Content Creation Improvement Week 33

The Content Creation Improvement User Group (CCIUG) has been discussing redesign of the Build Panel. Geenz Spad has been bugging me to get people interested in redesign of the panel. I’ve been like, “OMG! This is boring…” Now with the announcement of a materials system project, I understand his motivation. See: Second Life Materials System Announced.

Idea for New Build Panel – Enlarge

To implement the materials system will require design changes to the Build Panel. Whether anyone likes the idea or not the panel is going to change. So, you can either participate in the design process or not. HOWEVER… for all the clueless people that can’t handle change or cope with frustration and fill the forums with rants without participating in the process, remember. We will be pointing to this point in the design process to mock you. :p

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#SL Content Improvement Week 31

Morph Targets and the Mesh Deformer seem to be main topics of interest for this meeting. Neither were on the agenda. We have gone a couple of weeks with no news on the Deformer. Maybe we will hear something from Karl via Metareality’s podcast Thursday.

While Morph Targets and Redpoly’s Collision Bone process are of interest, I don’t see where there is any news about either this week. People have shown up at the Nyx’s Content Creation group and Geenz’s Content Improvement groups asking, but there is no new information. People tend to take that as no progress. It may not mean that, but those doing work on the projects are not being communicative.

Missing Transcripts

If you have been using the wiki, you may have noticed that a problem caused the Lab to restore the wiki from a backup. Several hours of editing were lost. In that loss are some meeting transcripts. The Content Improvement Group has replaced their lost transcripts. So, if you were wondering…

MAINTENANCE – On 2012-7-25 at 17:45 PST we rolled the wiki back 26 hours to the state as of 2012-7-24 15:30 PST. We apologize for any inconvenience.

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Content Creation Improvement User Group Week 29

For short I will refer to the group as CCIIUG or, for me, CIG. This week the meeting touched on Cloth Simulation and discussed more about Morph Targets.

Content Improvement Group

For the first 3 meetings the agenda has been overflowing. The topics also require considerable discussion. So, we have yet to make it completely through an agenda in a single meeting. Attendance has been 20 to 30 people.

Part of the idea is to discuss JIRA items that content creators need fixed. Supposedly the first 15 minutes will be devoted to JIRA items. Asking if anyone has a JIRA to bring up tends to result in a ‘deer in the headlights’ reaction. Eventually we may learn to deal with it.

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Content Improvement Week 28

The second meeting of the new Content Improvement Group (CIG) was this week. The group has not yet been added to the SL User Groups list. You’ll find it in the SL Wiki as: Content Improvement.

Content Improvement Group

Geenz Spad is known in viewer development circles. Geenz facilitates the CIG meeting. With a viewer development background it is probably not surprising that the first topic of discussion was outstanding JIRA items. It isn’t THAT boring…

Using the Linden Lab™ viewers, both main release and development, I kept crashing. I finally switched to the Exodus Development version and managed to stay connected (Exodus is fast). What a pain having to relog 3 times.

The highlights from the meeting follow. There is more on the Deformer debates.

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Content Creation Improvement UG

The new group had its first meeting. I’m bummed to have missed it, but RL fun was calling. They posted their meeting minutes so I can have an idea of what was happening. Some of the interesting things from the meeting follow.

Geenz Spad is chairing the meeting as the facilitator. He states the purpose of the meeting as: the idea is for people to discuss their ideas in a collaborative environment, and if everyone can agree on an idea, that idea will hopefully be made into a proposal at some point for Linden Lab, and prototypes demonstrating that functionality will also eventually be submitted as well.

So, this meeting is an opportunity for fashion and content designers to contribute ideas to enable better content creation and get problems in the design and creation work flow smoothed out.

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New Content Creation Group

Geenz Spad from the Exodus Dev Team is chairing a new user group. Oz Linden will be the liaison between the group and Linden Lab. He may be at some of the meetings. But, since 3PM SLT is 5PM EDT it is late for him and after hours.

You can find the groups home page in the SL Wiki: Content Creation Improvement Informal User Group.

Meetings will be in-world in the Hippotropolis Auditorium, Tuesdays from 3 to 4 PM SLT/PT.

The stated point of the meeting is to find ways to improve rigged mesh and other content. A secondary emphasis is how to improve the viewer to help with content creation.

The first meeting will be a good one to attend.

PS: Squirrely Wrath is accepting donations of nuts… only the food kind. No wackadooles.

 

Second Life Advanced Modeling Blender 2.6 Tutorial 2012

This is the second tutorial in a series. The previous tutorial is: Second Life Mesh Clothes Blender 2.6 Setup 2012 Tutorial. The next tutorial is still a work in progress.

The direction I’m going with tutorial is toward making clothes and weight painting. But, this tutorial will provide information for those building both objects and clothes. I am limiting this tutorial to just the modeling and the tools we need for making the model and the lower poly models we need for Second Life.

Second Life Modeling

#1 – Modeling in Second Life

This is not your standard tutorial. There are loads of modeling tutorials. Making avatar clothes is a special type of 3D modeling. There are a number of tricks to be learned, especially for making Second Life® clothes. I’m going to focus on the things I had a hard time figuring out how to do.

I’ll lay this tutorial out with indexing so you can quickly find the various tricks. I need that because I tend forget a step here and there and need to look it up.

Index

Page 1First Decision – Which shape to use.
Page 1Deformer – What it does.
Page 2Modeling – Start the modeling tools.
Page 2C-Select – A better select tool.
Page 2Redoing Topology Trick – Snap with a good video.
Page 2Snap – Details on using snap.
Page 3Scaling – How to use Alt-S scaling.
Page 3Shrinkwrap – How to use shrinkwrap.
Page 4 Triangles vs Ngons – Getting into Ngons and Bsurface.
Page 4Bsurface – How to use Bsurface.
Page 4Grease Pencil – Needed for Bsurface.
Page 5Reducing Poly Count – Needed for LoD’s.
Page 5Dissolve – Tools for reducing poly count.
Page 5Using Images – How to use pictures and images to guide your modeling.
Page 5How to Model – Some of the Second Life requirements.
Page 6How to Model – The outline.
Page 6Summary

I hate slow paced, rambling video tutorials. I’ve found some that are pretty good. I’ll include those where appropriate. After them I’ll add explanations. Sometimes they leave out the most basic but necessary steps. Even after a couple years of using Blender I’m going: how did they do that?

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