New Second Life Tool for Blender

Machinimatrix.org is releasing a new tool for use by Second Life™ creators. This one is called Sparkles Tool Box. The promotional video comes as a tutorial for merging UVMaps and shows people how to perform the task manually. Then goes on to show how much time can be saved by using the new tool.

If you already have AvaStar, you may not need the new tool, depending on your workflow. I have Blender 2.71 and avastar-1.1-beta-4_blender-2-70 installed. When I copy the AvaStar model’s lower, upper, and head and combine them I get the UVMap result that Sparkles provides as shown in the video.

But, if you are working with anything other than the AvaStar model, Sparkles is going to be a time saver.

4 thoughts on “New Second Life Tool for Blender

  1. I find this quite weird as 3D Max user. I know Blender isnt Max but… when I join 3 meshes the UVs remains intact. Didnt know that Blender would mess them. Somehow it seems like someone is using a wrong workflow or something.

    • Well, it makes sense to me. Blender doesn’t change the UV’s. It just stacks them within the area of the texture.

      If you make 3 items in 3DS, unwrap them, then join them, how does 3DS know how to join the UV’s?

    • Well, the UVs don’t get messed up. If they have different names, they are just kept separate. Most 3D apps allow the creation of multiple UV maps on a single mesh. It’s not unique to Blender.

      But what Gaia is illustrating is how to merge those 3 (which is simply to name the maps the same name), and back out of having kept them separate if you already did it.

      However, the Video is a bit misleading, as if you do what she shows, and upload it, you’ll have a mess on your hands. The 3 merged maps will all reference the same texture, and so if you applied the head texture, the head would be on the chest and legs as well. Not what you want.

      Instead if you want to merge the 3 parts to one mesh, you need to create 3 material zones, one for each UV region. So then you can apply a head, torso, and legs texture which will be mapped to each orignal UV area.

      Or you could simply just leave the 3 parts separate, and link them inworld. But you definitely wouldn’t want to merge the 3 UV maps, and have only one material. It simply wouldn’t give usable results.

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