of two dimensions. The dimensions used will always be shown in the Map Size field.

If in doubt, please attach your question(s) to this Post or tell me about any missleading parts and or any necessary corrections. I will update this reference as needed.

Have fun,

Gaia

From plane to cube with no effort

Gaia Clary — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 03:44:37 +0000

abstract: Yet another tutorial about how to create a sculpty cube. This time i show, how you can successfully ignore all technical aspects of sculpties and yet achieve perfect crisp edges on a sculpty-cube. The shown technique is more than just of academic value. It can be used to create objects with more ease and it can create perfect texturizable sculpty surfaces …

or upload the high quality version: FromPlaneToCube.wmv

Tuna's Showtime and "After show get together"

Gaia Clary — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 11:19:00 +0000

Hi, all;

The event is over now. As always Tuna’s show was well visited. I am not sure, how many of you sculptors have actually joined the party as it was quite crowded. But i have seen some of you I wanted to make some fotos from the party itself, but it turned out to be almost impossible for me to ban the scene into images. So you MUST go there and take a look by yourself. Anyways The show was running for 2 hours and afterwards we invited everybody who wanted to continue chatting to join us in the “Flamingo Bar” …:

Well, we ended up in a Gang of 4 debating for almost 4 hours about many many… many interesting issues all around blender, primstar, future planning, and what not else…

Here are some pics:

Raz… always coming up with good ideas, showing us her latest creations, WOW!!! thank you raz!

Mr. Undercover … “Don’t use my name, but show my pic” He was all so funny an inspiring. It was hell of fun to chat with him And if you want to talk to him, come and join us the next time. And no, we won’t tell who has been hidden behind his avatar!

Of Course Domino was there, telling us lots of information about his upcoming moves, ideas,products… That! was informative chat…

Yes, i was there too, of course I’m looking somewhat tired on the pic, but i was eagerly listening to the conversation. I was mainly asking questions, though i haven’t been a big babblemouth that night (i guess…). But if you had been there with us, you would now know about what I am planning in the next few months. Surprise, surprise …

So let’s get together again soon and

have even more fun

Gaia

Sculptors Party on 13-september 2009 (join and enjoy)

Gaia Clary — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 21:21:17 +0000

Hi, all;

Again a big thank you to all people who have contributed to the last month fund raising initiative for Domino Marama. Now we want to invite all of you to join us at the upcoming “Odd Ball” on the next weekend. Tuna Oddfellow, a magician in RL and in SL will donate his next 2 hours virtual Show entirely to Domino. And as his shows are typically well visited, we expect a lot of fun, many people showing up and many opportunities to chat with Domino, and hopefully some other sculptor’s …

What: “Tuna Oddfellow’s Odd Ball”

When: Sunday, 13-Sept-2009, 11am-1pm (SL time)

Where: Research Center in Second Life

Note: If the SLURL does not work for you, please go to the search system in SL, there lookup “odd ball” in the events section and follow the TP.

If you want to get together and chat, the party location will be no good place to do that as it most probably will be very noisy there. So people can meet at the Pink Flamingo Bar. This is a silent place with close to zero traffic, so it should be optimal for a get together.

The complete Show is a free event and if you never heard of it before, it is time to take a look at it next sunday. Here is a video snippet from a Show recorded by the machinimatrix about 2 years ago:

I hope to see many of you at the show and lets have virtual fun!

Cheers,

Gaia Clary

I-Beams (LOD invariant construction)

Gaia Clary — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:37:54 +0000

The Tutorial explains, how to create an LOD invariant I-Beam.

High quality download i-beams.wmv

Or read the text

Hello and welcome again!

Today we will create an LOD-invariant I-beam.

We start with a new sculpty using 16 X-faces and 4 Y-faces.
We will use 2 subdivisions of type simple, and we will use the cylinder as our starting template.
And finally we will work in Multi-res mode.

In top-view,let’s go to edit mode, and there look-up the multi-res control panel.

Go to multi-res-level 1.

Now delete all higher multi-res levels.

Rotate the sculpty by 11.25 degrees.

Scale the top and bottom-level vertices along the x-axis,
until they are located above and below the next-level vertices.

Now select the remaining eight inner-vertices, and scale them along the X-axis .
These vertices will make up the eye-beam’s central part.

When the x-position is convenient, scale them along y.

The central part of the construction is now almost ready.
But we still have to align the inner-most 4 vertices.

And then shift them along the y-axis, until they are positioned exactly
at the inner corners of the set(s+) eye-beam set(s–) .

Now we align the vertices so that they form a rectangular shape with sharp edges.
We also will adjust the width and the height of the whole construction,
so that it finally ends up with the typical eye-beam-shape.

Now the eye-beam is almost finished. We still need to close the top and the bottom
of the object. We do this, by selecting the upper-edge loop, and then scale the selected
vertices down to zero \pause=30 along the x-axis.

Lets do the same for the bottom-edge loop.

Then we go to front view, and scale up the inner part of the object by a factor of 2.
And here it is: a perfect LOD invariant \pause=0 set(s+) eye-beam set(s–) .

Bake the sculptmap, save it to disk, and enjoy your eye-beam in Second life.

Have a nice day!

Fund delivered to Domino

Gaia Clary — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 09:56:55 +0000

Hi, All

Thank you again for your donations for the work of Domino Marama.
In total we have collected an amount of about 500 US$ within 30 days
which is not too bad!

We have meanwhile managed to transfer all your Donations to Domino’s
accounts. Furthermore the machinimatrix has added the same sum as we
have collected from you plus some extra donation from the founder of
the machinimatrix. The exact transfered sum is well above 1000 US Dollar
and that should help Domino to continue working on the primstar scripts
for a while.

Please continue to donate to Domino’s accounts if you want to help him.
And consider to donate to the machinimatrix, if you find our work
is saving your time and your money …

By the way: Donating in Linden Dollars seems to create less transaction fees
compared to donating on Paypal…

Thanks a lot
Gaia
(for the machinimatrix team)

2 in 1 (multiple objects with one single sculpty)

Gaia Clary — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 01:22:42 +0000

The Tutorial explains, how you can create multiple objects out of one single Sculpted prim.

High quality download 2-in-1.wmv

Or read the text

Hello and welcome…

Today we will build two clearly separated objects by using one single sculpty. I will explain how the vertices have to be moved, in order to achieve the desired separation-effect.

We will use a cylinder as starting point. After creation of the sculpty, we apply a rotation of 90 degrees along the y-axis. Then we scale the object along the x-axis by a factor of 20.

Now we select 2 adjacent slices of vertices at the center of the object. We scale the vertices down to 0, along the y- and z- axes.

We end up with two almost-separated child objects, which are connected by a tiny little tube of zero-radius. This connection will not be visible in Second Life. And hence this is the trick, how you can create separated objects with one single sculpty.

But now let us finish our work. We select the right child object and transform it into a ring. We use the warp-tool for this purpose. Just place the cursor somewhere below the selected vertices. Then press W, and enter 360 on the keyboard.

Now transform the other child in the same way. Then we move both child objects, so that the still visible connection line is located near the x-axis.

In order to get rid of the remaining spikes, we simply select the 2 ends of the connection line, and move them inside of the object bodies.

Finally we apply a rotation of 90 degrees along the z-axis. And at the end we move both objects until they intertwine.

There you are! We now have one single sculptmap, but 2 visible elements. Now bake your sculpty, save it and watch the results in second life.

Have a nice day!