Blender Materials w/Cycles

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Blender Tutorials
Blender Tutorials

 

 

Many of us in Second Life™ use Blender as our creative tool. Few of us have taken a college course on using Blender, so Blender tutorials are popular. But, it takes a bit of time for the tutorials to catch up with Blender’s latest updates. So, I was happy to come across a rich source of Blender Cycles Materials tutorials. See: Reynante Martinez.

 

 

Plus there are a number of handy tips on using Blender. They can make life with Blender nicer.

 

The main page about Blender Materials is here: Cycles Material Studies. Not all these materials can be used in Second Life. But, it is some pretty impressive materials.

 

Gmail Clean Up

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If you use Gmail as I do, you soon find out that it lacks many of the tools in advanced email applications like Outlook. What you may not know is Gmail has an amazing search feature. This search feature allows one to perform many of the tasks you may think are not possible.

Gmail Search Help
Gmail Search Help – Click for more…

I discovered the hidden features of Gmail Search when I decided to clean out some of 7,000+ emails sitting in my Nalates mailbox. Deleting the 50 or 100 emails displayed per page was looking to be rather tedious. 

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Rigged Mesh Tutorial Sans AvaStar

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I don’t see many tutorials about rigging mesh for OpenSim. But, Hypergrid Business has a new one. See: Quick mesh rigging how-to. Of course the procedure will work for Second Life too. But, this is for ‘rigged’ mesh only, not fitted mesh.

-. InnocEnce .-
-. InnocEnce .- by Perhaps Twine, on Flickr

While they use the Machinimatrix base avatar, you do not need AvaStar. However, not having AvaStar means using the parts of the model included for working with fitted mesh is awkward and not at all intuitive.

I haven’t played in OpenSim since OSGrid crashed. So, I am not sure whether or not we can use fitted mesh in OpenSim. So, this tutorial is more than adequate for most of those making clothes in OpenSim.

Experience Tools & RLV

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Last week the first phase of the Experience Tools feature arrived for Premium Members of Second Life™. I think by now most bloggers have covered the arrival.

Serenade for a Fae
Serenade for a Fae by Aelin Quan, on Flickr

According to Google we are the top three reporting on Experience Tools. There are plenty of links leading to the SL Forum and Wiki. So, finding information on how to use the Tools and what they can do should be easy.

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