Blender – Page 2 – Ciaran Laval

January 20, 2012January 20, 2012

Creating Basic Mesh Steps In Blender Using The Array Modifier

This is going to be a very basic tutorial, I am not going to cover super efficiency, texturing, UV Mapping or anything like that, although if you want your steps to be bloody useful, you’ll want to learn those aspects. Nor will I deal with reducing vertices, removing doubles and other tricks, although they’re useful, I’m not a teacher, I work in education but I’m not a teacher! Really what I want to do here is show how useful Mesh can be by demonstrating how to create a basic set of steps that will come in at One prim. Ideally Torley would be doing this with friendly greetings, however I’m not Torley and I’m not friendly!

I should also point out here that if you don’t know how to login to the beta grid, you should learn to do so! The beta grid is great for playing with Mesh as you don’t pay for uploads there, so perfect your Mesh on the beta grid. Details on how to login to the beta grid are here, but please note, you’ll need to pass the Mesh quiz for the beta grid too, even if you’ve passed it for the main grid!

Ok so to start with we need to open Blender, then press the N key so we get the properties up, which will show this menu:

The x, y, z dimensions work just like they do in Second Life, you have to do something to make them ideal, but it’s just like setting them in Second Life. For my steps I’m going to use settings of 0.750, 3.000 and 0.500 for my x,y,z settings, which is a nice size for step, choose whichever settings you think work best but remember this is for just one step.

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January 12, 2012January 12, 2012

Blender To Drop Support For COLLADA? No Need To Panic

The Mesh Forum has a post from Masami Kuramoto pointing to a mailing list discussion, which suggests that Blender, the hugely popular open source 3D creation tool, may soon drop support for COLLADA in release builds, if you’re unsure what any of this means, COLLADA is the format that users export their creations to from within Blender to make it Second Life compatible in terms of Mesh. The opening to the discussion reads:

“Hi,

As everybody noticed current collada importer/exporter is very buggy which seems to make this format almost useless in Blender. And what’s much worse — we don’t actually have developer who maintains this area.

We discussed this already with Campbell and found that OpenCollada itself isn’t actually maintaning — there are only few commits in several months. Ofcourse it doesn’t mean this library is useless and all bug from our tracker is related on that issues, but still.. Maybe the time have come to re-think this importer/exporter (investigate if it’s possible to fix issues in clear way, check if design is good enough — not sure, haven’t touched this code deep myself)?

Here’s our proposal: – Move all collada-related issues into it’s own tracker. Like it was done with BGE, it might help finding volunteer to fix them. Also, people will see that it’s not actually core stuff and that it’s community-supported. – Disable collada in release builds. It’s not useable and only seems to be making artists disappointed.

More optimistic targets would be find volunteer to pick up this stuff who will make it usable (maybe rewritting this stuff from scratch..)

— With best regards, Sergey Sharybin”

This initially looks like a massive blow to Second Life’s Mesh implementation, but in reality it isn’t.

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August 26, 2011August 26, 2011

The Trouble With Mesh – Texturing

Mesh is still making a lot of noise in Second Life circles, but Mesh won’t be for everyone and there are times when the good old prim, the lovely wonderful prim is far more useful for creators and consumers and here I’ll give an example, a door. I decided I’d make a Mesh door, now doors in Second Life generally require some path cutting so that they open nicely, objects rotate on their centre so a door has to be half invisible to work nicely.

Bearing this in mind I created the door in Blender, I decided to do a loop cut so I could have one half alpha textured and the other half with my door texture, so it would be able to perform the spinning on its centre door trick, this didn’t work well but one point regarding all this is texturing, I created my UV Map and ended up with this:

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August 25, 2011August 25, 2011

Blender Noob To Pro Has Handy Tips

What on earth is this shining project on the Jira? Alexa moved my Jira about the region setting that allows or disallows Mesh on a sim not working to the shining project …. a rather disturbing looking project complete with an icon of someone doing a “Here’s Johnny” impression!

Anyway Mesh is the talk of the Second Life related forum and blog crowd at the moment and I’ve been having a very slow dabble with Blender, seriously, can we have bigger days to go with these bigger prims. The tool of choice I’ve decided to use for Mesh is Blender, this is largely because as a hobbyist Blender gives me the most options, I’d love to have Autodesk Maya but unless Autodesk sponsor me that ain’t happening, there’s no way I’m buying such an expensive tool with my artistically challenged hands at the mouse and keyboard, maybe one day if I find I can utilise 3D builds nicely I will. However for those with large pockets and good skills, Maya is highly regarded but it’s not really suitable for noobs.

Anyway I’ve been looking at a few video tutorials on Blender, they are handy but I like to read instructions at times rather than pausing videos and I’ve gone back to a handy resource I looked at a while back when I was considering trying my hand at sculpties.

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August 5, 2011August 5, 2011

Useful Blender Tutorials

Mesh is on the grid, although not officially released, so getting ready for Mesh is an important step, although as I’ve said before the prim is far from dead and Mesh will have problems, especially early doors, with viewer compatibility. I’ve been looking at Mesh and settled on Blender as my tool of choice, which you can read more about here. I’ve chosen Blender because Autodesk Maya, which is a fantastic 3D Modelling tool, is expensive for a noob to 3D modelling like me, it is of course aimed at professionals, which I’m not. Another popular tool is Google Sketchup, but from what I can see the free version is for personal use only, so Blender is the tool that gives me the most options at the best price, in this case nothing but donations should be forthcoming.

First things first, anyone who tells you 3D modelling is easy is talking cack, trust me on this, it’s not easy, inworld building with prims is definitely easier to learn, however Blender is a powerful piece of software from what I can tell, now you may be like me and rush head first in and then bang your head on the wall and then follow a process like this:

Excitedly download the program.
Open it up and stare at a cube.
Look at the menus and think “WTF”.
Read some tutorials and think “WTF”
UV Mapping? “WTF”

However fear not, because I have fearlessly sought out some half decent tutorials which have allowed me to upload a mesh cube with a texture on it … it’s a start! I will share some of the useful tutorials with you.

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