Blender Primstar Question

In Blender I began by using a Primstar cylinder mesh. If I just stretch the cylinder a bit and close the ends and import to SL, everything is fine; it’s perfectly solid looking. If I further modify that same cylinder in blender by using the warp tool to make a half circle, and then modifying it a bit further by grabbing the center and pulling it into a handle shape for a amphora; when I import that into SL I get the shape I created, however I get invisible sides. It makes no sense why it would be solid before I warp it to a half circle, and after have invisible parts. Thank you for any insight and help.

By invisible sides I suspect you mean the bounding box - the invisible rectangular shape which encloses the sculpted shape. Ypu can see it when you select stretch in Edit mode in SL.

In simple terms - all I'm capapble of - every sculpty has this 'containing' rectangular box which behaves as a solid enclosure which you can't penetrate/walk through/or otherwise interact with. To get over the problem the solution sometimes is to make the sculpty phantom.

If it's some other problem I'm sorry I can't help - at least not without understanding your problem better. Others more expert may offer further insight.

Or maybe this ...:

Short answer: Maybe you have exposed "inner sides" of faces and use those as "outer sides" on your sculpt...

A bit of explanation: sculpties have only one texturisable side. The other side is totally invisible. Usually you can tell which side of a face is the visible side by looking at its normals. In blender (edit mode, F9) you can enable "draw normals" to see in which direction they point. (The normals are drawn as light blue lines) Again briefly said: If your model shows faces where the normals point inwards, those faces will be rendered invisible in SL.

The use of Warp as you describe is absolutely legal. I suspect however that during your further modifications you have ended up with what i describe above.

One way to immediately see if you have this trouble is:

I assume you have already baked the sculptie and your sculptiemap is in the UV editor. Now:

- go to edit mode.
- set your draw type to "textured" (the icon directly on the right of where you selected the "Edit mode"

All faces will be either drawn with the rainbowish colors of your sculptmap or they are not rendered at all looking a bit like the "inside out" effect which is in principle the exact same problem but for the whole sculptie (inward and outward sides are flipped).

Maybe this can help a bit to understand immediately what happens:

http://www.vimeo.com/8504087 please watch around 09:20 in the video. It most probably shows the cause of your problem...

Thank you so much Gaia, I understand about the one side texture. I used your hard hat tutorial with a sphere to model a amphora inside and out. It looks perfectly solid in SL. But when I went to make the handles using a cylinder, it all went wrong. I figured I had to be somehow getting the inside to the outside, but could not figure out how I did that, or how to prevent that. Now I have lost the file, so I will start again with the help you provided. Thanks again, your help, as always, is invaluable.

Another way you can tell if you've gotten things inside out is to turn on "normal drawing". If you go into edit mode, one of the buttons that should be visible in the buttons area under the "Mesh Tools More" panel is "draw normals". If you can't see mesh tools more, make sure you select the little icon that looks like a box with four lit corners.

Sometimes it helps to shorten the normals so they aren't so long -- Just change the "NSize" value to something more suitable for your model. I always build to scale in blender, so a value of .05 or .01 works nicely.

I started fresh with a new cylinder. I carefully followed instructions. After forming the handle I set the draw type to textured and the handle was a rainbow on all outside faces. Baked the sculptie and imported it to SL. It was half invisible. I tried selecting all and pressing Ctrl n to recalculate normals outside to fix the new handle. The resulting sculptie was still half invisible when imported into second life. I “drew normals” and shortned them so I could see them better. Yes, half point up and half point down, & the row between the ups and the downs on the side points straight out on this curved handle, however they were ALL on the outside of the handle. I tried flipping some with W flip normals, tried selecting all and flipping all. Same result when imported. **Finally I noticed the “inside out” box in Second Life under the Sculpt texture box. EUREKA! That worked on SOME of my many many practice handles. So frustrating. I cannot thank you all enough for you insight and help. I cannot figure out how I am getting my sculpts with the cylinder inside out. This is driving me Bonkers!

Don't worry. I think everybody encounters this problem once and in a while

There are a few identified ways how you can get this effect:

1.) If you unintentionally cross the center of your object while scaling it.

2.) if you scale your object to a negative value (most popular -1). This is essentially the same as 1.) but intentionally

3.) if you scale one axis to a negative value (most popular -1)

In the above situations your normals will flip. Of course if you perform the same action again the effect gets reverted, see also below.

I furthermore suspect (but do not know for sure) that primstar calculates the normals by itself. And with my wineglas tutorial i sometimes see my objects suddenly getting inside out without warning and the only cure is to perform 1.) 2.) or 3.) in that case. Flipping the normals in blender has no effect in such cases (which makes me think that primstar calculates them by itself)

But i slowly get some interesting indications when the effect happens as i start to "know" beforehand when the effect will occur. So there must be something which i can not yet identify and describe precisely... But the time will come and i will know. Or someone else who already knows it better will just tells it here... or wherever ...