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.

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 for Blender. I think the bad habits were taken from tutorials. I have to say there are WAY more horrible tutorials on YouTube than there are good ones. I came to the conclusion that on YouTube you REALLY need to know the author of a video tutorial. I can go nuts as someone rambles through a tutorial.

A not so bad a habit is the attribution given by Blender.org to Domino and Gaia. See: Blender 2.62: Collada I know who Domino and Gaia are. I haven’t heard of Juha, but congrats and thanks to all three.

A Second Life compatibility option was added for exporting armatures, along with a number of other fixes related to transformations and armatures.

State of the development

There has been much discussion about the state of the Collada integration, it’s not currently working very reliable yet, and this needs to be solved somehow. A new team now started working to improve Collada support to get it more useful for integration with external tools and game engines, improving the existing OpenCollada based I/O module. Members of the team are:

• Domino Marama (development)
• Juha Mäki-Kanto (development)
• Gaia Clary (Organization, Documentation and all the rest)

Other developers interested in joining development are welcome. There’s a wiki page where we collect plans, application support info, test files, and a list of issues to solve.

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.

The rumor that Collada will be dropped from Blender is circulating. See: SL Post: Blender dropping COLLADA support and Blender Lists. It is undecided whether the Blender development team will drop it or not. Everyone strive for No Panic Mode.

Don't Panic

It looks like Collada is the ideal format for use with SL. Several other pay big money modeling programs have Collada export. So, it is unlikely it is going to die out. I have a hard time believing the Blender Team will give up on it. But, those playing with the code say it is a bit of a mess and likely will be rewritten. That could mean we will see it removed and come back latter. But, even that seems unlikely to me… the ‘remove’ part that is.

It looks like Domino Marama is going to make a Python Collada exporter for Blender. For those of us that have purchased Primstar or Avastar it will be free. Or it may end up free to all. Only time will tell us what is finally decided.

I’ve heard someone at the Lab say they had some people working with Blender Org on Collada. So, may be they can or will LL chime in at Blender Org or otherwise help to keep Collada in Blender. We’ll ask but don’t expect a definitive answer. It is obviously in LL’s interest to have Collada export in Blender.

A new version of Blender was released a couple of weeks ago. It has 180 fixes that will be helpful. There are some new features but those are not for anything we do in Second Life. Also, Gaia Clary has a Collada fix rigged mesh over on Machinimatrix.org.

New Blender 2.61

Simple Blender Install

To have multiple versions of Blender installed download and use the Blender Zip Archive. The zip file contains a working copy of Blender in a folder. The folder can be placed anywhere in your file system and work. One unzips the file to a folder, opens the folder, navigates to the blender.exe file, right click and drag it to the desktop or Launch Bar, release, and select Create Shortcut. That’s it. You have an independent install of Blender.

A new release is out. There are reports of some new problems for those importing rigged mesh to Second Life. Some rigged Collada model uploads are failing. The Lindens know the reports and in yesterday’s Mesh Content group it was discussed. So, a fix is already in the works.

New Blender 2.60

3D Audio

This is the big NEW feature for this release. However, it cannot be used for anything in Second Life. The SL viewer has its own sound system. This feature is for those making animated videos and games in Blender. It is an OpenAL thing.

Animation System

This is an improvement to an existing feature in Blender. The user interface has been polished and usability improved. Also Collada integration has been improved; I suppose they mean integration with the animation system. The release information links to a section on Full Collada Animation Support.

The previous part of this tutorial is OpenSim Terrain Tutorial via Blender – Part 1. The previous part is about getting terrain from Second Life and OpenSim into Blender. This part is about exporting  the terrain from Blender 2.59 as a height map image.

Height Maps via Blender Nodes

Terrain

By the time you start this tutorial you should have a completed terrain or at least have a test terrain to try.

Also, you should have a backup of your region. Loading the tutorial can mess up your region. So, a backup is a good idea. In OpenSim I make OAR file backups. (save oar [filename.oar] – save to OpenSim’s working folder. You can specify a path.)

Now is a good time to back up your Blender file too. It is a great idea to work in a copy of the file.

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With the addition of mesh objects we have some nice possibilities for creating new things in Second Life. Ashasekayi made a great 6 part clothing/rigged mesh tutorial. Gaia also makes wonderful tutorials for working with sculpties, going from sculpties to mesh, and mesh. They have the basics pretty well covered. I want to get beyond the basics and find more Blender features. I have found several features that can help with modeling and in particular with making clothes. This article is about one of the Blender features.

Nice Clothes Example

Looking through loads of tutorials I’ve found some I think are pretty good examples of how to use the feature for making clothes look like they are made from real cloth. This is not a complete how to make a top. This is about a feature you can use in making a blouse.

Feature

Cloth Simulation – This is a feature in Blender that I have seldom seen discussed in Second Life circles. I wanted to explore what it can do and try it out. I used Blender 2.59.

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