Intro to Blender and making non-rigged items

Part 1

This class is approximately 1 hour in length but may be longer allowing for questions etc.

The topics covered will be:

  • The basic “Scene” when we open Blender
  • How to move around and change the view of our object
  • Selecting vertices, edges and faces
  • Moving vertices, edges and faces
  • Subdivide
  • Loop cutting
  • Sizing loops, edges and faces
  • Intro to modifiers
  • Subdivision Surface Modifier
  • Proportional editing
  • Selecting loops and mutliple verts and loops
  • Omitting axes or specifying axes
  • Smooth Shading v Flat Shading
  • Deleting Faces and minimising complexity
  • Backface Culling and the nature of mesh in SL
  • Solidify Modifier
  • Unwrapping an object to UVs
  • Creating Materials (or texture faces in SL)
  • Default view <> UV view
  • Optimising UV layout
  • Applying modifiers and managing the modifier stack
  • Adjusting UVs manually

Part 2

This class is approximately 1.5 hours in length but may be longer allowing for questions etc.

The topics covered will be:

  • Uploading mesh to Second Life
    • Mesh Upload Status
    • The upload Dialog
  • LOD – Level of Detail and Physics and Land Impact
  • Cost
  • Optimising LOD – using planes for lowest LOD

Texturing:

  • Starting to think about texturing our object
  • The composite viewport in Blender
  • Using Cycles in Blender to bake shadow maps or texture our object
    • Nodes
    • Diffuse / Glossy
    • Rendered View
    • Lighting
  • Using local textures in Second Life to view textures without spending L$

Part 3

This class is approximately 1 hour in length but may be longer allowing for questions etc.

  • Making our picture for the lowest LOD plane
  • Using graphics programmes to enhance textures made in Blender or useing shadow maps
  • Making Normals and Specular Maps for an object
  • Uding Texture Paint mode in Blender to reduce/remove texture seams
  • Optimising textures for Second Life