More Blender advice needed, please

Hi all - need some more assistance to steer me right.
I'm now running Blender 2.48a with Domino's scripts installed and everything appears to be functioning correctly.
My current puzzlements are as follows:

1) Is there any straightforward way to achieve sharp corners on part of a sculpty while the remainder is smoothed? Is the Crease option of any use or is it simply (hah!) a case of squishing up the vertices to have lots of edges along the desired corner?

2) I think I'm getting the hang of the baking sculpties process but how do I wipe and start over if I've done it wrong - a fairly frequent matter. I don't seem to be able to start a fresh sculpty UV bake from the dropdown Render menu - the way I'm doing it is to reload the sculpty file and that can get tedious. Sorry if I'm missing something obvious.

3) I'm now wrestling with the rendering process and having heaped praise in the past on Domino for his scripting I'm now going to do likewise for Gaia and the tutorials on Machinimatrix website.
However............... there's always a but, isn't there? I seem to be screwing up somewhere. I've been diligently following the 'Texturizing sculpties with multiple images' and have managed to get my version of the hard hat tutorial to work but the object I'm presently working on keeps reporting a problem. The sculptie was baked a few days back but now I've come back to try and add a texture to it. I get most of the way through and can consolidate the various bits I've unwrapped into one image and think I'm doing the subsequent material/texture linking correctly. However when I go to bake the 'texture only' I keep getting an error report saying that there are no images found to bake to.
Anyone got any suggestions where I'm going wrong?

Thanks again from a slow learner.

Drifter

Use a subsurf modifier instead of multires if you want to use crease. The development scripts have this as an option when creating sculpties.

http://dominodesigns.info/downloads/tutorials/blender/flask.avi has an example of this technique



You can alter the sculptie settings on the logic panel (pacman icon), or just delete the LL_* variables there and on next bake the script will ask you for the settings again.



Make sure you assign an image on multires level 1 to the UV layer you want to bake to.

Dom,
Once more, thanks for reply.
I'll go study your tutorial for the crease option.

Not sure I quite understand the resetting the sculpt thing yet - I'll work at it.

The problem with the 'no image' seems to be the original sculty had lost it's link to the baked UV. I managed to rebake the sculpt mesh and the texure baked without hitch thereafter.

One final query for now - if I import the sculpt without a texture I can get a nice shiny finish to the object - a car wing - by sinply applying a colour in-world and increasing the shininess in the SL edit panel, but once I import and apply the texture from Blender, the shiny option doesn't seem to have the same quality of effect. Is this just the way of things and I need to set the shininess in the applied texture (if possible) before importing to SL or is there something I can do in Edit mode to combine the sculpty texture with the gloss which can be applied to the in-world colour?

Drifter
- maybe need to change my name from Drifter to Purposeful to suit this new enthusiasm for building/creating replacing my unfocussed existence!

The in world shiny will give a different look depending on the base colour and texture, I'd just put random textures on your shiny sculptie to get a feel for how it behaves.

For car panels, just baking an ambient occlusion map for the texture and using in world color tinting with shiny should give reasonable results. You'll need to do the AO bake with the full car in Blender to get all the shadows. I'd use approximate AO as it's results are more suited to this use.

Thanks Dom.
A bit more study is in order to get my head round the Ambient occlusion thing - so far I haven't strayed very far from the guided route through the Blender attributes referred to in the various tutorials. AO is new - presumably just a different version of baking a texture only.

Baking the full car means, I presume, doing each bit individually as they're all separate components.

The in-world tint causes a bit of grief as I've a quarterlight on each of the doors with alpha transparency ( a whole other set of woes to master the intricacies of that!) and an attempt at a 'chrome' frame, and applying inworld colour tint affects the glazing and the frame as well as the door panel.

Anyway, Gawd bless LL for providing the Beta Grid and a lump of money to spend on experimental uploads!!

Drift

Well in that case you'll be using a full bake, so I'd pull apart some of these blend files to look at how the materials are done.

http://www.blender-materials.org/index.php?action=category&category=9-car-paint

http://www.blender-materials.org/index.php?action=category&category=2-metal

I generally find if your chrome looks good with shiny off, it'll look good with it on too.. A good HDRI image on the world shader will do wonders for reflective surfaces in Blender, so add that to your things to learn list

PS: By baking the full car, I mean assembling all the parts together in Blender, so the shadowing is accurate (like wheel arch being dark due to light blocked by wheel).

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.............................!!!! Head hurts!


PS. Incidentally, after your earlier advice on postioning the sculpties relative to each other, what I did was note the assembled coordinates in Blender then did an excel spreadsheet with a little formula to calculate the relative in-world coords. Worked a treat - boy did I feel good!

The release candidate scripts have basic link set support when using "Export LSL", just link the prims before placing the textures and scripts in them.

http://dominodesigns.info/second_life/blender_scripts_git.html

The scripts are in a zip downloadable from the link on the right.

Hi Dom.
Can you confirm your avi file is working, please? I downloaded it but keep getting 'unsupported format' error reports. Tried MS Media Player, Quicktime, Winamp, PowerDVD - none will play it for me.

Thanks
Drifter

It plays with VLC fine or you can install http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffdshow