This tutorial looks promising, and I like how the presenter uses a really big keystroke display:

I’ve bought 2 Blender books, watched many tutorials, and still can’t retain the basics, I have to start nearly from scratch every time I try it, and then get frustrated too quickly.

I’ve got a project for a friend, and I’m hoping not to have to buy full-perm templates for $L400 for sculpt or mesh. This tutorial is for mesh, but I’d prefer a squashable sculpt once we get to that point. It seems like a good starting point just to try to get something going.

Blender: just downloaded and installed 2.69.0, the latest version
Primstar-2: installed from my download directory for Machinimatrix.org

Need to review: everything, but specifically the steps to make a sculpty in addition to mesh

UPDATE:

Knock me over! I made a snappy mesh fedora, although I don’t know what I’m doing and the poly count was high. Still, the video was helpful, though maybe applying all the subserf modifiers before saving all the low-poly models (uh, what?) wasn’t the way to go.

UPDATED UPDATE!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9rH_ftPRkA

It’s silent, and “slow” as in “for slow learners and senior citizens,” but it clearly shows how to create mesh 3D text, which is part of this project and a future one that may turn out to be pretty neat.

UPDITTY UPDATE UPDATE:

The project was to make the hat for a special event tomorrow night in Second Life at Toot Toot’s Carolina Pub, in the Sifton sim. The event is the Zuehl Duel, and owner (and longtime SL friend) Symmetry Munro needed a party hat to go with the theme. I walked in there the other night wearing my newest texture-change top hat, the Time Warp, and Sym wanted to know if I could make a hat on commission.

It’s finished, I think, and I picked several textures that worked well with the glitchy, not-unwrapped-properly final version. Actually, there might be a finally final version tomorrow, because I messed up the LOD factor on the letter Z. I hope Sym likes it – she did like the prelim version last night with just the one texture, which makes the hat look like an arty hipster hat similar to the Japanese ones I saw. The other textures, with the same settings, all looked interesting if a bit “loud,” but hey, it’s for a party celebrating a loud, raucous, unsettlingly modern style of music. There are 5 textures and a blank white one so the hat can be tinted a plain color.

That’s why the hats are called “Z is for Zeuhl,” because tomorrow night at the Zeuhl Duel, anyone who admits they switch the stream or turn it down because the music was too weird has to wear the hat. I gave Sym Munro a giver box with a big Z on the outside so people can just click it to get the folder. I could jazz it up by adding a large rotating Z and hovertext and… okay. It’s late, time for bed. Here it is, in all its questionable glory.

This texture is one I made on my iPad one day, just goofing around.

This is a goofy Linden Department of Public Works texture designed for some kind of weird mushroom. I like the weird look.

The hat is tinted very pale butter yellow so one texture in the contents is just a plain white, so people can tint. A future version, with a proper UV map, will be a shademap or AO or something, so that the highlights and shadows are in the right places for a tintable option.

I attended a very intensely focused “Intro to Mesh” class at Caledon Oxbridge taught by Wordsmith Jarvinen that included an incredible amount of links, resources, archives of mesh user group meetings, and a vast array of useful information, with citations and source links. I feel a lot more confident that I can improve on this thing, but for now, it’s fine as a PARTAY HAT for the shindig tomorrow. I had already re-learned that an UNRIGGED attachment or object can be scaled and squashed like a sculpty, so there.

Have a look at another event at Toot Toot’s Carolina Pub – my friend Mistletoe Ethaniel turned her evening there into a little vid:

Look at all the fine hats! And soon mine will be one of them!