Blender

Working with #SL Male Shape

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Some of the avatar files have a male shape included. Others appear to NOT have the separate male shape. You can also import a male shape to Blender by exporting one from SL. See Second Life Mesh Clothes Blender 2.6 Setup 2012 Tutorial for information on how to export from Second Life® and details on which shapes are what.

Revealing the Male Shape

This tutorial is about working with Blender 2.63a shape keys to get the male shape. It will also give you some idea of how the Alternate or Redpoly Deformer can work.

If you make petites or giants, getting a copy of the male model that is well weighted is important. If you have tried exporting the male model as a mesh for use in SL, you likely ran into problems. This tutorial will help with exporting the male model.

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Blender Testing Needed

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Gaia Clary has been and is working with the Blender Development team. In Blender 2.64, the likely next release, we will see a revised Collada Export. Gaia is looking for people to help test the revisions while the code is in beta.

Coming Blender 2.64 Release w/New Collada Export

Blender Installs

Using Archive installs will allow you to have multiple independent installs of Blender. See Blender Archive Install for more information on doing a Blender Archive Install.

Downloading Beta Versions

You will find the various beta versions of Blender on a site named GraphicAll.org. Look for a release build designated r47979 or newer.

Discussion

Gaia posted the information in the SL Forum in: Blender Collada news. If you want to provide feedback or ask questions this thread would be a good place. If you find a bug, report it in the Blender.org patch tracker.

Gaia posted a longer and more informative post on Mahinimatrix.org. It gives some of the background on Blender Collada and plans for the future.

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Blender Retopology – Clothing Update

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In April I posted an article on retopologizing (like that is a word – redoing the topology of) mesh objects in Blender. See: #SL Blender Clothes Retopology. In Blender 2.62 I kept having problems getting the method to work. I think it was more me than Blender that was the problem. Whatever… today a decided to figure it out.

#1 Getting Surface Snap to Work - Click to Enlarge

I plan to do more tutorials. One of the things I want to do is work with weight painting to see if I can make skirts that work better than what we have. The current mesh mini-skirts show it all when one sits down. I don’t think it has to be that way. Now I need a well made skirt to work with. So, I’m studying 3D modeling. One of the things modelers deal with is redoing the topology of high polygon into low polygon models. Using the tools built into blender can make changing the topology much easier.

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Blender 2.63a Released – #SL Review

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Blender has a new version out. This is a significant release. It will change how we work. For Second Life® users it is an important release. It is going to change how people build clothes and rigged mesh for Second Life, at least the possibility of change is there. How quickly people will learn to use the features is an unknown.

Two weeks ago 2.63 was released and 2.63a has just popped up.

Blender 2.63a is Out

Blender Modeling

Blender CG Cookie says this, “This is the long-awaited modeling system overhaul that has been in development for many years. Bmesh brings a much less destructive, streamlined modeling workflow that will let you model faster than ever before in Blender.”

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Beginner’s Second Life Mesh Tutorial

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Gaia Clary has 3 new tutorials out from a new series of mesh tutorials for Second Life® users new to mesh. This tutorial series starts with the basics of mesh and defines what vertices, edges, faces, polygons, and quads are. I think it is a great series for anyone considering building with mesh and unfamiliar with 3D modeling.

New Machinimatrix Tutorials

There are 10 videos on the new Mesh Path page at Machinimatrix.org. All but the 3 Coffee Cup tutorials I have seen before. Some use Blender 2.49 and other various versions up to Blender 2.62. The new Coffee Cup series uses 2.62.

It may be subtle but, the Coffee Cup tutorials are about 3D modeling concepts more than they are about using Blender. Additionally, the overall focus is about modeling for Second Life. The other 7 video tutorials take one farther into modeling for Second Life.

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Blender 2.62 Released

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A new release of Blender is out. Domino Marama and Gaia Clary have been working on this version. Also, Juha Mäki-Kanto, a Blender developer, has helped with Collada Export in this version. Domino and Gaia are well known in Second Life. At least those of us that have worked with sculpties and mesh know of them.

Blender for Second Life

Gaia has published an article on the Machinimatrix.org blog: Blender 2.62 supports SL meshes.

If you have not been working with mesh, this means little to you and you haven’t run into the problems of getting mesh from Blender to Second Life. For those of us dealing with the problems this is great news.

So, the effort by Domino, Gaia, and Juha are greatly appreciated.

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Blender Bad Habits

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Hibit Spad posted a link in the SL Forum to an interesting Blender article, Blender Bad Habits. There are 10 bad habits that the author, Light, encourages people to unlearn. I have a few of those habits. I think it is well worth the look. I think the author is mostly on about those making video tutorials … Read more

Blender Collada Plug-in 1.8 Released

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The debate about how Blender will deal with the lack of support and activity from the open source Collada crew is still up in the air. Fortunately for Second Life residents there is a fix available. It comes to us from Gaia Clary in the form of a free Python script. So… here is the story.

New Collada Plug-in for Blender

Hopefully you know Collada is the file format used by Second Life for import of 3D models made in various 3D modeling programs.

What many don’t know is the Collada open source project is not very active. It has great ideals and is arguably the current the best model import/export plan for transferring models between various modeling programs and games. But, there is not a lot of work going on in that open source group.

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