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General informationPrimstar-2 is an add-on module for Blender-2.59 (or newer) which will help you to create content for Second Life and similar platforms. Primstar-2 supports the creation of Sculpted Prims and the creation of regular Prims. Also mixed builds are supported. A comfortable transfer from Blender into the virtual world repository (SL and similar) will be available. Primstar-2 also supports the creation and modification of SL terrain and seamless round trip development (export from SL, modify in Blender, import back to SL). Primstar-2 is currently in development. However the Sculpty-related features of Primstar-2 are almost completed by now (see the feature matrix for detailed information) and available within our early adopters program (see below). We are aiming to be ready to release the feature complete version against Blender 2.65 but please understand that we can not yet guarantee that. We are to some degree dependent on the Blender Foundation to implement required features in Blender and until those are done, not everything we have planned can be implemented. What License is used for Primstar-2 ?The Primstar-2 license is based on the Fair End User License Agreement by Ed Foster. Where do i find documentation ?Currently we have following more detailed info pages for you:
We will complete the tutorials and manuals before Primstar-2 will be released. Our contacts:
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Early Adopters ProgramLatest updates
We now offer access to the development version of Primstar-2. This development version is not yet feature complete and it will be given to you at your own risk and with minimal support. Nevertheless you may report problems and suggestions and we will be all ears. You will need to install Blender 2.59 or newer. Then you can install the developer version “primstar-2-dev” as a regular Blender add-on (works on all platforms which support Blender 2.5/2.6). How can i purchase ?primstar-2-dev can be instantly bought via Paypal (see Purchase offer on the top left side of this page) or from the JASS-Shop in Second Life. After purchase you will get a permanent Link to the software. Also all future updates of the development release will be automatically posted under that link. The final release will be handed out as soon as it is available. What will i get ?The following is included with the early adopters program:
What is the Pricing ?Get 1000 L$ discount on final price(*):
This offer will end one month before Primstar-2 will be officially released. (*): The final price for Primstar-2 will be 7000 L$ |
Hi … with the latest blender V2.63 , I can t active Primstar add on .
Best regards
Think i made a mistake to buy primstar-2.
Tried to install and begin with reading the documentation. so far so good.
links went to nirwana….404 not found…or i got something in italian?????
is that worth L$ 6000????
Regards
Sledge Kappler
This is lovely… but do you not have a free version of primstar available for Blender 2.6? Don’t get me wrong… I think the feature sets are nice, but I don’t exactly need most of them. Only the ability to create the primitive base I need in-specific, and do the rest by hand.
Hi Gaia,
When I create new objects in Blender with Primstar 2. I get the default texture map instead of the sculptie map. Any suggestions what I am doing wrong or any workarounds to this problem?
Thanks,
Brian
Hi Gaia,
I have two related questions I hope you can help with.
I have been trying to learn more about making mesh and rigged mesh with the goal of making mesh clothing. I have had a lot of trouble with the coverting primstar 1 and 2 shapes to mesh. I noticed they were much more blocky in second life in mesh form. I figured out that you can use the hot key alt-C in blender 2.49 or 2.62 and convert to mesh which did fix the blocky appearance in SL ( however it increase the vertices a huge amount making it more challenging to get prim weight down. Once I made it this far, I imported my shape into blender and rigged it following your excellent tutorial on how to do this. However, I have had a lot of trouble trying to figure out how to join a mesh to the rigged mesh now. For example adding a mesh pockets on the side of the legs on the lower body and getting them to work properly with the bones. I have been using a process of selecting the mesh before I join it to the avatar mesh and making parent to the bone heap. This has been hit or miss for me, sometimes it works other times it does not. Finally, one I do get to more right with the mesh and upload the model to second life. The pockets look fine rezzed on the ground but when I wear or attach to my avatar they are transparent from certain angels. So my questions are
1.) Do you have any or can you point me to any tutorials on how to properly convert primstar shapes to mesh ready to upload as models into Second Life.
2.) Do you have any or can you point me to any tutorial on how to join other mesh to a rigged second life mesh either using .blend file in 2.49 or maybe using the avatar workbench files in 2.62?
Thanks so much!
hi
i used blender 2.49 alot and get handy with it, now i try to work on the new 2.6 and wanted ask if there is any option where i can change the handling to shift or rotate objects
in blender 2.49 i just klicked on the button and could moove it well around, now in 2.6 i need press all time the right mouse button when i wanan shift something
is there a way to change this?
thx
kakaue
Just purchased both Primstar-2 and Avastar-1. Am looking forward to learning and working with both but have already run into a snag: My main motivation for purchasing Primstar was to work with the sculpt maps of full permission items I have purchased in SL. In this case, a woman’s shoe that I need to modify. I have all of the sculpt map images (png and targa) saved to my computer for this item and I simply cannot get them to work right in either blender or jass-magic (I have 1.1.4 and 2.3.8 installed and have tried both).
I’ve gone through the sphere tutorial — saving baking the map, saving it, and then reloading it. The equivalent process of loading one of the sculpt maps for one prim of the shoe yields a distorted shape (usually a long thin shape that looks like a twisted needle).
I have noticed that the map for the sphere shows up in color. The maps for each of the shoe components shoe up in grey scale…I’m not sure if this matters.
Actually, I had one brief bit of success when I was able to get one piece of the shoe to show up correctly formed, but after that I wasn’t able to replicate it.
The tutorials provided don’t seem to address this use — any map that is loaded appears to have been originally created in blender or jass-magic.
Can you offer any insights on what’s going on and any tips for what I need to do?
Thanks.
Oh, one last thing: I am a bit weirded out that both versions of jass-magic are pretty well locked-down versions of an older release of blender. Specifically, the “add-ons” management screen is inaccessible as far as I can tell and not exactly sure why then when I buy primstar-2 I’m stuck with primstar-1 in jass-magic…nor can I understand why I can’t upgrade blender in jass. Anyways, as a jass-magic newbie I’d appreciate some tips there as well.
Hi.
First of all, Primstar-2 should be compatible with any sculptmap created by Primstar-1, Jass, or ans other product in the market. If a sculptmap is working fully in Second Life but can not be read by Primstar-2, that is counted as an issue with Primstar-2. In that case we would need to get access to the sculptmap that breaks our functionality. If this is not possible we woold need at least to know who was the originator (creator) of that sculptmap. Then we can try to contact them.
You mentioned your maps show up in grey scale. This is a typical look for so called tiny sculpties, where the used color range on the map has been reduced. However this should not at all break Primstar-2.
Regarding importing of sculptmaps, there are two caveats:
1.) The scaling of the object is not provided, thus any sculptmap will be scaled to a cubic Bounding Box. You have to scale your object in Blender’s Object mode (change the Dimension values). You can use the same size values as you can see in Second Life (you probably have demo objects for your sculptmaps).
2.) You must know which stitching type your sculptmap has. Primstar-2 tries to figure out that automatically, but sometimes it is not possible to determine the stitching type just from the Data. So (like in the SL Editor) you can set the stitching type during importing of your sculptmap (in the Import Operator panel) The Import is described in the Reference guides: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/primstar-2/reference/import-from-file/
Regarding Primstar-1, Jass-Magic and Primstar-2:
The difference of these products is described in great detail here:
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/products/
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/jass-feature-matrix/
In short: Jass-Magic is indeed based on Blender 2.49 This is mentioned on many places on the Blog and in the tutorials. There is no way to “install Primstar-2 on Jass” That simply does not make any sense. Primstar-2 is an Addon For Blender 2.5 and newer. It CAN NOT be installed on older versions of Blender. And Jass-magic is a software bundle containing Blender 2.49 and Primstar-1 addon scripts. This simply can not be “installed into blender 2.5 or newer”.
The only reason why we added Jass-Magic to the Primstar-2 distribution was that until recently Primstar-2 did not provide a multi part sculpty exporter. I felt it was just right to provide the Jass-magic distribution as a fallback solution also because Blender 2.5 did not provide the full functionality for Second Life users until recently. Well, since a few weeks Primstar-2 has its own multi part exporter and with Blender 2.62 we have a full Second Life support again. So the Jass-Magic distribution is no longer needed as fallback solution for Primstar-2 users.
You repeatedly mentioned “both versions of Jass-Magic”. There is only one single version: jass-Magic-1.1.4 I am not sure what the other version of Jass-magic is. Maybe you mean jass-Pub-2.3.8 ? this is the free alternative to Jass-Magic…
Thanks much for the reply. And thanks so much for the time you spent explaining some things to me.
The shoe I’m working with is the “AP Platform Pumps – Stiletto Heel” by Alice Demonia who runs “Alice Project” (though the object owner says The Muse Crew).
I didn’t touch the scaling or stitching in blender. In the sphere tutorial, obviously a very basic example, it doesn’t discuss that aspect.
I will give that a try (and a few other ideas you sparked) and add a reply with results.
Again, thanks very much for your assistance on the map thing and for explaining the jass details.
Hi. I finally figured it out: the textures I had that I thought defined the prim’s shape was actually the texture that defined the prim’s lighting effects. Not surprising that they don’t look right. Thanks for helping me “level up” a bit with this stuff.
Hi im very happy to read such a good info on your blog
Been playing a couple of days to get to know the limits of sculpties and love it!
Can`t wait to build sculpties with normal prims and export entire objects/buildings to SL with the script xD
Will Primstar-2 have any added features that’ll allow easier uv mesh unwrapping?
or will there be any videos on how to unwrap a mesh, in so many ways?
I can make just about anything I want in blender now but it does not matter because I can not unwrap the mesh correctly and so I’m stuck waiting for a tutorial that no one has yet to make or at the very least named it so that its easy to find on youtube, all the videos I have seen on youtube shows you how to unwrap yes, but not in a way that second life will accept.
I’ve been waiting for over a month or so now, is such a video going to ever be made, is there something holding it back? Any bit of info would be great, so I don’t loose interest in making mesh objects.
Kouta, do you mean UV unwrapping for sculpties, or for mesh? SL does accept unwraps for mesh.
You can’t use custom UV unwraps for sculpties, they have to coincide with the sculpt map– a sculptie by definition is an image applied to the surface of a prim. That image just uses color values to define points rather than texture.
You can do a custom UV unwrap on a separate UV layer, and then bake it into a new texture using materials. (In the object data tab of the properties window, create another UV texture besides the one labeled “sculptie.” Unwrap that one however you wish. Then create a material under the materials tab and create a texture for it in the textures tab. There you can assign an image. Set the mapping to UV and select the UV layer that you had created in the object properties tab. Then you can set the active UV layer to sculptie and create a new image. Then when you bake the image [under the render tab, not sculpt map bake] it will bake what you specified as the unwrap onto a texture that will coincide with the sculpt map and work in SL.) …I hope that made sense.
I mean for a mesh, not a sculptie, sculpties I know how to make textures for now but mesh, unless it a box, I can’t seem to figure out out to unwrap it correctly so that it works in second life.
I’ve been lead around in circles trying to find a simple import of sculpt maps into blender, my most worthy find is this. But I use Maya to sculpt my sculpts, there simply isnt an importer for sculpt maps that I can find, so Im planning on using Blender for that, if I can. Primstar 2 supports importing sculpt maps, right? What if that is all I need it for? Is there a (cheaper) version with just an import code?
I think, Maya HAS a scuplty exporter. But i do not know about the state of it. However you can get jass-2 or primstar-1 for free from the Jass-shop in second life. Both products are capable to convert “sculpty compatible” objects to sculptmaps. This means if the objects have a mesh which CAN be converted to sculpties without any modifications on the mesh itself, then the mentioned products can do that (sometimes you must define the seams before it really works)
Currently we have only one version of Primstar-2 and there is no discount available right now.
After upgrading my blender to 2.5 I learned that the primstar 1 I had doesn’t work with it. That made me sad so I went to find a new update. Then to learn that a once free program now cost me, lowly builder, an arm and a leg.
I understand the need to earn a living but now a days it’s hard to pull together enough to spend on SL. To me I feel offend by the price range. I do hope it comes down so that maybe people like me have a chance to sculpt once again with our free program Blender.
Hi.
You can install jass-pub and blender in parallel. So you always can follow this workflow:
- create your sculptie in Jass and save it to a blend file
- switch over to blender 2.5 for modelling
- switch back to jass for baking and exporting
This is entirely free and it works for many users. Primstar-2 adds some nice features, but they are not essentially needed to create sculpted prims. And Primstar-2 will offer much more than sculpted prim when it is fully implemented.
If you need help even for free, then you always find that in the IM Group “Blender Primstar/Jass”. When i am online i also answer as much as i can for free.
It took me a little while to get the L6000 needed to pick this up, But I was badly in need of a sculpting program and after updating had no idea that Blender 2.5 and Primstar1 were incompatible. X3 Fortunately a client who likes my work sprung me the nesessary money and I was able to easilly find the vendor, Pick up the url and install the program and am already following the included tutorials and following along. I paused to send this reply that this is an outstanding job. Even with the bugs I see you guys are following and quashing every one you can and taking feedback and suggestion, Both good and bad. The fact there were templates, tutorials and such included with the purchase as well makes this well worth the pricing. :>
My only concern is I’ve never once paid a red cent into SL, And run a hobby shop and a few sattelite vendors, Not charging more than it takes to build/script the object and cost of uploads. For people in my position, It’s sometimes hard to make the large amounts of lindens nesessary to purchase various tools and kits we use to ply our trades.
Now I’m not saying to lower the price, But if there was some manner of way to implement some manner of payment plan, For developers with NO PAY info who still desire to purchase your product, This would be a boon. I know several like myself with limited RL financial means who also are currently savign like mad to get in the sculpting ring again. X3
Nontheless, You guys are doing a great job, Thanks for the dedication to your product. :>
- DS
A kind client gave me the lindens
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