Blender

Second Life Normal Maps & UV

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There is an interesting discussion in the SL Forum about a problem some people have had making Normal Maps for Second Life™. Jake Koronikov opened the thread. Jake had a problem with the normal maps creating a visible seam in the model.

FlickrNormal
Normal Maps from Flickr Search

For instance, the seam between the front and back sides of the avatar leg. Of you were making a manikin and using a normal map on it that seem would become visible as a step on the surface rather than the smooth surface it is supposed to be.  You can see his images of the problem in the thread: Tangent spaced Normal Map seam visible in UV border area. (2017 – The images are gone.)

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AvaStar 2014-18

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I see there is a new video out on AvaStar and the Second Life Avatar. It is a mix of promotional information and ‘How To’.

[youtube kSXChLL7kJM]

The current release candidate of the AvaStar plug in for Blender is still avastar-1-1-1057_blender-2-65.

When talking about what AvaStar plug in does the wording is much better. There are numerous things we can do in Blender to replicate what we see in Second Life. But, several of those things cannot be transferred into Second Life.

AvaStar, since the 1057 candidate, does a pretty good job of showing how what we model in Blender will behave once inside Second Life. It is certainly better than the 1054 version I was previously using.

To see Gaia’s videos on AvaStar and Fitted Mesh visit YouTube – Gaia Clary. To learn more about AvaStar and modeling with it visit Machinimatrix.org.

 

AvaStar Update 2014-17 #2

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Gaia Clary announced today that Avastar RC 1.1.-1054 is out and has a fix for the shape sliders. See her announcement here: Avastar-1.1 Custom Shape Sliders fixed. The article explains what has been going on.

The big change is getting shape sliders in Blender to represent what happens in SL. See the 7 minute video.

[youtube 5hhMEiPjslY]

Another LARGE improvement is you may now use any custom shape. Until version 1054 we needed to model to the default/Ruth shape.

Quoting Gaia, “If you export your mesh with a specific shape slider configuration, then the System will minimize the distortions when you wear exactly the same shape in SL.” This is going to be a big help.

Gaia is hoping this is the change we have all been looking for. I know I have been scratching my head testing avatar, weighting, and weight transfers via Avastar and Blender to figure out how to get the best results. This change may give me better results. Once I have my tests done I’ll make a post.

I’m downloading now…

Blender 2.70a Released

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Today I saw Blender has a new release out. I don’t see any changes, just a lot of bug fixes. But, the page is only current to an f5 build. This one is an f9 build. So, I doubt this version is much different than 2.70. If you are having Blender troubles definitely update.

Blender 2.70a
Blender 2.70a

I strongly recommend downloading and using the ZIP versions over the Install version. Once you unzip look inside the folder and find blender.exe. Right-click it and select pin to Task Bar and you are ready to rock. 

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AvaStar Update 2014-17

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AvaStar is on RC version avastar-1-1-1052_blender-2-65.

Changes:

  • wip: cleaned up the mesh_morph functions for better readability
  • Alter to rest Pose now also works for automatic weight from mBones
  • Removed obsolete print() call from previous commit

Blender: Using Brush Textures in Blender – This is a good texture painting with brushes based on textures.

[youtube 7FobUOuISak]

If you are thinking of using Creative Commons textures as the video shows be sure to read: Linden Lab TOS and Creative Commons.