blender tutorials (text and video) for sculpties and more ...

Hi, Osgeld;

First of all thank you very much for talking frankly and pointing out some serious problems with the video tutorials. Beforehand i want to say, that the arch example is not the first, but the last tutorial we created and we think, that one is more an infotorial, than a tutorial. The other tutorials get much faster to the blender screen.
Did you also watch the other video-tutorials and do your critics also apply there for you?

Apologize for the voices. We are aware of this problem and we try to improve this part as much as we can. If anyone could point us to better quality voices, we would give them a try. When Domino's scripts are in a mature state, we consider to make a final voice over with true voices, but that can take a while. In the meantime we have added the transcriptions to the blog.

I think, many people are not aware of the facts, we have shown at the beginning. I have been asked often, why i would make an arch out of sculpties instead of standard prims. So i had the feeling i need to demonstrate in depths, WHY i am doing that, before i show, HOW it can be done. And our machinima experts wanted to show, that indeed the difference between prims and sculpts is esthetically significant. Hence the panning sequence, which also demonstrates, that the sculpted arch does not suffer from LOD problems.

Thats a serious flaw. if you lost patience, that means, the beginning did not wetten your apetite for more. So i consider to cut this video into 2: "prim arches vs. sculpt arches" and "create a sculpt arch" So people can decide whether they want to get full background information, or just howto make the object... What do you think about that approach ?

I thought I posted the work around... may be another thread.

Problem: With Blender 2.46 and Vista, once the 'Occlude' selection button is clicked vertices, edge, or face selection behavior using B-key and LMB stops. I cannot select any vertices by dragging a box. B-key and RMB does not deselect as is normal.

Work-Around: Use Ctrl-LMB and draw a lasso. Use Shift-Ctrl-LMB to deselect. This method not only sometimes misses some selections; it also seems to select some random faces on the backside. Mostly it does work. It is handy for many other selection situations.


On tutorial voice quality...
I don't know if it would be more or less work, but I used a computer voice for a small project (it needed to sound like a computer). To make it understandable I had to misspell many of the words, which helped a lot. However, I did not need to publish a transcript.


I agree with Osgeld a little. Lead in seems a bit long on some. You might consider placing some of the 'why' in a side bar with the transcript and referring to it in video. I suspect many of us know the why when we come to see your video tutorials. But, I think, I understand why you presented as you did. So, the problem may be more our impatience than any ramble or bloviating on your part.

In all... good job and thanks.

A new version of the texturizing tutorial is now available, compatible to the most recent script modifications. I also added your hint about the vista bug in form of a visual note: "For vista users: ..."

We are using one of the best today available TTS systems. It supports emotional speach to some extent and with some additional fine tuning we get very far with it. Although compared to human voices, its quality sucks. Yes, we also have to misspell words frequently in order to get them better pronounced. We also can use SAMPA code (phoneme related language) directly, but that is really the hard way to go.

So, as long as we can improve the quality, we tend to keep with TTS. Our final goal is certainly to get the sound quality very comparable to human voice quality. I guess, we are not too far away, but still need improvement on some crucial parts... But still, if this approach does render our work much less usefull, we will eventually give up and switch to human voices. Although from our current workflow we already learned, that TTS allows for much more flexibility especially when we have to modify parts of a tutorial...

Me too I just have uploaded a shortened version of "the arch example". The flash-version should be available (in about an hour or so, the auto-flash-converter seems to be very busy at the moment ...)

Thank you soo much for your feedback!!! Give me more feedback and improvements can't be stopped

loving the new look to the tutorial though I do wish there were pictures to illustrate the text part still. I like personally going through the text part as it allows me to go through it faster.

Just my input on the tutorial.

Update on the Save UV Face Layout, I was having a similar issue on another computer again and I didn't luck out and have it mystically work for me.

I took Nalates' findings (thanks!) and tried a new clean install (uninstalling and deleting profile and program files directorys) and it works fine now. I upgraded from 2.45 to 2.46 and I think that was the issue, so if that is the case and your haveing that problem do a clean install.

Congratulations on trying to dispell some of the myths surrounding sculptys.

Your work is very much appreciated.

One suggestion I would make is to have pictures in the text sections which show where controls are found. Most of us agree that blender is not intuitive so finding some controls is a little like a lottery. You could spend hours clicking sub menus and never find the button you want.

Also in the videos it may help to zoom into the controls as you use them so that we can see clearly what is being done as the voice is not always clear enough.

I dont know how easy/hard it would be to do the above as i am totally ignorant when it comes to video creation.


Again many thanks for all your hard work

We originally had pictures embedded in the transcriptions, but then the videos started to change, so the transcriptions got outdated. At the end we only added the transcriptions. But on the other side we are learning more and more about "HOW to make a tutorial", so we started to use visual markers since a few weeks and we recognized that sometimes zooming in/out is also a good thing to clearify what's going on. we also slowed down the speed, so hat the videos are now about 20% longer than the first version, but we got many positive feedback since we did that

Good to know, that there seems to be at least an idea from where these problems could possibly result.Maybe we should add an FAQ or tips and tricks section...

It is easy to do in postproduction with our video editor but we have slight loss of quality in the images. We will take care of this in our next tutorial by increasing the video resolution so that we can deliver high quality video material at the end. We plan to release some high quality versions of the tutorials on DVD after we have created some more videos, so we will have to redo the tuts anyways.

Thank you all for you valuable input !

Hi;

I just released a new tutorial "the blender node editor (part I: introduction)"
I would appreciate, if some of the blender gurus would watch the video and
point us to potential problems.

thank you

You should create another UV Layer ( from the sculptie one ) called UVTex to be the target for the texture bake. This would leave the sculptie layer pointing at the sculptie map, so that Export - Second Life LSL will work.

Also anyone getting into texturing in Blender should note that specular shading isn't baked to the final image. This is because actual specular highlights are view and lighting dependent. It's a good idea to get into the habit of turning specular off in nodes, or down to 0 for a normal texture so you can see what the baked texture will look like.

Done!

Done! ... I turned specularity off by setting its color to black in the material node. Is there another way to turn off specular highlights ? There is also a value for "refl", which is not taken into account during baking (texture only). How can i turn off this ?

The updated video is already on blip. the updated flash version will be available in a few minutes.

A texture only bake just uses the colours. "Refl" is reflectivity and it is used in the diffuse shader so will have an effect on a full bake. So the correct setting will depend on the material. There's a slider for specularity, setting it's color to black has a different effect. Or with nodes there's buttons to turn Specular and other parts of the material on or off on the material node.

OMG ... How could one overlook these buttons ? I could sware, there were no buttons in the material node before... But i looked at blender and found them... and watched my own video and they were there, all the time ... I need to go to holidays! well... ok. I change this in the next revision.

We just released a new blender installation tutorial on our blog:
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/07/12/the-blender-installation-guide/

feedback appreciated (as always) ; -)

have fun;

Hi;

I just uploaded a new tutorial for the blender purists.

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/07/14/sculpted-prims-for-the-blender-purist/

The tutorial is a 6 minutes life demonstration, how to create a whine glass sculptie with blender, from scratch and without any(!) help of scripts. I only use the blender internal functions and show a very easy going way. This tutorial is dedicated to Amanda Levitzki and Domino Marama, who have given me all the hints i needed to eventually find the demonstrated workflow. I hope, you like it. And , please, please send me feedback

You didn't let me know enough of your plans or I would have pointed you at this:
/8/8f/253447/1.html#post1954358

Using material baking for a sculpt map needs an exact UV map, so you may need to adjust the top row and right column depending on the sculptie type. If that edge isn't wrapped they will need moving in 1 pixel ( on a 64 x 64 image ).

Thank you for the hint, Domino!!! The idea for this video came to me about 16 hours ago. Before that time, i didn't know, that i would do such a video, in fact i planned for something else. And while i was doing the 3 texture solution (which i basically copied from from amanda) i was wondering if that couldn't be done better with the node editor But i didn't want to make another round on it because i am about to leave for holidays...
Anyways i looked at your link above and yes, thats how it should be done
i will incorporate this later.

but... there seems to be a problem with my stitching... i realised, that after some mesh modifications the final sculptmap tends to get some distortions. at least i see irregularities, when i reimport the sculptie with your import script.

i guess this happens near the stitching line. I wonder, how i could avoid that. When exactly do i have to adjust the UV-map? and would it be enough to grab all vertices, snap to pixel ? or is there something else, that has to be taken into account ?

Gaia, you continue to learn and get better. Thanks for the revisions to Surface Textures Tutorial.

There are two things I noticed. At about 3:35 in the video you popup the selection note for Vista users regarding using the lasso to select in Occlude mode. But the need for that is not until about 5:00 in the video. It might help to put it in the part of the video where people will run into the problem. When I hit a problem I replay the problem part of the video looking for things I missed.

I also think a part of the process has been left out. I suspect you are editing parts of the image showing Blender or making several passes to get what you need... Notice that the materials are 0 Mat 0 from the start to the break for editing with Gimp, Paint Net or Photoshop. When you come back then suddenly the material list is 1 Mat 1. You do build the material in your tutrial. So, the count is not so much a problem. Skipping the step where the material is assigned is a problem. ...yeah I knew that...

I had problems not getting the UVMap to render on my objects. I could see the texture on the Blender screen. But, baking failed and when I started doing Blender Render as a check, it was rendering gray objects. I was concentrating so much on the tutorial I was not thinking.

A tutorial at http://feeblemind.tuxfamily.org/ on Material Indice cleared up the problem. (a Doh! moment) If a material has not been added to the object, it does not get used in bake or render. I knew that so once I got my head out of the tutorial and started thinking, I assigned the texture and things start coming out right.

I am also still struggleing with the black triangles in the final texture bake. Selecting the cyclindar ends and smoothing does not help in my case. Scaling the ends to 0.01 toasted this object. I can no longer scale the opening back up. Next model I'll try leaving larger holes.


On the UV Map Layout... While I have done my Blender clean up I can still repeat the problem. The Save UV faces script will often save the wrong map, usually an older or previous faces layout. I have found that if I select all in the UVMap Editing window THEN run the script that resolves the problem. I have not done a lot of testing. But, yesterday that was working very well for me.


In your tutorials the text in the buttons window is crisper now and that helps a lot. I can read enough to tell what is happening. Plus I can pause the video and check all the settings.


Node Editing Wow. This is a whole new part of Blender for me. It does explain a lot of the why things are the way they are. I've always known Blender had nodes and supposedly it was why Blender had so much power. But I never bothered to learn much more. Thanks for the tutorial. I have new toys to learn about.

Domino, thanks for your work too.

@Domino: I have created a material according to your example and it works. It was only after i onmly had to perform a "full render" instead of a "texture only" render. But now it works. I will incorporate the node based material into the movie, but that will have to wait for a couple of days now. There are other things to be done before.

@Nalates: Thank you very much for your feedback. Indeed your points are all good points. We cheated a bit in the last videos, such that we recorded new versions and merging them into the already existing video. That was a little faster, than redoing the whole thing. I think, we will remake the videos sometime within the next 2 months. Then we will also incorporate the newest changes from Domino's program.

hi;

i just posted a thread in the blender.org texturizing forum. I found a strange effect, which
i can not explain. Maybe some of the blender gurus here (domino ?) could take a quick look at the thread ? i am sure, you see the problem immediatly and know the solution ...

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?p=1163901#post1163901

thank you

Gaia, thank you so much for making these tutorials! I'm completely new to Blender and sculpties, but your videos are a great boon!

I do have some things I'm not sure on though.

In your tutorial, you list the progression of vertex degradation from LOD in its three stages; 1024, 512 and 256. However, The number of vertices I'm seeing at the different levels is much different in blender... 1056, 272, and 72. It's just not obvious to me if that's wrong.. especially since those numbers aren't powers of 2...

I'm really curious if there is just something wrong with my environment or not - because I really really would like to have 256 vertices for the lowest LOD... I know my scuplties will probably be stuck there based on what I plan to use them for :/

I realize that might be something more suited to ask Domino himself, but I figured I'd check with you first since it was your tutorial.

The correct wording should be:

"In numbers, that means that we start with 1024 faces when we are nearby, and we end up with only 64 faces at reasonably far distances. Each decreasing LOD level corresponds to a decrease of faces by a factor of 4. In second life we have seen 4 LOD levels so far, so the lowest level of detail corresponds to 16 faces only!"

So you are completely right. The numbers we mentioned are all wrong. The vertex count depends on which initial sculpt type you choose. So with a cylinder your numbers (for the vertices) are also correct. But i prefer to talk in "faces" because this is the same for all sculptie types.

We realised that fault some time ago but changing it has fallen "behind the desk". So thank you for the reminder. I have corrected this issue now in the text version of the tutorial. And i will force the modification of the tutorial as soon as possible.

Thanks for the reminder!!!!!

Concerning your doubts about the decreasing level of available vertices/faces...
Well, yes you cant do everything with sculpties. But if you realy sculpt your objects with LOD IN MIND then you can achieve "distance invariant" display. We showed an example in our other tutorial about "the arch example". the trick is to sculpt your objects so that when LOD changes, the change in shape remains as small as possible. So many times changing the object shape slightly results in increased display properties...

And DOminop;'s Scripts make a veryt good job here

Hi;
We released a new NURBS to SCULPTIE tutorial:

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/08/10/from-nurbs-to-sculptie/

Have fun.

Well, ok, it was my desk, where the note got out of sight. Sorry for this.

Anyways, i have just corrected and uploaded the new version of the LOD-tutorial to our blog at http://blog.machinimatrix.org/tutorials . I also added some display enhancements, so that the new tutorial-version should now be easier to follow. Have fun

Nice! 'NURBS to Sculptie' answered several questions and cleared up several problems I've run into. Well done.

I'm not sure whether the voice is better or my ears are learning to hear it. Whichever, it seems easier to undrestand.

Providing the 'how to' without scripts is going to be very helpful to many other modelers, not just those targeting SL.

When I have time to play with the processes, I'll provide more feedback.

Thanks.

Hi Gaia,

I'm too busy coding to do any real documentation on the new avatar.blend file. If you could do a quick tutorial on how to use the Record Button and Shape slider on the object panel I think you'd get lots of new fans

http://dominodesigns.info

A funny coincidence ?

I downloaded the avatar.blend file and realise, that i still know almost nothing about blender and its possibilities. Wow... a whole new universe pops up here! So, as always, when walking threw unknown terrain, a guided map (or even better a guide) would be invaluable. So here i am, eager to create the guide. But it looks like i myself need some initial guidance again...:

I searched for half an hour to find the Record button and the shape slider. Can you precise i little more, where i could find them or better said: how i can get to them? As always, in first place i am just sitting in front of a huge new mountain, which i want to climb up now. Anybody out there, who could give me a hand ?