Sansar Creation Bits – More How To…

Sansar Forum… sort of. The big discussion there is how to stop people from making SL-Like-Name-Tags. It is surprising how many people are full on fascist-like in how they want to control others. How do we make everyone do it my way!?!

The forum is pretty badly formatted and awkward to read. The Lab is aware and plans to change it to something more ‘forum-like’. The change is not currently scheduled. (Reference) I mean… it isn’t like they have anything else to do…

Sansar ‘Grid’ Status… They say they’ll post planned outages on this page.

Avatar Skeletons… As of July 6, 2017, there were no models or skeletons available. The Lab just isn’t there yet. (Reference) So, no avatars, no ‘rigged’ clothes. There are, however, Sansar Reference Avatar models.

However, making things that can be attached to the avatar is possible. Examples are here. If your attachments attach in the wrong places read this: Importing avatar accessories – attaches in the wrong place – solution? A 3D Max tutorial is available on YouTube by Jesse Thompson: 3DS Max Avatar Attachment Guide for Sansar.

The official instructions are here: Avatar attachments (accessories). This is what you want to read if you are just trying to figure out how to make an attachment. I had to experiment to see how this works in Blender.

The female avatar has 24,000+ faces in the body and 9,000+ in the head-neck for about 34,000 total. The SL Avatar has about 7,000+.

I imported the Linden Female FBX file using the Blender defaults. That worked well for Blender. The model is supposed to be 5’-4” (162.5cm). I made a cube to visually measure the model in Blender. It shows as 1.65 Blender Units, which I usually consider as meters when working with Second Life™.

Sansar FBX Avatar Imported into Blender – 2017

What size is the model if I take it from Blender into Sansar? I think 1.6cm…

Sansar Import Scale Test – Larger Image

At first, I thought my model was invisible. It was just microscopically small. Look closely in the circle in the lower right of the image. It’s there.

I tried again exporting at 10 times the scale. I could at least see it.

I wanted to get an idea of how it compared to the avatar in Sansar. So, I started building in My New World, very original name… not, saved, triggered a build, and then visited my experience. At the left of the image, you see the 10x model and my current avatar.

Scale 100x – It’s centimeters…

So that worked. The conversion from Blender to Sansar is 100 times.

In the video, you can notice the terms used are a bit different from those used in SL. So, SL specular maps can be inverted (the color change invert, I think) and used as a ROUGHNESS texture/map.

Specular maps are not used in Sansar. (Reference)  Google PBR roughness/metalness workflow for more in-depth information on no specular map texturing. PBR Texture ConversionPBR You Can Do

For some reason, people are having problems with the axis rotation. You can see in the FBX import step I used -Z Forward and +Y up. Seems to work. The Blender axis icon does not reflect that orientation. Z is up and -Y is forward. Don’t over think it. Just make an import pass to see if your editor and model are working well with Sansar. If not, then start thinking.

Normal maps are OpenGL types with a Y+ green channel. Reference

Terrain is modeled in special programs. We are not yet able to upload terrain – 7/7/2017 (Reference)

Polygon counts per scene: Widely Linden recommends keeping the poly count under 3 million and using lots of occluders, things that block the view so you can’t see everything from everywhere. (Reference)

For lights, the Intensity controls the brightness and range of the light. To illuminate something 100m from the light, the range must be set to >100 and intensity set high enough to cast light on it.

Summary

Finding Sansar tutorials on YouTube and in Google seems unusually difficult. Try searching for Jesse’s video using just the terms you would use if you didn’t know his name or the title. Is Google lagging or do they not like Sansar? I would think the Lab did something odd with their page optimizations if Bing and Yahoo hadn’t picked up their Sansar pages.

Also, the videos that Drax, Strawberry, and others make are seldom tagged “tutorial”. Those YouTube tags make videos much easier to find, especially to one of the KEY words is not used in the title. I am bad enough with tags. So, I’m not knocking those peeps, I’m just saying some stuff is harder to find than necessary.

2 thoughts on “Sansar Creation Bits – More How To…

  1. Hello,
    How did you get the faces number for the female avatar ? I get 64038 Faces for the female and 63958 for the male when importing with Blender.

    • I saw that 64k… when I select the body and go into edit the count drops significantly. That lower count is what I used. I think it is a better comparison to mesh bodies. I probably should have dug deeper and explained more. The 64k is the head, eyes, numerous mouth parts, body, and nails.

      The outliner reveals some interesting information.

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