I took a class in #SecondLife last night on how to “mesh” an object created with SL’s inworld build tools and take it into #Blender to optimize it and clean it up to re-upload.

The instructor is very nice but… she had no experience with the third-party viewers that can export your own created objects to a Collada file format that Blender can read. She only works with expensive scripted tools in the bog-standard Second Life viewer.

She pretty much balked at my comment late in the class asking “why don’t we export using Firestorm or another viewer? It’s free.” She doesn’t support that and can’t answer questions about how it’s done.

So I went looking for a better answer than “Buy an expensive script and make your ability to create mesh dependent on server uptime.”

And I found it at Beq’s blog – she’s a Firestormviewer developer, and actually improves the SL export/import process herself.

After that, I actually opened up Blender and tinkered with the student project that we made in class last night. Tiny steps.

Those familiar with my blog may recall that our journey together through the art/accident of mesh making began with, and often returns to prim2mesh tools such as Mesh Studio (MS). During a period of particularly poor reliability from the Mesh Studio servers, in 2016, I made a blog post and video explaining how some of the optimizations achieved by Mesh Studio, could, with a little knowledge, be replicated in Blender.

Via: Beq’s techy blog: Cleaning up your act – how a round trip through blender can improve your mesh