Blender (and Primstar!) Rocks.

I tried learning Blender's oddball interface once before with no luck, but, after about a year or so, and a revisit, I've managed to get the hang of it this time around. I'm still learning, still a newb at it, but I seem to be getting there!

My primary reason for getting back into it was sculpted prims of course, but watching various Blender related videos (tutes and non-tutes alike), I started to see some other stuff, like physics simulations, gravity, wind, and stuff like soft body and cloth, stuff you'd not really use when making sculpted prims.....

....or would you?

A friend has me working on making some ruffles for her clothing that she does, and I began to think, gee, I'm going to have to go in there, grab a sculpt plane, and spend hours pushing/pulling verticies experimenting to get something that looks realistic.

Life's so much easier in RL when you have a body to lay it on, and gravity to form it into shape, so I got to thinking, why not let Blender do it?

I downloaded the SL avatar meshes, loaded them up into Blender, chopped off the head, and made it a collision object. I then took a sculpt plane, subdivided it a few times, turned it 45 degrees so the corner faced forward to the avatar, and set it as a cloth object. Then, I rendered the scene about 150 frames or so, and let gravity drop the cloth over the avatar shape, and voila:

http://johanlaurasia.tripod.com/shawl.jpg?


I then took the same technique and used it to make the ruffles I needed by pinning 1 face at the top in one (or two) spots, and experimented with rotating the prim first as well. The ruffles came out pretty well too.

Along with the I've also done the leg lamp from "A Christmas Story" (did that on Christmas day actually while watching the 24 hr loop on TBS)

http://johanlaurasia.tripod.com/leglamp.jpg?

The one thing I can suggest when it comes to making sculpts is try to think outside the box because what you might think you would never use can actually come in quite handy, and secondly, if you try something one way and it doesn't work, don't give up, just try to attack it from a different angle. Also, tutes tutes and more tutes!

Much thanks to Domino for all his work on making sculpties a reality in Blender! Domino, you ROCK!

Thanks

Manny did a video tutorial on using cloth http://dominodesigns.info/node/150

There's also one on the mirror modifier and one on using armature from him in the editing sculpties part of the Primstar manual - I'll get around to doing a HTML version eventually

http://dominodesigns.info/node/108

Oooh, mirror modifier... always thought that would be cool to use, but figured it couldn't be done (for obvious reasons). I'll have to check out those tutes.

Johann, when I click on the links to your pics it takes me to

http://johanlaurasia.tripod.com/adm/interstitial/remote.jpg rather than displaying the pictures

but it opens a popup window with an ad in the background.

hmm, that's odd, never happened before, and I was getting that when I used the IMG tag. Try pasting the url directly into a browser, apparently tripod is finally getting around to banning hotlinking. Time to find a new freebie website

One question about the leglamp. Did you manage to convert parts of the avatar.blend file to a sculptie ? If so, can you publish the trick please ...

Nope, that was made from scratch using a cylinder.

I loaded a reference image of the leg lamp to use for reference.

Then I positioned and scaled the the cylinder so that it was approximately the same height and width of the leg.

I then loop selected each horizontal 'ring' of edges, and used a combination of scaling (S, then shift Z to constrain to x and y) and scaled each ring to the reference image.

At that point, the leg looked like a perfect side view of the leg.

Then, I couldn't find a decent front view of the leg lamp, so I just hunted around the web for a front view of a female leg. Which I then loaded as a reference image.

Then, I turned my view so that I was facing the leg from what would be the front of the leg (technically, since I did the side profile from the front view, I was now on the side view, looking at the "front" of the leg)

I then did the same thing, except the 2nd time around, I scaled on just the X axis (no constraining), and matched the profile facing the front of the leg.

Voila... it worked great. It took me like 3 attempts before I figured out how to do it, but the trick is to not move at all on the Z, simply scale the X/Y, then rotate 90 degrees, and then scale on the X only.

I then used the same technique for the lamp shade, bulb and bulb socket (not visible in that photo) except I only needed to scale constraining to X/Y (S -> Shift Z). Scaling, then hitting Shift and an axis exlcudes that axis from being scaled and allows scaling on only the other two.

With the shade, bulb, and socket, since they're the same viewed from any (z) rotation around the object, I only needed to scale (constraining Z) once, and it was done.

Since you cannot lathe with sculpts, this is the best method I've found that will produce the same result that lathing would produce.

Bear in mind that occationally, after scaling, I'd use Get to shift left or right on the X axis sometimes to get it centered right. Sometimes you'll wind up switching between scaling and then Getting (on x only) to do slight adjustments.

I'm still quite the newb when it comes to Blender, but I've been wanting to tutorials, maybe I'll throw together a quick tute on how to lathe with sculpties, since the end result it the same as lathing.

Now, if I can just figure out how to make a 1 prim, 5 point primstar, (and get paid!) I'd be all set...lol

Putting the url in the browser doesn't work either.

The url
http://johanlaurasia.tripod.com/
produces a page with one mal-formed line of text and three ads.

Us Blender users have known about it's great usefulness a long time. We've copped a hiding about the interface, which once mastered is very simple and fast to use.

Although sculpties can easily be made without Primstar, it does make it easier and quicker to get a sculpt out. You can knock out some awesome shapes, texture and bake them in just a few minutes.

Blender can do everything including making a complete avatar with clothing as well as create the animations. I dare say, you can do sound environments as well. Seriously, get good at Blender and no other app is needed. At all!

Indeed, the Blender/Primstar combo, does rock.

Lol, that malformed line of text is for when non-owners touch clocks I make (it reads the text from the website and prints a SLURL in world that they can use to TP to my shop).

Try copying the entire line into your browser:

http://johanlaurasia.tripod.com/leglamp.jpg

http://johanlaurasia.tripod.com/shawl.jpg

Those should produce the images.

Yep, I agree. The first time around I gave up on the interface, but that was quite some time ago. This time around, I was working on a project that just HAD to have a sculpted prim (the body of a bumper car I'm making), and I figured I should revisit Blender and see if I can master the interface once and for all. I've been at it several weeks now, and I've crossed that 'hump' and although I'm no expert, I can navigate my way around the interface fairly well, and, you're right, once you start to get the hang of it, you can fly. It's faster than any other interface I've encountered.

Texturing... oh geez, that's an understatement. It's wonderful how you can make an object, texture it, light the scene, and let Blender bake the texture with lighting and shadows, all done quickly and easily. Many textures can be done completely from within Blender, and others, I'll head into photoshop to make a base texture that I'll map to the object, and then light and bake.

Avatar's with clothing.. been there, done that. BlenderSL has some great tutes on YouTube, and one of them showed how to map clothing onto the avatar meshes (which he provides a link to the avatar mesh pre-grouped into head, upper and lower body. I exported my baked outfit (including skin) and dressed up the male avatar in Blender... looks cool to have my avatar rendered in Blender! All I need to do now is figure out MoCap and I'll have him dancing around in animations as well. (Already downloaded all the BVH files from SL).

I've been experimenting beyond sculpties with Blender now that I'm getting a handle on the interface. Feel free to check out my YouTube page to see short vids of various sorts of trouble I've gotten into

http://www.youtube.com/johanlaurasia