Starter's Corner

Manny's picture
in

This was re-edited by me (Manny): [First things first... This' Domino's projects home; Primstar, Avatar, GIMP Terrain, it's not meant to be flooded with Blender video-tutorials, I believe.  But...]  Tutorials/video-tutorials are encouraged! Big smile

I noticed some members and some not members (yet =) are after Primstar without having any clear idea what Blender is or is capable to do so... Besides the links shown in the gadgets of this site would be interesting point specific easy going basic video tutorials. It's important the "easy going basic" connotation to avoid complains from the Blender community, which I have read so many many times. I mean by that... Well... These video-tutorials might be not so technical (at some point, depending the video-tutorial) Why? Because, let's first learn what numbers and letters are (understandable (for all) language), then, let's move to the formulas.

Briefly here I'm after the useful for the Blender Starter and of course it's absolutely encouraged the self knowledge development after, depending your scope in Blender. Steve

Today I was seeking some information related to modeling and I stumbled with Mike Lively's site and of course I'm a peeker, so surfed around a little bit finding his useful easy going video-tutorials related to Blender and some others applications I use. I watched most of the videos, took the time to analyze its content, useful and funny, great sense of humour. So you can access the basic video-tutorials through here also he has done a great job modeling a heart in Blender so check out his youtube channel here (the heart modeling videos) so with the basic video-tutorials at his site and what he shows at his youtube channel the Blender Starter will probably find its way in the application. (Apparently he (Mike Lively) uses Blender 2.46 (read: "Starter's Corner Plus" below), current Blender version is 2.49.2, keep that in mind, some changes have been done, but the video-tutorials worth the time, really).

You learnt what numbers and letters are, ready for some formulas? Check out Blender Underground's site you can download the video-tutorials here. These tutorials are longer, heavier to follow, compared to Mike's video-tutorials, but amazingly full of information and specifications.

Important is to keep into account: these are video-tutorials to cover the basics of Blender usage (not Primstar involved) however Domino has taken the time  to add Primstar related video-tutorials here.

I hope you, Blender Starter, find it useful and share it with others after the flavourly taste of knowledge.

[up-dated] 11 November, 2009 - 20:10

By request I'm going to add a few more links:

You are a  Blender beginner? Did you watch the video-tutorials from the previous links? Want some more? Good.

These ones are quick and effective: Introducing the Blender 3D Modelling Environment by Glen Moyes

If you like, check these too: Blender for Beginners by Jeremey a.k.a taconene

You feel you are ready for the next level check the ones below:

Complete creation of a character in Blender by David Allen Ward

Last but not least, an argentinian Blender artist well-known in the community.

Venom's Lab by Pablo Vazquez

With all the information above you should be ready for your first short animated movie. (don't take it seriously) Sexy

Leaving aside the first short animated movie affair, I'm sure you would get the feeling of using Blender from a much more comfortable perspective.

 

Manny's picture

Starter's Corner Plus

I wasn't sure if to add this or not because it's explained everywhere but to make life easier I will... Seems Mike Lively is using an earlier version of Blender than the 2.46 in "Modeling The Heart in Blender" video-tutorials series so you might notice at a point the Mode "UV Face Select" is not longer in 2.49.2, well... Yes, it is but just not like an independent Mode, it's now part of "Edit Mode" please read here for further information about it. So now, when you get to find some old (and not too old) video-tutorials, for example about creating SL sculpts with Blender and you read the authors (I have seen it a lot in youtube) saying: "you can't, you need Blender 2.45 for this" that's probably wrong, it's possible hitting "U" key in your keyboard while in Edit Mode. Party

Domino Marama's picture

Blender tutorials

I'm not worried about a flood of tutorials. As well as being useful for beginners, they are also useful when people want to step beyond sculpties and learn a little more. With my long term plans including the avatar stuff, a good knowledge of Blender will be very useful. Even for sculpties, besides modelling and uv unwrapping there's creating and editing materials, setting up lights and texture baking. For some sculpties, rigging, animation and cloth simulation can play a part. So there's no reason not to post and discuss video tutorials, I'm sure a lot of creative options will open up from it. And if following those options leads to posts in the WIP section better still Wink

xidoraven's picture

The way I see it, tutorials

The way I see it, tutorials are not only helpful to learning the capacities of PrimStar, but integral to any beginner, whether they are familiar with only sculpties, only Blender, or a noob to both.  I started out with only a mediocre knowledge of Blender's capabilities and a noob to SL prims, but it is possible to get to a stage where 'beginner' actually means 'practitioner' with the right leadership and education.

The people/efforts that have made the most difference are those individuals and groups who show us step by step how to utilize these capabilities and to watch out for common pitfalls by giving us video tutorials or step-by-step screen-shot written tutorials (I prefer the former).  I cannot stress enough that - although outdated by Domino's recent additions to PrimStar - the videos at Machinimatrix (http://blog.machinimatrix.org/video-tutorials/) are absolutely invaluable to anyone trying to understand the method of building sculties.  Both as using the scripted functions and teaching a "purist" Blender user an approach to making sculpties from the ground-up (to know what it is that their scripts are actually creating) is a great way of bridging the gap between experience levels.  Based on the simple method that Amanda Levitsky first outlined, I was highly interested to see what scripted functions were being carried out - so that I could still go in and build a sculpty that was in many ways non-compliant with the other basic shapes, I could do so.

One subject I am still uneducated on is the idea of cutting (knife or some similar tool-command) a sculpty without multiple vertices.  I see it talked about, so I assume it is a part of the scripting...  Where is it, or how is that accessed?

Any ideas or input at all on my menial little one-pager about the manual considerations yet?  (http://dominodesigns.info/node/90)

Best wishes,-will

Problems baking sculpties

Hi all, I'm new to the site. Not certain if this is the correct place for questions like this.

I've made a multiple sculpty (8 objects) vehicle motor in Blender. I've baked the sculpty maps previously, made the sculpties in SL and assembled the motor in SL. I've changed the meshes in some cases and repeated. All of this without problems. Thank you Domino Smile.

I've been working on trying to improve my work in regards to LOD retention with some sharp edged objects like a steel I-Beam made with a 64*16 cylinder in Level 1 multires. I seemed to have a new problem with those sculpty meshes being very clear (able to see the color changes at the edges on the sculpty map well) in Blender and in Gimp. But those textures, once uploaded to SL, were blurry and the sculpties look bad. Maybe I've accidently changed a setting. Yes, I had lossless checked. :)   So I decided to rebake and reupload some of the motor meshes that also have sharp edges and I know looked good in SL the last time.

I now open that motor .blend file again to do that and I can't get a new sculpty map baked for any of the 8 parts. I keep getting this message after selecting a motor part>going into edit mode>selecting all>Render menu>Bake Second Life Sculpties.

Sculptie Bake ErrorSculpt image does not exist: BeltDrive-Trans8-28-0

BeltDrive-Trans8-28-0 is the name I gave the previous sculpty map when saving it to a folder on my harddrive. I get the previous name I gave each of the 8 sculpty maps when I nw try and bake a new sculpty texture on each part.

What I'm I doing wrong in either instance:

1)when I got the blurry sculpt maps in SL from nice sharp ones in Gimp?

2)when I try to bake new sculpty maps of previous sculpty meshes?

Thank you in advance.

Manny's picture

Problems baking, answer

First the possible answer: I wasn't sure what it was but probably I was in the way to find it out, I was thinking about packed images in the blend file missing, (commonly used for team work) Anyway...  Domino is probably right about it and makes absolutely sense what he says, moving or deleting the original baked images will produce that error, the way to fix it would be "to create new images and assign them to the uv map". (Domino's words)

Second, this thread is meant to share and discuss tutorials/video-tutorials related to Blender to improve/build the knowledge of Blender Starters (not Primstar involved). Primstar has its own Forum topic here. Otherwise this will become a " Primstar's F.A.Q Station" and that wasn't the idea when I started this thread. Tongue

Of course, I'm happy to answer those questions I'm able to, however keep the site organized is really important, especially for new visitors, so all the information is kept together by topics.

Hope it helps! Party

Thanks Manny.  My apoligies

Thanks Manny.  My apoligies for posting in the wrong place. I see your response but I don't see the response from Domino that your refered too.

 

Manny's picture

He didn't response directly

He didn't response directly, it was while we were exchanging some ideas.

Domino Marama's picture

Lossless upload problems

Generally speaking, if someone posts a question in an existing thread, I'll give the thread author time to answer first (and help them if they request it). So if it's an unrelated question, it's better to start your own thread.

The blurry textures might be related to a lossless bug in Second Life. I've only logged in to SL a couple of times this year, so I've not done exhaustive testing of uploaded maps since oblongs were fixed. It seems pretty pointless aggravating my wrist to do it while there's still known bugs affecting their use.

added sculpts have only 58 vertices

When i add a sculpt mesh sphere i get a sphere with only 58 vertices instead of the ones that show in all the tutorials and have many more vertices. I have no clue why i get meshes with less certices. Same holds for cylinder and other types. With so little vertices there is not much to sculpt with Sad. I use Blender 2.49b, have the 0.5 primstar scripts in the script directory of Blender and have Phyton 2.62 installed. Would be happy if you could help me out on this as i am eager to create something cool of course!

Domino Marama's picture

Old tutorials tend to use multires

A lot of the tutorials are written using multires sculpties, so if you disable subsurf, you should get what you are expecting. The 0.9.x series makes this distinction a lot clearer.

Yay!! Thank you Domino.... it

Yay!! Thank you Domino.... it worked! Now i can get things rolling. Thank you so much.

Manny's picture

starter's corner up-dated

Added a few more links by request. Enjoy.

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