So, you want to learn more about how materials – that’s normal maps and specularity maps in addition to the regular textures, which will now be called “diffuse,” will work when Second Life enables the new features.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2H5m9qtGkQ
Well, they’re a way to add eye-popping detail, if you do it right. When the shiny part happens, it’s pretty spectacular.
The tutorial from TheGameCreators.com was my original starting point for a Second Life-specific tut on how to create the extra textures using GIMP that can be used to add depth and shine to objects inworld once the new Materials Project viewer is released (and all the other third party viewers can show the work they’ve already done).
Then I ran across the excellent “Materials for Dummies” entry at Kcreations’ blog at WordPress.com, which was beautifully clear and easy to follow as far as creating a greyscale image to generate a normal map. Those that don’t want to use or learn GIMP can give xNormal a whirl, though the UI looks sort of dopey, like Anakin Skywalker’s Leap Pad (with an early version of the Death Star, apparently).
I’m still hoping that a GIMP plugin called “InsaneBump” which would make the workflow a lot easier will be fixed or clarified for me so that I can get it working, the weird thing is that a discussion thread for it picked up my last blog post on it and reposted the first half there as an unattributed comment. I think somebody got a little SEO-happy trying to get some linky-love, but sucks-boo to them, this blog gets very little traffic! Nyah, nyah!
Anyway, back to tutorials and stuffs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Jdo3ZmtPWk
For now, I’ll be using the normalmap plugin, which I got installed fairly handily from the README.txt, though I’d seen VscorpianC’s tutorial before and had to hunt it down for this post. VscorpianC takes the time to go through all the different settings, especally once in the 3D preview window of the plugin – lots of extra settings in there to try. There are other good ones out there on how to install the plugin, too. She sounds very kind and understanding and has a great channel for Blender users, too.
Anyway, I tried to follow the tut that follows earlier and it seems pretty straightforward, but there’s a catch.
From TheGameCreators.com, by Kravenwolf (his screenshots are hosted by Photobucket so I’m leaving them as hotlinks)
Normal Map Tutorial
First, you’ll need to have the normal map .ddl plugin for GIMP installed. You can find the free download here
1. Open your texture in GIMP, and in the layers tab in the toolbox, right-click on the texture and duplicate the image twice so you have three layers of the same texture. Rename each of these layers ‘normal’, ‘diffuse’, and ‘spec’.
2. Select your spec layer, and go to colors > desaturate, to create your specular map. The brighter the specular layer the glossier the texture will appear with the normal map. With the spec layer selected, you can go to colors > brightness-contrast to darken the layer, which will make the normal map less reflective when using the spec map.
3. Now, you’re set up to create your normal map. With the ‘normal’ layer selected, go to filters > map > normalmap. Everything should be set up fine from default. From here, all you really need to mess around with is the scale. The higher the scale, the ‘bumpier’ the normal map will make your texture. The lower the scale, the ‘flatter’ the normal map will make your texture. Set the scale to 10.0, and click 3D preview.
Before you can view a preview of your texture with its normal map, you need to put the layers in their proper places. Give the diffuse map field the diffuse layer, the gloss map field the specular layer, and check the specular lighting option under the bump mapping field to test your specular level. If the texture is too shiny, cancel the normal map, and select your specular layer and go to colors > brightness-contrast and darken the layer. Reshow the normal map again, and it should be less reflective.
4. When you’re satisfied with the preview, click OK in the main normal map tab and GIMP will create your normal map. Obviously you’ll need to save all three layers individually. The easiest way to do this is to click the eyes next to the layers to toggle their visibility. If the eye is showing next to that layer, that is a visible layer. So to save all three images separately, make only one layer visible at a time, and with it selected save the image as a .tga file (_D, _S, _N). GIMP will ask you to ‘merge visible layers’. Do that and it will only save the layer you toggled visible.
See how rough that normal map looks? This tut states to use the photograph or source image as-is with all the colors left in.
Now she has a Blender focus and is also aimed more at FPS games that take modded content like Doom and Quake and so on – so much more of a “pro game texture artist” point of view. Still, have to admit that her painstaking method with her “heightTemplate” produces a much cleaner normal map. It’s similar to what Kat Fetisov did (who doesn’t seem to be the same as Kat from KatsBits).
GO THERE and study her images, especially the heightTemplate, and the resulting normal map and the final textured image. It’s a much smoother, cleaner, more real representation. She’s got a copyright notice so I won’t copy the images here, but I hope she won’t mind the long quote to get the gist of her method across.
The tools work with 24 bit images using gray scale values to represent height and depth information; black is as far back as you can go and white as far forward – place a blurred white spot on a black background and you create a normal map with a ‘bump’ on it. This means that if we use a ‘mid’ tone gray to represent ‘0’ height/depth, objects that require height (sticking up from a surface) need to have white or light tonal values in them somewhere; objects that sit below a surface need black.
With this in mind look at the image opposite; it’s called a heightTemplate and has been constructed specifically for the creation of a normal map using one of the bump map tools. It differs from the normal gray scale height maps because it doesn’t contain any surface ‘noise’ detailing – scratches, pot marks, etc. – the heightTemplate should only contain basic layout and height/depth information – a ‘block out’ of the physical attributes of the object in question – surface noise and fine details will be added later in game by the heightmap.
I went inworld to the Beta grid yesterday after installing the Materials Project viewer and messed around for a while trying to find a place to work that didn’t return my objects (someday, I need to figure out a “fave work spots” list for Aditi). I had fooled around with the first tut and produced some images that kind of looked right, but didn’t really have the specular one figured out right.
I was trying to emulate the effect I saw in this video, but Kitsune Shan used Mudbox to get her rather spectacular specular and normal maps:
I notice that Kitsune’s
That shiny silver thing she does at the end just by changing one of the settings makes me think that jewelry makers and metalworkers are going to start making stuff that’s only going to be visible to those whose viewer has Advanced Lighting turned on – she demonstrated how the effects vanish for the various textures on her objects when AL is turned off and then back on again.
I messed with it a bit but wasn’t really seeing what all the fuss was about – probably didn’t set enough of a scale to get big crevices on my normal map, and I never did get the specular thing working.
I recently ran across some pretty nice texture-generating methods in a SL class at Builder’s Brewery that results in a texture that’s both bumpy and shiny looking at once that may be workable for those who can’t get advanced lighting working, at least it seemed to work well in class. This was for creating a tileable rock texture:
Create a new 512×512 image (you may want to duplicate it and delete the background)
Go to Filters> Render> >Clouds> Solid noise
Randomize, with a detail of 10-16 or so
Then set your foreground and background colors – use a solid brown (not too dark) and a medium-ish grey.
Go to Colors> Map> Gradient Map
Oooh!
Create a new layer
Go to Filters> Render> Clouds> Solid Noise
Go to Collors> Brightness> Contrast and set contrast to around 40-50 or so.
Hide the top layer by clicking on the eye, then click on the color layer to make it active
Go to Filters> Light and Shadow> Lighting Effects
Go to the Bump Map tab and enable bump mapping. Select the hidden clouds layer as the bump map image
For the materials tab, play with the settings, each between about .20 and .35
For the Lighting tab, try the directional light, move it around, check the intensity.
When satisfied – go to Filters> Map> Make Seamless ( you can also check Tileable way back in the beginning when setting up your clouds, or if you use Plasma).
Save and export in your preferred format. I also ran across a similar method on a GIMP discussion forum, here it is:
Create a new image of any size
Open the Channels dialog box. Select “New Channel”. Name it ‘alpha 1’
Go to Filters–> Render–> Clouds–> Plasma
Go back to the Channels Dialog Box. Select the Red, Green, and Blue channels only
Go to Filters–> Light Effects–> Lighting Effects. Hit the “Light” tab. Under “Type” select “Directional”. Bring the Intensity down to around ‘0.66’
Select the “Bump Map” tab. Check “Enable bump mapping”. Select the item that has ‘alpha 1’ in the “Bumpmap Image” drop down list. Chose “Linear” in the “Curve” drop down list. Hit “OK”
Either way you generate it, the texture looks very rock-like and is shiny – play with the settings until satisfied (Not sure what the environment map setting is, it seems to act like specularity if you don’t load up an RGB image to link to it as in the GIMP docs. Which would make sense given that the Second Life Materials Data page uses “Environment intensity” to describe the alpha section of the Specular map on the table.
2 more videos – not Second Life-related, but good examples of how just adding a bump-map or normal map can increase detail on a 3D model. The original model was probably generated with a high-poly model, then applied on a low poly model.
This last one is almost an hour and a half long, but it’s fascinating; using a technique with a “displacement map,” which looks very much like a greyscale heightmap or bumpmap, a simple torus is turned into a menacing alien spaceship – all the “modeling” is done with a single square texture (there may be more to it than that, it’s an .exr file according to the forum info linked at YouTube).
Oh, THIS is a nice tutorial for Materials – using xNormal, though I’ll probably stick with the normalmap plugin in GIMP for now. Because I have to agree, the xNormal interface is as if a million user interface designers cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
Or, it’s as if young Anakin Skywalker was handed a LeapPad to design his pod racer on, and then pulled it out to tweak a design on the Death Star decades later.
UPDATE: I’ve found slightly less opaque instructions and gotten the InsaneBump plugin working for GIMP (and also the fully InsaneBump program working, but it’s really old).
I’ll start a new post because I’ve since found yet another tool for quickly generating different kinds of maps for texturing, Knald.
This might be worth installing the Materials Viewer to test in a SSB-enabled region. I’m usually well behind the curve on changes with Second Life updates and enhancements – see recent posts about trying to learn Blender years after sculpts (and later mesh) were introduced. But the Materials project, which I’ve been folllowing via blogs like Nalates‘ and others, really seems like a game-changer (heh) and people who like to make stuff for fun or virtual profit might need to step up their skillz a bit.
GIMP Plugin Registry – Insane Bump (based on Insane Bump, a free alternative to Crazy Bump)
This is a normal map generator from a single image, originally created by omaremad. Load a single layer picture, then choose filters/map/insanebump…, tweak the details, then hit OK. The normal/height/ambient/specular maps for the picture will be created within the folder where the original picture resides.
It’s recently updated (May 2013) and it’s for GIMP 2.8, and it’s based on a free alternative to Crazy Bump, which costs $99USD for a personal license. Crazy Bump is demoed in this video that Nalates featured in a preview of the coming Materials project for Second Life that uses Server Side Baking.
The process for generating 3 or 4 additional textures/materials in GIMP is pretty tedious, and I think it can also be done in Blender, but the learning curve there is steep. This might be really useful for Second Life texture artists, and other texture artists in the gaming community.
It looks good, but it doesn’t work. See below, I’m hoping that a fix will be posted or found.
This is a plugin for GIMP version 2.8.x. It allows you to convert images into RGB normal maps for use in per-pixel lighting applications. The goal is to completely clone NVIDIA’s photoshop plugin, with a few new useful features.
Features
Filters. These include the filters found in the NVIDIA plugin (4 sample, 3×3, 5×5, 7×7 and 9×9) with the addition of 3×3 and 5×5 Sobel and Prewitt edge detection filters (yields the best results IMO).
Post-filtering normal scaling
Wrap mode. This allows the filters to wrap around the image. Useful for creating normalmaps from a tiling bumpmap.
Height source. Use an average of the RGB components or the alpha channel as the height source in the generation of the normals.
Alpha result. For RGBA images, the alpha channel can either remain unchanged, have the height used to generate the normal written to it, inverse height, be replaced by either 0 or 1, the inverse of the alpha channel’s current value or use the value of a grayscale image.
Conversion options including “Normalize only” for renormalizing bumpmaps.
“Convert to height” conversion option to reclaim height maps from normal maps (use in tandem with the Invert X and Invert Y options).
DU/DV map creation (8 and 16 bit, signed or unsigned)
Dynamic 2D preview in the interactive dialog.
Dynamic 3D preview window using OpenGL to view the normal map applied to a lit 3D mesh. Here are some of it’s features:
View normal map applied to a number of 3D meshes (quad, cube, sphere, torus and teapot)
Shading is done with a number of bump mapping techniques (dot3, parallax, parallax occlusion and relief mapping) using the OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL)
Full scene navigation controls (Rotate the object, light or scene)
Fullscreen viewing support
Specular lighting toggle with exponent slider
Ability to choose ambient, diffuse and specular light colors
UV coordinate scaling
I got Normalmap working just fine, no problems. But eeeeeesh, InsaneBump is a Python script, it’s a little more involved to get it working. I checked check how to install Python plugins and it still isn’t working. I think the original poster left in calls to programs or plugins that aren’t standard installs, and it seems to be calling for ImageMagic to be installed in the C:/ directory.
I found a separate page with an OP calling for a step-by-step process to get it working on her 32-bit system, and of course, no step-by-step, just a confusing conversation between the original plugin poster and a helpful person who posted pretty technical fixes that I didn’t understand.
01. I have searched and read all the general help items relating to the installation of plugins on a Windows XP platform. I have placed the InsaneBump.txt file in the proper directory, correctly changing its file type suffix to .py.
02. Gimp (2.8.4) launches and appears to run correctly in all respects. The menu hierarchy Filters>Maps however does not expose a plugin named InsaneBump. What is exposed is named BumpMap and does not, as far as I can tell, provide the functionality that you have supposedly ported from the original standalone program posted by Omar.
03. So, please bear with me. The Messie-posted instructions concerning installation are extremely terse, which may be appropriate if you assume that all users are not only long-time GIMP users, but probably Python developers. For someone who is not in that category, but would really like to be able to use your valuable plugin, please provide precise instructions which, if necessary, but I cannot tell, may involve a prerequisite requirement to install any other Python libraries and/or tools which are not installed by a fresh install of GIMP 2.4 itself, I will need to download and install in order to successfully access your code.
To be clear, I would like instructions that have nothing to do with Linux, nothing to do with 64-bit versions of Windows, just the correct steps for a long-lived, very solid 32-bit windows environment on which Python development does not take place, so no assumptions concerning anything not installed by GIMP will succeed.
Thank you.
Polite, firm, and yet carrying a big stick ready to thump anyone that doesn’t give a clear, non-technical answer. They’re still using Win XP and GIMP 2.4, so I wish them luck. The answer that came back was no help, it was something about fixing indents. My in-house geek looked at it and said “I hate Python,” then tried to install the missing stuff. Then we looked at it not working for a while, and decided it was a good time to get some lunch. So we went and got something to eat.
Please, can’t somebody just fix the plugin so that it installs itself rather than editing files and so on?
I’ve tried editing it, my in-house geek attempted to edit it, we installed ImageMagick (I seem to remember that’s a really old program) and made sure that the other program – “vinvert” or something – was already installed in 2.8. I’ll try rebooting, and as a last resort, check back at the plugins page and the “step-by-step” page to see if there’s been any update.
It’s hard to find a nice, antique-looking blog theme, whether to use on your own self-hosted blog, or on a hosted site like WordPress.com. I’ve cobbled together a few bits over the years, but needed something better to adapt in GIMP as a text-separator. I ended up modifying one I had, and overlaying a nicer one on top of it from Old Book Illustrations. There are some wonderful antique ornaments there, and they even have a meme generator:
This site is dedicated to providing our visitors with a wide range of illustrations scanned from old books. Most of these vintage pictures are originally wood engravings or woodcuts, fewer are etchings or metal engravings; if you are looking for nineteenth century or victorian clipart, you might just find it here. You are welcome to use our pictures in your school or educational projects, as well as in your artwork or in your scrapbook; you can also use them to make CD sleeves, banners, websites, etc.
According to the copyright laws in many countries, all illustrations in our galleries belong to the public domain and as such, they are free to use for personal and commercial purpose. They are suitable, for instance, for graphic designers to use, without the need of any prior authorization. For more details, please see our terms of use.
A high resolution set (approximately 2000 px in width or height, depending on the format) containing ten pictures, is available for download as a zip file. Its content changes every now and then.
Here I am, on my standalone grid Haleakaloha, which isn’t very interesting and isn’t open for visitors, and up until yesterday, it wasn’t working very well because of a texture-reloading bug. Also, I’ve been struggling with Blender again, trying to learn it and not get discouraged.
Yesterday, SUCCESS, after getting some help, I installed an update that fixed my Open Sim grid. Today, SUCCESS, I made a blob. You may not think this is a big deal, and it’s a badly textured blob, but I made it, and I figured out what I wasn’t doing right that made it turn itself inside out (it was something called “flipped normals,” which will make the cool kids smirk knowingly). Tomorrow, SUCCESS at something, even if it’s rearranging the virtual furniture. I am unstoppable now, eh.
I bought a couple of books, and I’ve downloaded some tutorials to make a decent effort to finally teach myself Blender, and also Gimp, and also Open Sim/New World Studio. In the past, I’d progressed to the point where I’d made a mesh object that’s supposed to be a big rock, but got bogged down in trying to texture it correctly. Modeling it wasn’t difficult; where I got freaked out was in the tangle of steps to add a material, ASSIGN it, add or create or load a texture, and somehow get it all on the actual object, in the Blender window, and then to have it show up to the party when uploaded to my grid. I’ve watched many tutorial videos, and what I really need is to make a fricking CHECKLIST of steps and settings, that I can refer to, because so many of the important tips are buried in videos that I don’t want to track down and re-watch yet again.
I’ve gathered the most recent “keyboard shortcuts” I could find (one that’s specific to Blender 2.5, and one that appears to be more recent from an online book, and there’s good info at Kat’s Bits, too). The online book, which I loaded into Dropbox so I could keep it handy on my iPad, is called “Blender Basics: Classroom Tutorial, 4th Edition.” Oh, and here’s another online book I’ll stick in Dropbox: Blender 3D: From N00b to Pro. Finally, I had worked through almost an entire class curriculum via videos at Grylllus.net called “Blender 3D Design,”and that one can downloaded/subscribed via iTunes with an app from Tufts University. In looking at the course chapter headings at Gryllus.net, I see that, yep, I bogged down in the section covering materials and texturing. Insert favorite quaint anachronistic blasphemous oath at will. And that is where I’ll stop in Blender tonight, too – I can’t remember how to get from assigned material and loaded texture to a textured object – remembered to try to UV unwrap, then got lost, but at least was able to paint (crudely) some shading. Meh, tomorrow. I think I needed to save the image, do some stuff with baking shadows, and Gawd knows what all to apply it.
Gathering all these links in one place makes me feel like… yes, I’ve been muddling along for a long time, but I really have tried. And I’ll try to get some kind of step-by-step checklist pulled together this week.
But at least I feel less foggy and angry about it; I’ve given up on trying to attend classes in Second Life from a particular instructor who shall remain nameless, because every time I attend one of [Redacted]’s classes, I end up either quitting in a rage, or having some normal interruption prevent me from getting the concept, or getting it down in written notes clearly. No notes are provided by the instructor, so if you’re not present, on voice, and paying close attention, you’re screwed. I just couldn’t learn like that, but it’s time I stopped blaming myself and just teach myself the way that works best for me. I will say that anytime I was lucky enough to catch one of Eleanora (Ele) Newell’s classes at Builder’s Brewery, I did make progress, but didn’t retain much because the classes I needed are offered infrequently. I’ve got some of her “class in a box” things in my Second Life inventory; even though they point to the older version of Blender, I could still use them for journeyman practice. She also spends a LOT of time in the official Blender/Primstar support groups, answering questions. So props to Ele! I’m her worst student, but I appreciate her efforts.
Anyway. The blob what I made. With Blender. Textured with a tileable rock texture what I made, created from a photo what I took.
As Mr B, the Gentleman Rhymer says at the end of many of his quaint televisual offerings, “I thank you.” MUSICAL INTERLUDE!
The other thing that I wasn’t doing right was kind of hard to figure out; I recently upgraded to Blender 2.67, and when refreshing my memory on the process of creating a simple sculptie, I ran across this at Machinimatrix on their Primstar-0 page:
Short Instructions
Preliminaries:
Copy this blend file to a convenient place (for example to your Home folder or to your Desktop) and if possible make it read only, so that you never make unintentional changes to the templates!
Critical: Blender 2.5/2.6 uses an advanced color management by default. While this is a good thing for texturing, it will break the Sculpt-Map bake. Hence you must disable color management for Sculpt-Map bakes. You do this as follows:
go to the render properties menu
locate the shading tab
uncheck “Color Managementâ€
It’s a measure of my own cluelessness that following these very simple instructions completely baffled me; for one thing, where is the render properties menu, and once you find it, the shading “tab” (it’s under a twisty arrow) didn’t have a box marked “Color Management” to uncheck. I looked at , Blender.org docs for 2.64 color management, not that helpful and much too technical (and outdated). Still, I started to get a vague idea of where to look and what to look for.
Two years ago, it was a simple matter of unticking a box marked, wait for it, “Color Management.” Most of the rest of the process on that page is handled by the Primstar scripts I paid for 2 1/2 years ago (I know, I checked my customer download inventory just now). But there are a still couple of settings on that I should double check, they may be important later.
It took me a day and a half of occasional Googling around to figure out that in Blender 2.67, the relevant section is this:
I’m still not entirely sure how, but changing the device setting to “None” worked for me. Also, the bigger problem was “flipped normals,” meaning the faces I was trying to bake the UV map from were facing inward instead of outward, because something was checked that should have been unchecked.
Ugh, sorry about the teeny type. Here’s another helpful tip I ran across, this is on the Object Data tab:
There. Notice how in this post I’m also brushing up on somewhat rusty Gimp skillz (another excellent program which also got upgraded to the latest stable version lately). I’ve been offline a lot the last few months, trying to deal with some RSI problems which are now on the mend. My next major hardware purchase is probably going to be a decent trackball mouse.
So today after my moment of angelic choral zen when whatever I did made my blob sculpt map go from something that was either completely black, or a rainbow sculptmap with a black background, to this:
I knew it was right, it looked like the ones I’d managed to make last year. At that time, I’d even managed to set up Blender to generate the alpha mask automatically, which is not only a security feature, but is damn handy if you don’t have a sculpty rezzer on your texture organizer.
I’m feeling much, much better about my progress. However, we won’t talk just yet about my complete lack of modeling skills, that’s next on my List of Lists. I can kind of remember some of the basics – S, G, R for scale, grab, rotate. I even remember E for extrude and W for the “specials” menu… and something about how to box model, add an edge loop… and how to load up a background reference image, which helped when I was working actively on a simple mesh rock slab that’s meant to be stuck in the Spirit River in Steelhead St Helens eventually (I’m obsessed with geology, apparently).
And, oh God, every time I try to figure out materials and texturing… well, I’ve been here, too. Looking for just such a step by step guide, that is NOT a series of videos, which neither I nor the OP got.
All this agita over a blob/blog… anyway, getting over these difficulties gives me the confidence to tackle real modeling, like an interesting old-fashioned candlestick in a hurricane glass I spotted on an aetheric televisual show about the U.S. Constitution. I’m not interested in making rigged clothing in Blender (though shoes might be interesting, since the shoes I have in Open Sim are pretty crap). I don’t know if I’ll invest in Avastar, more scripts from Machinimatrix.org that make the process of setting up rigging and shapes and whatnot easier. I’ve dabbled with Qavimator and could certainly use my private island(s) as a convenient way to test uploaded animations, since I tend to get distracted just trying to find a place to be on the Second Life test grid.
Yeah, yeah. I’ve been writing this post, off and on, all day. And updating the now-working main blog with a better theme layout, and goofing around adding widgets from LibraryThing (I’ll probably add the Goodreads widget here, though it leads to a totally different reality).
IT ALL BEGINS WITH A BOX, they say, or in this case, with a mesh cube, some books, and a good graphics card.
My main blog is and ever shall be** at www.lelanicarver.com. But occasionally, I’ll repost things here – today, for example, our webserver was down and I needed to blog about my recent struggles with Blender, with pictures so I can remember what I did to get it working.
Sometimes, I’ll post stuff about GIMP here, or my budding Open Sim build Haleakaloha, or some new product I’ve listed at the Second Life Marketplace. More often, I may be posting reference images or background articles when I’m trying to figure something out for a problem or project I’m working on. I’ve got a Pinterest thing that’s got some cool stuff in it.
The theme isn’t really my favorite, but I’m somewhat familiar with how it works. Why can’t they have a nice Victorian or Steampunk option? I’ll stick with the current theme on my main blog, Weaver II, which is pretty customizable.
In other “hello virtual worlds” news, I got my standalone grid “Haleakaloha” set up again. I use New World Studio‘s
Community edition, although I’ve paid for the Licensed addition for the year to show my support for the project. The paid version allows one to easily connect a grid to the Net and either hypergrid from it to other grids, or open it to the public. I’m not going to be doing that, but a standalone makes a great “test bed” for uploading textures, meshes, and even animations. I’d had some problems since upgrading from the original version – the developer, Olivier Battini, recently resumed work on the project and since then has been working steadily on coding the two versions, updating the new website and forum, staying active on the Facebook page and Google+ community, and updating the blog, too. I don’t know if I have things working completely correctly and by the book, as I bobbled the original installation and was on a buggy early version, but the Community Edition is working now as of update 0006 and the Licensed Edition is supposed to be bundled with it, but I still have the old, buggy, unbundled files in a separate folder.
I’ll probably have to visit the support forum for that later, but it’s not a deal breaker, I can work with it, and Olivier is very responsive to problems (and so are helpful moderators on the Facebook page and forum).
It’s late now, but it’s been a surprisingly productive day; got a footrest, somehow broke the wooden keyboard tray on my desk (oh well! IT WAS CRAP ANYWAY), packed up some stuff to donate to a RL charity, tidied a few things (I’m off this work for my RL job).
I learned some stuffs, and I blogged some stuffs, and I heard the angels sing, for one brief, shining moment. Onward.
*it’ll be used as a backup, for project research, and to stash assets and useful links.
**as a long-time Star Trek fan, I reserve the right to insert the occasional sly reference. JJ Abrams got nothin’ on me.
First things first, if you’re in SL just to have fun, do that! Not everyone is building interactive environments for RP sims. Not everyone considers themselves a “professional” content creator, making a living selling avatar accessories on the marketplace. A lot of people just want to have fun slapping prims together and seeing what they can do.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
By all means read this post. If you learn something useful, fantastic! But don’t fret if my recommendations are outside your abilities.
This is primarily aimed at content creators, sim builders, and people who are comfortable slapping prims together, working with sculpts and mesh, and who want to get more out of SL.
Finally, I’m sure many of you have seen me talk about all of these things before. I’m also sure there’s many who haven’t. If even one person learns something new, then it’s worth sharing tips like these.
Penny is very generous with her time and tips, and they are well worth reading whether you make stuff, or just like to enjoy well-made stuff other people make.
Here’s something that I myself am guilty of: the store-logo textured root prim:
Then there’s one more texture! Inside my head is a box with a 512×512 Wasabi Pills store logo on it. Neither the prim nor the texture are necessary, both are entirely hidden yet place just as much extra rendering burden on the videocards of everyone who can see me as if it were a giant box on my head.
People love those store logo root prims. I’m guilty of it, too. back when I was making avatar accessories before I got all efficiency con(s)cious. They’re unecessary and just add to the pile of things SL is trying to make your hardware render.
10:08 AM 5/22/2013 Lelani Carver blushes and resolves to remove textures from invizibul root prims.
Here I am, on my standalone grid Haleakaloha, which isn’t very interesting and isn’t open for visitors, and up until yesterday, it wasn’t working very well because of a texture-reloading bug. Also, I’ve been struggling with Blender again, trying to learn it and not get discouraged.
Yesterday, SUCCESS, after getting some help, I installed an update that fixed my Open Sim grid. Today, SUCCESS, I made a blob. You may not think this is a big deal, and it’s a badly textured blob, but I made it, and I figured out what I wasn’t doing right that made it turn itself inside out (it was something called “flipped normals,” which will make the cool kids smirk knowingly). Tomorrow, SUCCESS at something, even if it’s rearranging the virtual furniture. I am unstoppable now, eh.
I bought a couple of books, and I’ve downloaded some tutorials to make a decent effort to finally teach myself Blender, and also Gimp, and also Open Sim/New World Studio. In the past, I’d progressed to the point where I’d made a mesh object that’s supposed to be a big rock, but got bogged down in trying to texture it correctly. Modeling it wasn’t difficult; where I got freaked out was in the tangle of steps to add a material, ASSIGN it, add or create or load a texture, and somehow get it all on the actual object, in the Blender window, and then to have it show up to the party when uploaded to my grid. I’ve watched many tutorial videos, and what I really need is to make a fricking CHECKLIST of steps and settings, that I can refer to, because so many of the important tips are buried in videos that I don’t want to track down and re-watch yet again.
I’ve gathered the most recent “keyboard shortcuts” I could find (one that’s specific to Blender 2.5, and one that appears to be more recent from an online book, and there’s good info at Kat’s Bits, too). The online book, which I loaded into Dropbox so I could keep it handy on my iPad, is called “Blender Basics: Classroom Tutorial, 4th Edition.” Oh, and here’s another online book I’ll stick in Dropbox: Blender 3D: From N00b to Pro. Finally, I had worked through almost an entire class curriculum via videos at Grylllus.net called “Blender 3D Design,”and that one can downloaded/subscribed via iTunes with an app from Tufts University. In looking at the course chapter headings at Gryllus.net, I see that, yep, I bogged down in the section covering materials and texturing. Insert favorite quaint anachronistic blasphemous oath at will. And that is where I’ll stop in Blender tonight, too – I can’t remember how to get from assigned material and loaded texture to a textured object – remembered to try to UV unwrap, then got lost, but at least was able to paint (crudely) some shading. Meh, tomorrow. I think I needed to save the image, do some stuff with baking shadows, and Gawd knows what all to apply it.
Gathering all these links in one place makes me feel like… yes, I’ve been muddling along for a long time, but I really have tried. And I’ll try to get some kind of step-by-step checklist pulled together this week.
But at least I feel less foggy and angry about it; I’ve given up on trying to attend classes in Second Life from a particular instructor who shall remain nameless, because every time I attend one of [Redacted]’s classes, I end up either quitting in a rage, or having some normal interruption prevent me from getting the concept, or getting it down in written notes clearly. No notes are provided by the instructor, so if you’re not present, on voice, and paying close attention, you’re screwed. I just couldn’t learn like that, but it’s time I stopped blaming myself and just teach myself the way that works best for me. I will say that anytime I was lucky enough to catch one of Eleanora (Ele) Newell’s classes at Builder’s Brewery, I did make progress, but didn’t retain much because the classes I needed are offered infrequently. I’ve got some of her “class in a box” things in my Second Life inventory; even though they point to the older version of Blender, I could still use them for journeyman practice. She also spends a LOT of time in the official Blender/Primstar support groups, answering questions. So props to Ele! I’m her worst student, but I appreciate her efforts.
Anyway. The blob what I made. With Blender. Textured with a tileable rock texture what I made, created from a photo what I took.
As Mr B, the Gentleman Rhymer says at the end of many of his quaint televisual offerings, “I thank you.” MUSICAL INTERLUDE!
The other thing that I wasn’t doing right was kind of hard to figure out; I recently upgraded to Blender 2.67, and when refreshing my memory on the process of creating a simple sculptie, I ran across this at Machinimatrix on their Primstar-0 page:
Short Instructions
Preliminaries:
Copy this blend file to a convenient place (for example to your Home folder or to your Desktop) and if possible make it read only, so that you never make unintentional changes to the templates!
Critical: Blender 2.5/2.6 uses an advanced color management by default. While this is a good thing for texturing, it will break the Sculpt-Map bake. Hence you must disable color management for Sculpt-Map bakes. You do this as follows:
go to the render properties menu
locate the shading tab
uncheck “Color Management”
It’s a measure of my own cluelessness that following these very simple instructions completely baffled me; for one thing, where is the render properties menu, and once you find it, the shading “tab” (it’s under a twisty arrow) didn’t have a box marked “Color Management” to uncheck. I looked at , Blender.org docs for 2.64 color management, not that helpful and much too technical (and outdated). Still, I started to get a vague idea of where to look and what to look for.
Two years ago, it was a simple matter of unticking a box marked, wait for it, “Color Management.” Most of the rest of the process on that page is handled by the Primstar scripts I paid for 2 1/2 years ago (I know, I checked my customer download inventory just now). But there are a still couple of settings on that I should double check, they may be important later.
It took me a day and a half of occasional Googling around to figure out that in Blender 2.67, the relevant section is this:
I’m still not entirely sure how, but changing the device setting to “None” worked for me. Also, the bigger problem was “flipped normals,” meaning the faces I was trying to bake the UV map from were facing inward instead of outward, because something was checked that should have been unchecked.
Ugh, sorry about the teeny type. Here’s another helpful tip I ran across, this is on the Object Data tab:
There. Notice how in this post I’m also brushing up on somewhat rusty Gimp skillz (another excellent program which also got upgraded to the latest stable version lately). I’ve been offline a lot the last few months, trying to deal with some RSI problems which are now on the mend. My next major hardware purchase is probably going to be a decent trackball mouse.
So today after my moment of angelic choral zen when whatever I did made my blob sculpt map go from something that was either completely black, or a rainbow sculptmap with a black background, to this:
I knew it was right, it looked like the ones I’d managed to make last year. At that time, I’d even managed to set up Blender to generate the alpha mask automatically, which is not only a security feature, but is damn handy if you don’t have a sculpty rezzer on your texture organizer.
I’m feeling much, much better about my progress. However, we won’t talk just yet about my complete lack of modeling skills, that’s next on my List of Lists. I can kind of remember some of the basics – S, G, R for scale, grab, rotate. I even remember E for extrude and W for the “specials” menu… and something about how to box model, add an edge loop… and how to load up a background reference image, which helped when I was working actively on a simple mesh rock slab that’s meant to be stuck in the Spirit River in Steelhead St Helens eventually (I’m obsessed with geology, apparently).
And, oh God, every time I try to figure out materials and texturing… well, I’ve been here, too. Looking for just such a step by step guide, that is NOT a series of videos, which neither I nor the OP got.
All this agita over a blob/blog… anyway, getting over these difficulties gives me the confidence to tackle real modeling, like an interesting old-fashioned candlestick in a hurricane glass I spotted on an aetheric televisual show about the U.S. Constitution. I’m not interested in making rigged clothing in Blender (though shoes might be interesting, since the shoes I have in Open Sim are pretty crap). I don’t know if I’ll invest in Avastar, more scripts from Machinimatrix.org that make the process of setting up rigging and shapes and whatnot easier. I’ve dabbled with Qavimator and could certainly use my private island(s) as a convenient way to test uploaded animations, since I tend to get distracted just trying to find a place to be on the Second Life test grid.
Yeah, yeah. I’ve been writing this post, off and on, all day. And updating the now-working main blog with a better theme layout, and goofing around adding widgets from LibraryThing (I’ll probably add the Goodreads widget here, though it leads to a totally different reality).
IT ALL BEGINS WITH A BOX, they say, or in this case, with a mesh cube, some books, and a good graphics card.
My main blog is and ever shall be* at www.lelanicarver.com. But occasionally, I’ll repost things here – today, for example, our webserver was down and I needed to blog about my recent struggles with Blender, with pictures so I can remember what I did to get it working.
Sometimes, I’ll post stuff about GIMP here, or my budding Open Sim build Haleakaloha, or some new product I’ve listed at the Second Life Marketplace. More often, I may be posting reference images or background articles when I’m trying to figure something out for a problem or project I’m working on. I’ve got a Pinterest thing that’s got some cool stuff in it.
The theme isn’t really my favorite, but I’m somewhat familiar with how it works. Why can’t they have a nice Victorian or Steampunk option? I’ll stick with the current theme on my main blog, Weaver II, which is pretty customizable.
In other “hello virtual worlds” news, I got my standalone grid “Haleakaloha” set up again. I use New World Studio‘s
Community edition, although I’ve paid for the Licensed addition for the year to show my support for the project. The paid version allows one to easily connect a grid to the Net and either hypergrid from it to other grids, or open it to the public. I’m not going to be doing that, but a standalone makes a great “test bed” for uploading textures, meshes, and even animations. I’d had some problems since upgrading from the original version – the developer, Olivier Battini, recently resumed work on the project and since then has been working steadily on coding the two versions, updating the new website and forum, staying active on the Facebook page and Google+ community, and updating the blog, too. I don’t know if I have things working completely correctly and by the book, as I bobbled the original installation and was on a buggy early version, but the Community Edition is working now as of update 0006 and the Licensed Edition is supposed to be bundled with it, but I still have the old, buggy, unbundled files in a separate folder.
I’ll probably have to visit the support forum for that later, but it’s not a deal breaker, I can work with it, and Olivier is very responsive to problems (and so are helpful moderators on the Facebook page and forum).
It’s late now, but it’s been a surprisingly productive day; got a footrest, somehow broke the wooden keyboard tray on my desk (oh well! IT WAS CRAP ANYWAY), packed up some stuff to donate to a RL charity, tidied a few things (I’m off this work for my RL job).
I learned some stuffs, and I blogged some stuffs, and I heard the angels sing, for one brief, shining moment. Onward.
*as a long-time Star Trek fan, I reserve the right to insert the occasional sly reference. JJ Abrams got nothin’ on me.
#unfunsports Batmitten (I actually played this one night in a bat-infested mountain cabin, it's a vigorous yet terrifying sport) ->
Well, that's it for http://t.co/pboDvNphYA and Linda Kellie's content – but a number of sites will mirror much (or all?) of the assets ->
@LizzieGudkov Thanks for the RT. It seems to be happening with Firestorm, Imprudence, & Singularity, I got a little delete happy. in reply to LizzieGudkov->
Need help with #Opensim#NewWorldStudio… I keep getting constant "missing baked texture" errors in the console. Whut? ->
