Blender

Hello, I’ve just gotten really interested in learning 3d modeling as of late, and I’ve downloaded Blender even though it doesn’t seem very noob friendly. Well, I made a little noob object but I can’t seem to find out how to export it, in order to import it to SL. I find the information talking about Blender/SL, but it is a bit too advanced compared to what I understand at this point, so I apologize in advance if it’s been discussed previously. Basically, I’m looking for instructions in SUPER noob terms, I’m guessing it involves scripts?

Yes, scripts are involved...
Maybe start here:

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/video-tutorials/

Best is to view the tutorials in the proposed order. You might want to take a shortcut and go to the new NURBS to sculptie tutorial

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/nurbs2sculptie/

which shows you a "three clicks to sculptie approach" But you should take the time and go through the other tutorials beforehand. At the end it is up to you. All tutorials come at least with a transcription. Some tutorials are backed by textual versions.

Have fun

i can't find the script folder =/

Look at the home page of Domino Marama's scripts. There it is all described:

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

Or go to the blender installation guide on our blog:

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/07/12/the-blender-installation-guide/

There you can see my favorite solution:

Scroll down the page to the bottom. You may be curious to watch the movie. Tip: Donwload the movie from

http://blip.tv/file/get/HussaynDabbous-TheBlenderInstallationGuide375.wmv

It has much better quality and you can better see,what goes on

And here is an excerpt of the relevant part of the movie transcription as an extra service for you :

=============================================
... One big advantage of blender is the possibility to be expandable with customization scrips. Many scripts are already bundled with blender, but there are much more scripts available. And many of them have been created to make your life much easier. Even as a newcomer, you will most probably need to install your own script collection. And here is a safe way to go.

First, we are going to create a scripts directory on our file system. I will place it right into my 3d-tools directory. I have downloaded a couple of scripts and will place them now into the just created directory.
the scripts here are import and export scripts for second-life sculpted prims. These scripts have been created by Domino Ma-Rama, and we will go into the usage details in a separate tutorial about creating sculpted prims with blender.

Ok! Now i start blender.

* In the upper left corner, you see the information icon. This is a hidden window. You can access it, by placing the cursor on the window border, then left mouse click and drag the window down. The user preferences appear.

* Go to the right side and click the button: “File Path”. A set of input fields appear.

* Locate the field labeled with: “python scripts”, and click on the associated folder icon. a file selector box appears.

* Now navigate to your scripts folder.

* Then select the folder by clicking on: “select script path”. Now blender immediately finds and recognizes all scripts, which we have placed into our personal folder. Let us navigate to some places, where you can now see, how nice the scripts integrate into the blender interface.

* ok, now move the user preferences window back out of sight.

* One final task is still to be done. If you exit blender now, it will silently forget about your custom data. So we have to tell blender, to keep the information for us.

* go to, file, save default settings. Now blender will remember your personal folder whenever you start it again.

Now you can jump start into blender art work creation. If you like to get more information about how to create sculpted prims with blender, we invite you to also watch our other video tutorials. You can find the newest videos on the machinimatrix website.
========================

If you still feel lost, go and watch the movie. Then watch it again. You will get this to run. It is not so complicated.

Good luck

Here's my reply in previous thread to someone else:
This is my setup and I've had no probs with using Domino's scripts........
Installed Blender to where all my applications are grouped: C:\Apps\Blender\Rel2.48\blender.exe.

Installed Python to similar folder: C:\Apps\Python

Downloaded and drag/dropped Domino's files to where Blender installs its background stuff on my system: C:\Documents and Settings\Drifter\Application Data\Blender Foundation\Blender\.blender\scripts

If you hover the cursor on the bottom edge of the top control bar in the Blender screen and get a little up/down icon then lclick and drag down, you'll get a whole set of control options. The File Paths tab has a button for 'Relative Paths Default' which I suspect will reset things to where Blender expects to find them. Maybe someone else can advise in more detail on that aspect.

Hope that's helped.

The solution described by Drifter is valid only if you instructed the blender-installer to use the application data directory as location for user data. And it only works for Windows operating systems.

If you happen to install blender (on windows) by using your installation directory instead, you will find the scripts folder in your program folder under

blender foundation\blender\.blender\.scripts

And if you work on Mac or Linux, things are different again.

A generic approach to find the scripts location has been described by Domino on his website.
But in my opinion the best way to go is to use the approach which we described in our blog.

Our process is independent from the operating system, it allows you to keep your scripts separate from the installation, thus upgrading blender is easier (you don't need to reinstall your scripts with each new blender version) and running multiple blender versions in parallel with the same set of scripts is also much easier, since all instances can share the same scripts directory...

Flexibility has a learning curve. Making stuff noob friendly often adds limitations with that. Look at truSpace for example. Just be patient and take a break when you get frustrated.