The judges have spoken. We have been participating in this years 48hour film project machinima contest. Our contribution to this years 48hour film project was “In Memoriam”.

The winner film is “Medieval Dating” from “The Adventures of Luke and Joe”. Our team Machinimatrix got an amazing number of awards in 6 categories:

The whole making of the film was only possible by the amazing amount of effort coming from a big team of enthusiasts. Thank you team for all your time, your patience and your excellent work! Here is the full team members list.

Here is the list of the other award winners:

The constraints to be used in the film where:

Special thanks go to Ayesha Bisiani (Skin Within), who has put signifcant amount of work on the avatar skins.
And more special thanks go to Gaia Clary (Jass), who has contributed the light system and the avatar movement controller.

Now it is done. Our contribution to this years 48hour film project was “In Memoriam”.

If you like the film, please vote for us on the 48.tv website and watch/vote the other films too.

• To vote, you first have to register (see top right of the screen)
• then go to the “machinima” section (the link is near the center of the screen)
• Click on the thumbnail of a film (the film starts to play)
• click on the star bar (bottom right of the film window) to vote
• The highest vote is achieved by clicking on the most right star.

Some background information:

8 teams have participated in the film contest and tried to create a machinima within 48 hours during the weekend from 14-16 november 2008. 5 teams have met the deadline and entered the contest. 6 films in total have been uploaded and screened last thursday.

The films are:

(*) This film has not met the deadline, so it has only been screened, but it is not in the contest.

The constraints to be used in the film where:

This video tutorial shows a method to create textures out of multiple images for sculpted prims in Second Life. We use blender-2.47 for this demonstration. No further software is needed here. Although this tutorial is self contained, you may also check our first texturizing tutorial, which may help for better understanding.

Watch the video here:

If you prefer to get a better quality .wmv-version, you can download it from blip.tv

Or read the text

Welcome to our first advanced texturizing tutorial.

Maybe, you remember our tutorial about texturizing sculpted prims ?
We have created a surface-texture for a sculpted-prim helmet.
During the described process, we created a second UV-layer (the projection-map).
Then we opened our favorite image-editor, and created the intermediate projection-texture by hand.

At the end, we reimported the projection-texture to blender, and baked the sculptie surface-texture. The baking tool automatically transformed the projection-map to the final second life UV-map. The result of this process was directly used as surface-texture for the sculpty. We strongly recommend, that you first watch the above mentioned texturizing tutorial again, and then come back, and proceed from here.

Well, today we will show you another, maybe even faster approach, which allows for more precise adjustments and can help you to texturise complex objects without using any other tools beside blender. At the end, you will know how to use the UV-unwrapper for texturizing objects with multiple input images.

We will use blender 2.47 for our demonstration.

So, lets go back to blender now. Ok! we create a new UV-layer, by clicking on

“UV-texture -> new”.

It is always good, to re-name your work-items by more suitable names. so in this case, rename the new UV-layer to: “projection-Map” and since we are going to work on this layer now, make it “the rendering UV-texture”.

Now go to your 3D-window, and ensure, that you are in front-view.

Since we are working with projections, we better enable: “occlude background geometry”,
and since we are working with faces now, we switch to: face-select mode. Now select all visible faces.

Check that you only selected faces from the outer part of the helmet, and if necessary, press the SHIFT-key, and then use the right mouse-button, to de-select all un-wanted faces.

Ensure, that at the end of this task, you switch back to front-view. If you use multi-res with your sculptie , you must disable this now. Otherwise the following steps will not work as shown here. Search for the multi-res tab and click on: “apply multires”.

Now, back in the 3D-window, click , mesh, UV unwrap, “project from view”. This is the step where you define the projection from a 2D-image , to the currently selected faces.

Now change the draw-type to textured, so that you can visually follow the next task . And then switch to the UV-image-editor.

Now open the image for the right side of the helmet. If the image does not get displayed, then use the image-pin and select the image again, from the adjacent selector box.

Maybe you want to immediately watch the effects, of your ongoing changes? Then enable window-synchronisation now. You find the corresponding button at the right side of the UV-image-editor header. You probably may also want to work in proportional-edit-mode during your adjustments.

Now, start to adjust the UV-meshpoints and ensure, that at the end, the UV-faces fully cover the helmet-shape.

ok! It is time to select the other side of the helmet.
go back to front-view, and select the entire object,.
then ro-tate the object by 180 degrees around the z-axis.
press: r, followed by, z, then type: 180.
Now, still in front-view, again select only the visible faces.
Also take care to select the top-most faces. You can see them best in top-view.

Again Check, that you have only selected faces from the outer part of the helmet,
and then de-select all unintentionally selected faces.

Now, go to front-view,
and then unwrap the mesh again,
exactly as you did it before, while you worked on the right side of the helmet.
Again, click ,

mesh, UV unwrap, project from view.

Now, open the image for the left side of the helmet,
then again, proceed in the same way,
as you already have done for the right side.

During this process, you also can try, to already adjust those areas, where you can see seams. We will take care about the seems again later, in the final step of this tutorial.

OK, the outer-part of the helmet is now texturized. Lets proceed with the inner-part. Select the entire inner-part of the helmet now and unwrap it in the same way, as you did it for the outer-part before. At the end, do not forget to switch your 3D-view to textured mode so that you can monitor what happens.

Since we do not have an image of the inner-part we will make a quick and dirty texturizing here.
Select one of the helmet-images and use this image to colorise the inner-part of the helmet in a consistent way.

Take care here: if you previously have pinned your image, then select the image now, even if you already can see it in the UV-editor. You know, that everything is correct, if you see that the texture in the 3D-view, corresponds to the texture in the UV-image-editor. Of course you also can apply any other more-appropriate image here, if you got one.

By the way: With this technique, you can apply an arbitrary number of images to your object.

Just select different parts of your object,
unwrap them individually,
assign an image to them and then adjust the UV-faces.

Now the helmet-texture is almost finished. We only need to transform this texture into a second life compatible form. We will first consolidate our work into one intermediate-image.
In the UV-image-editor, select, image, “consolidate into one image”!

Use high values for the image-dimensions,
so that you won’t loose your image-resolution here.
We recommend 2048 pixels for width and height.

unfortunately blender seams to have a bug here,
which prevents the creation of the consolidated image.
For some reason, we get an error here.
But fortunately we found a work-around.

Just go to the 3D-view, and switch to object mode.
Now the image consolidation works as expected.

This consolidated image-texture will now be used as starting point
for the final transformation into a sculptie-map.
So lets prepare the final step now.

For this step, we need a material,
where we can define the necessary transformation rules.
So, we first have to go to the material pannel, and create a new material there.

In the tab, “links and pipeline”, add a new material.

now go to the texture-pannel.

and then add a new texture.
Use the texture type “image” here.

Select the just created consolidated image from the combo box, left to the load button.
Now go back to the material pannel.
Then click on: “Map input”.

You Remember? this is the place where we connect the projection-map with the sculptie-map.

Also select: UV here.
This tells blender, to use the UV-coordinates,
for texture-coordinates.

And finally type in the name of the texture, which you want to use as input.
Remember, in our case this is: projection-map.

Go to the edit-pannel and switch the original “sculptie-map” back to :

active and rendering UV-texture.

Now blender knows, that the image source has first to be de-coded
according to the projection-map.,

and then re encoded according to the sculptie-map.
And this is exactly what we wanted to achieve.

Now create a new image, use 1024 pixels for width and height,
or any other convenient texture-size which works for you.
and then bake the texture.
Go to Render, “bake render meshes”, “texture only”.

If the transformation creates a set of black triangles at the top, or at the bottom of the image,
then take a closer look to the poles of your sculptie.
Go to edit mode, select the 2 poles , of your object, and click on: smooth .
This will avoid a mathematical precision problem during texture baking.

Finally select all vertices and bake the texture again.

The black triangles should be gone by now.
Now we can examine the final texture, look for possible seams,
and do some manual corrections if needed.

Now Go to texture-paint mode,.
And in the UV-image-editor, activate the paint tool.
Now set the paint mode to, smooth, or smear.
You find the corresponding tab, in the editing-pane, under: paint.

Now go ahead, and fine tune your texture.

Note, that you can also work directly in the 3D-view.
This is very convenient when you need to work on the left
and right side of the texture image,
where the elimination of seams may turn out to get very tricky.
ok! We are finished now. Save the surface-texture to your hard drive.

And now it is time, to start second-life and see your textured sculpty in action!

In our next tutorial, we will show you, how to work with multiple layers of textures.
And finally we will show a technique for creating truly seamless textures.
Stay tuned until the next time!

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.

Watch the video here:
High quality download blenderPrimer.wmv

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!

abstract: cocoon is a free open source product for XML based content creation. This video tutorial shows, how to install the software and it shows some first easy to understand steps to configure it to your needs.

Please note, that cocoon has nothing to do with 3D content creation (although it could… be used also in that context). So this trail is completely unrelated to the blender trail, which is also published on this blog.
cocoon can be found at http://cocoon.apache.org

Watch the video here:
If you prefer to get a better quality .wmv-version, you can download it from blip.tv

Or read the text:

hello everybody! this is our first tutorial about cocoon 2.2 . This tutorial mostly complements the beginners tutorial of the cocoon documentation, which is titled :

“Your first cocoon application using Maven 2” .

As cocoon provides a tight integration with maven 2, we can make our life very easy, by installing maven beforehand. The major benefit of this decision will be, that the entire cocoon installation will be done automatically for you. Maven is your friend in this case. All you have to do, is to provide some information about dependencies of software modules. So, installing cocoon on your computer, is basically reduced to one single command in your command-line shell.
well, you still have to instal maven first. If you don’t have it yet, just go to the maven site, and get the maven version 2 dot 0 dot 9, or newer. That should work for you. Once you have installed it, come back here and proceed .

are you still there?! cool! then lets proceed now. so, open your command line shell, and navigate to your preferred installation folder. Take care, that you have modification permissions here.
Then tell Maven to create the initial directory structure for your first cocoon-block:

We are using the built-in archetype generator now. so, please Type in the following command:

mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeCatalog=http://cocoon.apache.org

This will start an interactive process, where you are going to tell maven some basic informations about what exactly you want to get. But first, maven will probably start downloading a huge bunch of software modules, which it needs for its own operation. Eventually you get a prompt, where you have to tell maven, exactly which archetype you want to install. We will select option number 2 here .

This will install a minimal cocoon-block, containing some example files. This choice has the benefit that we will already get a very minimal, but ready to use cocoon-application.
Now you have to provide some formal information about your new cocoon-block.

- The group-ID, defines a unique software identifier. Think of this as your company’s web-domain. We will enter: com, dot my-company, here. Please note, that You will definitely have to provide your own ID.

- Now, enter the artifact-eyedie , set(s–) or in simple words, the name of your block. We choose: “ical” here, but you can name your block however you like.

- Then add a version information. Just use the default.

- Next, specify your java-root package. In our case we are going to use: com.mycompany.ical

- Finally confirm all entries.

your first cocoon block is created inside a sub-directory, which is named exactly as your block. So, navigate to this sub-directory now. If you are curious, then flip through the directory structure and see, where which files have been placed.

We will get back to this in full detail within our next tutorial. For now, just keep it simple and trust us. This is a ready made cocoon block and it will come to life within the next 10 minutes. And 100% of the work will be done by maven. You are the king (or queen) And maven is your servant:

double-check, that you have navigated to the root of your cocoon-block. Then type the command:

mvn jetty:run

And sit back and watch how your computer is now collecting your runtime en-vironment. In fact, maven is creating a web-application, places your cocoon block into this application, and finally builds a web-application-server, based on jetty in our case.

At the very end, maven starts the application server, so that you can open the application on your browser. And you ? You did not have much work until here, didn’t you ?. That’s amazing! isn’t it ?

Ok. Jetty has been started in the final step, and it runs now. So, go to your browser on your local machine, and call the localhost on the port 8888 … and? done!

The initial cocoon-block is life. Of course, the real work will start now. But at least you got the basics up and working. We will go through all steps for building a full web-application within our follow-up tutorials,
including, authentication, interactive pages, and database access.

We will choose the learning-by-doing-approach, so we will directly jump into the doing. But for now take a break, get some coffee, and then let us continue by examining the real heart of your application, the sitemap.

Now, lets move to the sitemap. You find it in the source folder at main/resources/COB-INF/sitemap.xmap

This file contains almost every information, that cocoon must know about your application-data. The information is provided as an xml-tree. There is much to say about this file. But let us focus
on the pipelines section first.

The most basic principle of cocoon is, that data is always processed inside a pipeline. processing always starts with a data source, a so called generator and it ends with a data sink, a serializer. The data walks along the pipeline, where it will be modified by transformers. While the data is passing the pipeline, it is transported as an XML data stream. And the transformers are in most cases simple xslt-processors.

For the beginning, we only need to understand, how we can start a pipeline-process from our browser. This is easy. Just call the application and provide an URL-path. For instance, in our very first call, we provided the empty string, in other words we adressed the application root. Inside the sitemap, we define, what shall happen, when a specific path is provided.

For this purpose, we use the match-tag. And we provide a match-pattern. So if a pattern matches, whatever is declared inside the match-tag, will be processed. Lets look at the matcher for the empty string. As expected, the pattern is the empty string. And it is not very astonishing, that we find a generator,

a transformer, and a serializer here. Each of these constructs provide its own set of parameters. The generator is configured to lookup an xml file on the file system. The source is specified relative to the directory, where the site-map resides. so in our case, the source file is welcome.xml and it is found in the demo sub-folder.

The transformer is a simple xslt processor. It gets the output of the generator, namely the content of the welcome-file, and it forwards the data to the transformer as xml-stream. In the configuration, we also see, that the xsl-transformation-rule-set is stored in the file welcome.xslt . The transformer passes the transformed xml-stream to the serializer, which happens to be an xhtml-serializer. Hence we expect to see an html-output. And indeed, the browser gets an xhtml-data stream as the result of the request.

it is important to understand, that the names of the files on the file system, are fully decoupled from the URL-pathes provided on the browser side. so neither demo/welcome.xml, nor demo/welcome.xslt, will be displayed, when we specify these pathes on the browser command line. if you want to see the content of a file, you must create a new matching rule for it. Translated to cocoon notation this means:

add a new match-tag to the site-map.

So, let us proceed by adding a new matcher for our home-page. The match-pattern shall be : “home”…

- As we have just learned, everything starts with a generator. And in our case, the generator gets its content from the file system. The location of the data file shall be: demo/home.xml and we set the generator source accordingly.

- Let us reuse the xslt transformation rules of the welcome page. So we specify a transformer, and tell it to us demo/welcome.xslt as transformation rule-set.

- Finally we specify a serializer, which creates xhtml code.

Now we examine, what happens, when we call our home page. well, on the browser side, nothing happens. but on the command line, we see immediatley, that cocoon complains about missing files.

oh sure! Yes, we did not yet create the home.xml file, so lets do this now. for simplicity i will copy welcome.xml and modify the copy….

so, after we created home.xml, a new browser call, returns the expected data.

ok, We are finished for now. We have shown, how to install cocoon from the internet by using maven 2. We also have shown how to start the minimal cocoon-application. And finally we have shown, how to add new web-pages to the application by modifying the sitemap.
There is very much more to say. But this has to wait for the next tutorial, where we are also introducing a way to authenticate your web-application with cocoon-native methods.

until then,

have a nice day!

abstract: The tutorial describes a reasonable way to convert NURBS surfaces to sculpted prims. We recommend that you install the sculptie import/export scripts from Domino Marama, but we also show a way to create sculpties with blender’s built in node editor and without any script usage. Please also take a look at our new page (plus video tutorial) about Gaia’s transformer script nurbs2sculptie

Watch the video here:
High quality download: nurbs2sculptie.wmv

Transcription

Hello, and welcome back to our blender tutorial series.
Today i will show you, how to convert a nurbs surface into a sculpted prim. First i will show you the easy way, by using Domino Marama’s sculpted prim exporter for blender. Then i will show you, how you can create your sculpt map, without usage of any external script.

ok, as allways, delete the default object first. Then split the view, and open the UV-image editor. After you prepared your view, create a NURBS sphere. You can sculpt your object in any way you like. For demonstration purposes, I will create a simple heart now, and here we go.

Please note, that in your own projects, you can alternatively select spheres, surfaces, tubes, or even donuts. In any case, you perform the same steps, as shown here in this tutorial. You only have to take care later about the stitching type. Obviously a tube transforms into a sculptie cylinder, and a donut, transforms into a torus.

Sculpties can only be generated from meshes. So once we are finished with our sculpting, we have to convert the final result into a mesh. And this is done in object mode. Simply open object, convert object type, mesh!

Now we need to unwrap the mesh. In this step, We have to take care about some Secondlife-specific constraints. Especially we must create perfectly squared UV-maps. With nurbs it turns out that this task can be performed by applying a well defined process. Here are the steps, which you have to perform:

Step 1: go to edit mode,
Then go to top view,
Now choose all vertices.
Finally open the UV-unwrapper and select: project from view, with bounds.
This step is only needed to initialy populate the UV-map.

Step 2: go to the UV image editor
There, select: quads constrained rectangular.
This forces the usage of rectangular faces.

Step 3: Go back to the 3D view,
switch to face select mode,
deselect all vertices,
now right click on one arbitrary face to select it.
Right click again to make it the active face.
Once you performed this activation, select all faces by pressing: a, twice.
Call the UV-unwrapper again, but now select: follow active quads.

Step 4: in the UV image editor, you see a more or less distorted UV map now.
This is normal. Still in the UV image editor, press the g-key, and click the left mouse key immediately.
Now the UV-map has changed significantly, but we still do not see the expected result.
But don’t worry. We are still on the right track.

Step 5: Go back to the 3D-view
Open the UV-unwrapper again,
And select: “follow active quads”, a secnd time.
Now we get a rectangular UV-map.
Well, it is not yet perfectly sized, but that will be done in the next step.

So, proceed to Step 6: go back to the UV-image editor,
and there, scale the mesh up or down until it fits as perfect as possible into the image.
You can make your life easy by selecting, “Layout clipped to image size”, and just scale the map, until it fits perfectly.

we have created the UV-map now. in the final step, we have to bake the sculptie. If you have installed the sculptie scripts from Domino Ma-rama, just go to Object mode, then render,bake second-life sculpties.
If you see a black stripe at one side of the sculptie, you did not precisely adjust the UV-map, or the vertex points are not adjusted at the correct positions. In that case, enter the UV-image editor again, and readjust your UV-map, until it covers the hole image space. Then do again: render, bake Second Life sculpties. And you are done. Your Sculptie is now ready for import to Second Life.

If you want to know how you can create a sculptie map without any script help, then hold on. I show you now, how this is done:

First, we remove the sculptie image,
Now split the view,
and then open the node editor inside the new window.

Now open the material buttons,
and create a new material.

In the node editor, click on: “use nodes”,
Now the node based material is initialised.

We can remove the material node from the node view.
We do not need it any more.

Add a new geometry node.
And finally add a new mapping node.

In fact with the help of the mapping node,
we are going to create a red green blue color cube,
Which spans over the object bounding box.

Each vertex of the object, lies somewhere in the color cube.
The red green blue color values at the vertex positions,
are used to colorize the UV-map.
And this is exactly, what we want to happen, when we create a sculptie.

We need to adjust location and size to zero point five,
And we will use the orco output-connector, which passes the original vertex co ordinates into the mapping node. At the end, we connect the final output node, and we are done.

Now create a new image of size 64 times 64,
then go to edit mode and select all vertices.
Finally, render, bake render meshes, full render.
the result is the sculptie map.
save it to disk, and import the result to Second Life.

And enjoy your heart.

abstract: The tutorial is a 6 minutes life demonstration, how to create a whine glass sculptie with blender, from scratch and without any(!) help of scripts. I only use the blender internal functions and show a very easy going way. This tutorial is dedicated to Amanda Levitzki and Domino Marama, who have given me all the hints i needed to eventually find the demonstrated workflow. I hope, you like it. And , please, please send me feedback

Watch the video here: If you prefer to get a better quality .wmv-version, you can download it from blip.tv

Or read the text:

Hi! I found a way to make sculpted prims with very little effort,
and without any scripting help. You are interested ? Here we go.

Start your virgin blender. No scripts here.
No nothing. This is pure blender 2.46 .

ok, as allways, delete the default object first. Then split the view, and open the UV-image editor. Are you afraid of UV-unwrapping? Don’t worry, there is nothing to do there. Just watch, while we are stepping through the process.

After you prepared your view, create a plane mesh object, and then go to edit mode,
Call the UV-unwrapper now, and just unwrapp this single face object. This is trivial, isn’t it?

Believe it or not, but the UV-map is already finished. So, lets blow up the mesh-count to a reasonable size. Use subdivide, and apply it 5 times. We end up with 32 times 32 faces. Now you have already prepared your sculptie mesh. But it is a simple plane. So what comes now?

let us start with a cylinder object. switch to the front view, and use the warp-tool to bend the mesh. Place the 3D cursor right under the plane. Then warp to 360 degrees.

Now we got a cylinder. But hold on. we need to check something: Zoom to the lowest part of the circle. Then smooth the object once. oh! What is this? You guessed it already, didn’t you?

All vertices from the left side and the right side of the plane fall on top of each other. We have to stitch the plane here. We do this by removing the double vertices now.

But before, press control-z once, to revert the smoothing, and to get the vertices back in place.
Now select the stitching-area and remove doubles.

As expected, the 33 vertices along the side of the mesh have been removed now.
our cylinder is now finished and the UV-map ist still correct.

You can start sculpting the cylinder right now.
I create a simple glass for demonstration. So, after this is finished, now lets make the sculpt map.

• Go to the material editor
• create a new material
• replace the material colors with vertex colors
• and then proceed to the texture panel
• Create a new texture and use the texture type, blend.
• Now go back to the material panel and focus on the texture tab.

go to the Map-Input, tab.
in the x-y-z matrix, select x only

advance to the map-to, tab. Set the color to red, and set the blending-mode to: add

Go back to the texture tab and add 2 copies of the texture.

Go to the map input tab of the secnd texture, and choose, y only, in the x-y-z matrix.

advance to the Map-to: tab, and set the color to green. Dont forget to set blend type to: add.

advance to the third texture, in the map input tab,

select z in the x-y-z tab.

In the map-to tab, set the color to blue, and again set blend type to: add.

in the UV-image editor, create a new image. Select width and height to 64 each.

Now select, render, bake render meshes, texture only.

Your sculpted prim is done.

Now save the image, import it to second-life, and verify that your sculptie works as expected.

Abstract:The tutorial shows how to install blender. It explains the various options for the application data locations. And it shows, how you can customize blender to find your personal scripts location folder.

Watch the video here:

High quality download blenderInstallationGuide.wmv

Transcription

Welcome to our tutorial series about blender, an amazing tool for 3D content creation. blender is highly customizable and flexible, and if you want to master this tool, you need to learn about it first. Once you understand, how to use it efficiently, you can get very productive with it.

So let us begin now and here with the installation of blender. We will use windows-xp, for this demonstration. If you are running on another operating system, installation details will be a bit different. Nevertheless, you should follow this tutorial up to the end, since some tips here will apply to all versions of blender.

We also assume, you have already down-loaded the blender installation file from the blender site. So lets execute the installer now. Installation is really no problem at all. You can simply hit the return key all the time, since the default settings for blender will work in most cases.

Here i will show you a slightly more advanced installation process. I assume, you use a separate installation directory for your 3D-artwork. In our case, i will install blender at my personal file space. You can use any location you want, you only need to take care, that you got about 30 Mega-Bytes of space on your hard disk.

After you have specified your destination folder, the installer will ask you, where you want to place your user data files. You have 3 different options.

1. If you are installing on a computer, which is shared by many users, the first option is what you want. In that case, blender will place all user data into individual user application folders.
2. If you are installing on your personal computer, the second option is good for you. But take care, now blender places all user data right into the installation directory. So if you ever want to reinstall blender, your personal data will be gone.
3. If you are working on a company computer, and your company supports the HOME variable, then use the third option. In that case, all user data will be placed at a folder, inside your HOME directory.

For simplicity, we will choose the secnd option now. And in a few seconds i will show you a nice trick, how you can customize blender, to find your personal data, where you want it to be.

So, lets finish the installation now. After blender has installed and checked itself, you can jump start into it and get your first impressions.

One big advantage of blender is the possibility to be expandable with customization scrips. Many scripts are already bundled with blender, but there are much more scripts available. And many of them have been created to make your life much easier. Even as a newcomer, you will most probably need to install your own script collection. And here is a safe way to go.

First, we are going to create a scripts directory on our file system. I will place it right into my 3d-tools directory. I have downloaded a couple of scripts and will place them now into the just created directory.
the scripts here are import and export scripts for second-life sculpted prims. These scripts have been created by Domino Ma-Rama, and we will go into the usage details in a separate tutorial about creating sculpted prims with blender.

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, then left mouse click and drag the window down. The user preferences appear.
• Go to the right side and click the button: “File Path”. 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 folder.
• Then select the folder by clicking on: “select script path”. Now blender immediately finds and recognizes all scripts, which we have placed into our personal folder. Let us navigate to some places, where you can now see, how nice the scripts integrate into the blender interface.
• ok, now move the user preferences window back out of sight.
• One final task is still to be done. If you exit blender now, it will silently forget about your custom data. So we have to tell blender, to keep the information for us.
• go to, file, save default settings. Now blender will remember your personal folder whenever you start it again.

Now you can jump start into blender art work creation. 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 find the newest videos on the machinimatrix website.

have fun, and see you later!

abstract: We introduce the basic functionality of the blender node editor. We use a previously created second life sculptie object as demonstration example and show, how texturizing can be setup in an easy and reproducible way. We highly recommend to view the tutorial about surface textures for sculpties with blender, before you continue here!

Watch the video here:

Or read the text:

Welcome back!

Today we will explain the basic principles of node-based materials and how these materials can be applied for sculptie texturing. If you have no experience with using blender for creating textures, you should watch the tutorial about “texturizing sculpted prims” first, and then come back to continue here.

Ok, lets do a jump start and open blender now. We will re-use our working example, a simple helmet. We have already created the sculptie itself before, and for texturizing purposes we have created another UV-map, which we have called: projection-Map. Both maps can be found in the UV-texture section of the mesh tab in the edit-panel. We will use them now.

But instead of using simple materials as we did before, we now want to use the node editor. So let us go to the material panel first, and cleanup a bit by removing the already existing material. Please remember, that now the material has been removed from the objects material list. But it is still available. If we want to completely delete the material, we have to save the object first. After reopening the bland file, the material is gone. Note, that this step is only for cleaning up.

Now we will split up our working windows, so that we get an additional view. Place the cursor over the window border. When you see a double headed arrow, right click and choose: “split area”. In the upper window, select the node editor. Take care to allocate enough space on the screen. Now add a new Material and rename it to texture-container. Then go to the texture panel and add the already existing helmet-projection-texture.

The reason why we have to create this material, is a dependency problem in the node editor! In a later step we need to assign textures to texture nodes. But, the only place where we can create textures, is inside an existing material. Hence we created the texture-container, as a work-around. We will come back to this issue in a few moments.

So, lets go to the node editor window. There open the selection box and choose: “Add, new”. This step creates the node based material. Rename this material to a convenient name, like: “helmet-material”

The just created material will be completely defined in the node editor. We have to tell this to blender now. Simply click on: “Use, nodes.” Now the helmet-material is used as the root of a complex material. It can be used exactly like simple materials, but it may contain a much more complex inner structure compared to what we can achieve with simple materials.

The helmet-material now contains 2 inner nodes:

1. the material-node on the left side, is just a place holder for a material. We still have to associate a material with this node.
2. the output node on the right side, is the processing end point. Here all material processing will be accumulated and rendered to the final texture. The small window in the output node shows a thumbnail version of the final result. At the moment you see a black circle there.

But you also see a lot more details here:

1. First, both nodes are connected through their “color” connection points. In principle that means, whichever color is associated to the material, will be propagated to the out-node. And currently the material is black. Hence the output shows the black circle.
2. Furthermore, you see some unconnected points in three different colors:
   - yellow connectors transport color information
   - grey connectors propagate values.
   - Finally, blue connectors propagate vector information.
3. In general, only connectors of the same color can be connected. But this is not a fixed rule. We will come back to this in the future.
4. All nodes show the same general structure:
   - The input connectors are placed on the left side,
   - The output connectors are placed on the right side.
   - Unused connectors will typically be filled with convenient default values.
5. In general, data flows from left to right.

Ok, back to practice now. You have noticed this prominent red request, to Add a New material ? So let us click on this red button now. This fills the material node with life. Note, that now also a new simple material exists in the material panel. Now, Look a bit closer. You see that the Out-node has changed to a grey sphere. This is, because the material node has turned its color to grey, and a bit of specularity has been added and this information is propagated through the system.

So, What is the next step now?

Of course, we will now place our surface texture into the system. So we first create a new texture node.

press space, add, input, texture

From the embedded selector box choose: “projection-texture”. This is the place, where the previously mentioned dependency problem pops up. The texture must be assigned to at least one material, otherwise it would not show up in the selection list here. But by creating the texture-container material in a previous step, we found a workaround, and now we can simply choose the “projection-texture” from the list. Let us go and change the preview display to 2D. Do this directly in the material panel.

Now all nodes in the node editor changed their output from a 3D view to a simple 2D image.

It becomes obvious now, that we have to connect the texture with the material. Lets do this, by using the color to color connectors. click on one of them, and while holding the mouse down, drag it, until it is on top of the destination connector. The connection line then snaps to the connection end point. As soon as the mouse is released, the texture-data is propagated to the out-node.

Now lets see, if we can bake the final texture. Therefore

- go to the edit panel
- choose the projection-Map
- create a new image
- and then: render, bake render meshes, Texture only.

Ok, this is not what we expected to see. Something is missing. We see, that the mapping is completely wrong. We forgot to define, which mapping shall be used to wrap the texture around the object.

Now the geometry-node comes into play. Let us create such a node now:

Press SPACE -> add -> input -> geometry.

A new geometry node appears. We remember now the map input tab in the material panel ? We had to specify some details there, to get the correct texture mapping. The equivalent settings in the geometry node are:

connect the UV output, to the Vector-input of the helmet-texture.
This is equivalent to: perform a UV-mapping, and use the UV-coordinates as texture coordinates.

Then enter: “projection-Map” into the input field. This is equivalent to: “use the projection-Map as UV-map”.

Now bake again, And yes! it works!

Oh! no, we still have to convert our texture to the Second-life compatible version. We used the wrong transformation. In the final baking step, we need to use the sculptie UV-map instead of the projection-map. Ok, lets do this now:

- Choose the sculptie-UV-texture, as the rendering UV-texture
- Go to edit mode and select the output image again
- Finally bake again.

Now we are finished. We just have used the node editor to define our sculpted prim texture conversion. Essentially we needed one texture node and one material node. We also had to define the mapping from the texture to the object. so we used a geometry node here. Then we had to choose the sculptie UV-map in order to bake the correct final texture.

So what did we get ?
The setup was quite a bit time consuming. But now we are able to use the full power of the node editing system. Things will become quite easy and you can do very complex texturing tasks now.

We are now close to the end of this tutorial. Finally I show you an easy example of how we can continue from here. Lets recolorize the texture to a light blue helmet.

• First, i disconnect the projection-map texture from the material node.
• Then i add 2 converters, one to separate the red, green and blue values and another one to recombine them.
• Then i cross the blue and the red values between the converters.
• At the end, i route the texture data through my new converter, and connect the output back to the material node.
• A final bake and?

The helmet has turned blue!
And now? it is your turn to have fun with texturing.

Meanwhile, We are going to investigate further.

see you soon!

abstract: A collection of videos for the creation of sculpted prims with blender, an open source tool for advanced 3D content creation. Each tutorial also contains a transcription of the spoken text. For newbies we recommend to watch the tutorials in the order given below.

The blender trail:

	Blender installation guide ( 11-July-2008 ) abstract:The tutorial shows how to install blender. It explains the various options for the application data locations. And it shows, how you can customize blender to find your personal scripts location folder. read more …
	The blender primer( 20-August-2008 ) abstract: This tutorial gives an introduction into the usage of the blender interface. It covers the most basic functions for creating and modifying mesh objects. The tutorial mainly adresses people, who are totally new to 3D content creation tools in general and blender in particular. After you have studied the tutorial you should be able to follow our subsequent tutorials about using blender for creation of sculpted prims. read more…
	Sculpted Prims with Blender ( 27-June-2008 ) 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 read more …
	Surface Textures for Sculpties with Blender ( 30-June-2008 ) abstract:Welcome to our secnd blender tutorial. We will now create a surface texture for a sculpted prim helmet. If you want to get more basic informations about how we created this helmet, please go and fetch the video about “creating sculpted prims with blender” . Then come back here. And don’t miss the new companion video “Texturizing sculpties with multiple images” which shows a blender only solution ( our preferred method) read more …
	Texturizing sculpties with multiple images ( 01-September-2008 ) abstract:This video tutorial shows a method to create textures out of multiple images for sculpted prims in Second Life. We use blender-2.47 for this demonstration. No further software is needed here. Although this tutorial is self contained, you may also check our first texturizing tutorial, which may help for better understanding. read more …
	The blender node editor (Part I: Introduction) ( 09-July-2008 ) abstract:We introduce the basic functionality of the blender node editor. We use a previously created second life sculptie object as demonstration example and show, how texturizing can be setup in an easy and reproducible way. We will use blender 2.46 for our demonstration read more …
	Precise Sculpties: “Level Of Detail” ( 4-June-2008 ) abstract:We show you, how you can use blender to create sculpted prims with high precision. This tutorial will cover the basics of LOD (Level of detail) and show you how to avoid the most common pitfall in sculptie creation. We used blender 2.46 for all demonstration sequences read more …
	Precise Sculpties: “The Arch Example” ( 30-June-2008 ) abstract:We show you, how you can use blender to create sculpted prims with high precision. This tutorial will show you some techniques for building high precision sculpted prims. We used blender 2.46 for all demonstration sequences. As an example we have choosen the construction of a sculpted window frame for a casino window front read more …
	Sculpted Prims for the blender purist ( 14-July-2008 ) abstract: The tutorial is a 6 minutes life demonstration, how to create a whine glass sculptie with blender, from scratch and without any(!) help of scripts. I only use the blender internal functions and show a very easy going way. This tutorial is dedicated to Amanda Levitzky and Domino Marama, who have given me all the hints i needed to eventually find the demonstrated workflow. read more …
	From NURBS to Sculptie ( 10-August-2008 ) abstract: The tutorial describes a reasonable way to convert NURBS surfaces to sculpted prims. We recommend that you install the sculptie import/export scripts from Domino Marama, but we also show a way to create sculpties with blender’s built in node editor and without any script usage read more …
	From NURBS to Sculptie ( 12-December-2008 ) abstract: This page describes the nurbs2sculptie script. I also have added a tutorial which shows the script in action: The simple way to convert NURBS surfaces to sculpted prims using the nurbs2sculptie script. You will need Domino Marama’s sculptie scripts installed as a prerequisite for the sculptie baking read more …

Your feedback helps to constantly improve our work.

So, Please tell us:

• what you are missing
• what we could do better.

Have fun.