Totaly Lost in Blender

I Have been struggling at learning Blender and trying to get at least 1 sculptie Texture out of it. I am sure once I get 1, I will finally know how to get a second and a third and will be glad to jump right into the more difficult sculptures.
Right now I can't even Find the Bake Panel that is shown in all the tutorials. I have searched the web and Blender Wiki and they all simply say to Bake it... Not telling you much more then that.. I have seen pictures of the Bake Panel But I am starting to think thats an old Tutorial and things have changed on my 2.3 virsion.
I would realy apreciate someone pointing me in the right direction on where it is.

Get the latest version of Blender which is 2.45 from

http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/

and the sculptie scripts from

/8/60/203571/1.html

there are tutorials on the scripts too

/8/ab/210627/1.html#post1677452

If you are new to blender then going through the tutorials on http://blenderunderground.com first will show you all you need to know to follow the sculptie tutorials

It's nearly impossible to use Blender by following someone's instructions for doing something specific, like baking textures. It acts differently depending on what mode you are in or where your cursor is, so you will follow button press instructions to the letter and it won't work and you won't know why.

You have to learn a little about the program before you can follow task-specific tutorials. Start with the noob-to-pro document here:

http://www.blender.org/tutorials-help/tutorials/

It's not very good but it's the best there is.

Once you know about the modes and the viewports then try to follow the sculpty tutorials. You won't have to go all the way through the noob-to-pro document to get to that point, which is fortunate since that document gets more and more incomplete as you get into it.

This is the unfortunate truth of complex 3D software, and particularly "free" software.

*Start* with a sculptie template. Don't add or subtract any vertices. Learn shortcut keys. Amazingly steep learning curve; correspondingly amazing payoff when you learn something.

Blender Short Cut Keys (in particular, the Edit Mode ones at first)
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Hot_Keys

Blender Sculptie Template
http://pkpounceworks.sljoint.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=28&func=fileinfo&id=9

Can you double-check this url? Seeing a page not found error...

edit: never mind - works now..

Thank you Domino!
The upgrade Magicly made the Bake Panel appear.
Also the Import and Bake py for Secondlife has allowed me to finally upload my first Sculptie Texture to SL... I am now sooo excited.
My Texture is very rudemental but it worked and now I can concentrate on more tecnical sculptureing.
Thank you again for all your help

That's one approach. In the tutorial videos I mentioned I show other approaches where adding and removing vertices is done.

If you really want to use starter sculptie then the ones here /8/60/203571/5.html#post1733247

give various starting points (plane, cylinder & sphere) and are multires enabled.

I just noticed that the tutorials seem to have moved. I hope I have the URL right, as I have not yet begun to use them and this is the first time I've seen them:

http://www.blender.org/education-help/tutorials/getting-started/


BTW, why do all the URLs in this forum appear to me as unclickable plain text bracketed with the tags? I poked through the forum options but I don't see an option that addresses that. I'm sure the rest of you aren't seeing the same markup, but rather, you see links you can click... right? I hope?

I didn't even use the link markup and it still got marked up.

The forums have lotsa BBCode disabled, which is stupid. If using firefox, there's a sticky on the RA forum called 'BBCode Emulation in Greasemonkey' that can solve that.

Anywho, the noob-to-pro tutorial for me is best found on wikibooks. I just went there and searched the name 'Blender 3d: Noob to Pro' and found it every time I needed to.

Thanks for clearing that up. I thought there was a setting I was missing that would make the URLs work.

Since you mention "books" [well, wikibooks], that makes me wonder:

What's a good [the best?] actual, paper book that I could learn blender with? I like books. I can carry 'em with me, and have 'em open by the computer, saving all that gorgeous monitor space for blender [or Second Life, or whatever].

Keep hitting it! I struggled with it for 6 weeks. (Not a software guy at all) Never played with any 3d apps before SL. Once you make that first break through the rest starts falling into place. What tripped me up was the conversion process to sculptie. And it was more of the chronology of steps than it was anything. As these smart folks will tell you, everything in Blender has a purpose.....it a matter of continually hitting it.

Thanks, I will. I'll be looking for a good book on it, since that's a learning method that works really well for me.

http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/ The Essential Blender

And if you don't mind printing it out you can learn a lot from the various issues of http://www.blenderart.org/

PS: My comments about starter sculpties in this thread are outdated now. The latest scripts include a "Add - Mesh - Sculpt Mesh" option which will generate a wide variety of starter sculpties in the various topologies.

TY so much for the recommendations, and the correction about starter sculpties. I'm on my way.