Blender Help Please

I have been messing around with blender for a few days, read a bunch of tutorials, and have succesfully loaded sculpted prims into SL.

However, I cannot figure out how to go from a 2 dimensional drawing starting with a mesh circle, to a three dimensional object that I can use. I seem to think that it has something to do with the way I am closing out the poles. I have just been scaling them down as small as I can get them, with no good results when uploading the image into SL.

How do you do this properly? Or better yet, is there a tutorial on how to go from a 2d outline to a 3d object? Thanks for your help

I am not at all an expert in blender and i just started uncovering one detail after the other. But i found one approach in "the blender book" (an RL-artefact, completely made of paperware :

After you created the outline lets say in the x-z axis, select all vertices, then extrude them into the y-axis. so you get at least the first iteration towards a 3D object. After that you can subdivide and start sculpting.

I also take use of the background image, when i have at least 2 fotos of my object, which have been made from 2 orthogonal vieweing axes (typically from front and side) i load these images, split the blender screen in 2 halves, set one window to view ->front, set the other window to view->side , put the two corresponding background images into the windows and then start sculting along the outlines shown in the images. with a little practice that works rather sufficiently.

Just curious: how do you manage to create a sculptie map out of your meshes ?
Which method did you use and which tutorials do you refer to ?

There's a lot of directions you can go from a 2D shape to a 3D object, as Gaia says, the easiest is extruding. The step I suspect you are missing is getting the correct UV map. This has to be a perfect square. If you are starting from a circle and extruding that up, then you probably need to mark a seam (ctrl e) along one vertical edge before doing the unwrap. Then edit the UV layout to make it square and completely fill the image area.

Most people doing sculpties in Blender are using my scripts to generate a base sculptie and to bake the sculptie map. This lets you concentrate on the modelling aspect as the UV map and mesh are already correct. Modelling from scratch is possible but it needs a little planning to make the UV mapping stage easier. There's a few flash videos below where you can watch how I work with UVs. The videos are from earlier versions of the scripts, now I nearly always start with Add - Mesh - Sculpt Mesh rather than building from scratch like this

You can get the scripts from /8/60/203571/1.html

http://dominodesigns.info/downloads/tutorials/blender/using_multires.swf

I'm not making anything specific in this one. Just a quick demonstation of how I make a sculptie with full control over how it looks at different LOD levels

http://dominodesigns.info/downloads/tutorials/blender/steps.swf

This shows how to make steps to sit on a ramp.

http://dominodesigns.info/downloads/tutorials/blender/wheels_of_time.swf

This one will leave you wishing it was 6 mins and not 5. If you want to see how the finished sculptie looks you'll need to have a go. Just finish squaring off the UV map and bake the sculptie