Keep your inventory under control (Part 5)

This article was published in Fusion Magazine, July 2014. Click for the magazine!

Greetings everybody! We've talked about boxing (using boxes to store our items), and even using notecards when packing our inventory, in order to make the total count of items go down.

There are some specialized items that will allow us to use some assets, even if they are packed: pose HUDs and texture organizers, to mention a couple of examples. This is extremely useful: while some of our assets are packed, we can still use them as if they were unpacked.

So what are these interesting tools we've mentioned?

A texture organizer, for example, is an object that will allow us to browse the textures we put in it, not needing to have the textures unpacked in inventory: when we need one, we just click on it in the organizer, and it will deliver us a copy. We use it, and delete it when we're done: it will still be in the organizer... and if we're extra-careful packing, in a backup box. (If we're extra-extra-careful, we'll also make a copy of the texture organizer. Things happen all the time.)

What features would be nice in a texture organizer?

As many categories as possible, ability to label the categories as we wish, search function, remove duplicates function, rezzable and HUD at the same time. Extra bonus if it recognizes sounds and animations. This is a tool particularly useful for builders and designers in SL.

A pose HUD is also a very helpful tool, especially if you are into SL photography (if you plan to be a blogger, you will need this). We may have in each of our pose HUDs thousands of poses that don't need to be unpacked in our inventories, and browse them easily, selecting which one we want to use at any moment.

What features would be interesting on a pose HUD?

Again, as many categories as possible, ability to label categories, search... but also, facial expressions, eye movement, ability to make at least one more avatar to pose. Perhaps we don't find all these together in a single HUD. If that's the case, know that there's a free HUD that will allow you to control facial expressions and eye movement, if you don't find an all-in-one that is within your budget. Look in Marketplace for Anypose Expression.

Texture organizers and pose HUDs will have a specific requirement: Do not add a no-copy asset. This is for technical reasons, but it is also important to bring it up, because we have to be really aware of the following fact:

If we drop just one no copy asset into just one box of a big linked object, the whole object is going to turn into no copy in inventory, and this is a risk. I would suggest packing no copy items separately, to avoid the risk of losing one of our packing boxes because of SL eating no copy items. Keep an eye when packing, because at times it's a no copy ad (texture) among all the copy/no transfer items, or a no copy alpha layer... and just that will make your packing box quite vulnerable to a SL mishap.

We'll continue in the next issue, with the last part of this series: Appliers and outfits. We're almost done!

Enjoy your SL.

"Act your age"

Not always I can do that.

Should I do that, all the times?

At times, I like to giggle. At times, I like to play and indulge in silly talk. Is a 37 year old expected to do so? While I find the answer, I'll go hang upside down, fall, and laugh at how clumsy I am.

Have a great day :-)

Thoughts on UV mapping

I would like to think that it doesn't happen often, but truth being said, I don't know how often I make this mistake when teaching: assuming that something as natural to me as breathing, is also equally evident to everybody else. It happened when I started teaching UV mapping.

Basically, UV mapping consists in "laying flat" your 3D model, so you can create a texture for it (textures are flat entities). In my mind, that was exactly the same as playing making my own cardboard dolls and items, an activity I devoted myself for a long time while I was a little girl.

My world was a world where my parents had to skip dinner so my brother and I could have it. Their budget was pretty tight, and clearly, toys for the little kids wasn't a priority. But there was cardboard, there were color crayons I used to steal from my aunts in my summer visits, scissors and glue. I spent hours figuring out how to design my own toys, trying to make them "real", "3D". I didn't know what I was doing at the moment: I was mentally seaming and unwrapping 3D models on cardboard. It became natural to me, and I assumed that everybody else had similar experiences with cardboard games. To my surprise, these experiences weren't that common, and some of my students don't even recall to ever have constructed a dice from cardboard, which is one of the basic layouts to use.

That's how I built a whole unit assuming that everybody would naturally knew where to seam basic models. And with that assumption I went into explaining how you would cut and align the pieces of your models, to make understand how hard it is to do it manually, so I could introduce how Blender marks seams and cuts and aligns the pieces for you. And then I went into showing how our UV map can tell us where are structural issues in the geometry. And then I finally explained one way to decide where to place the seams, based in decisions we can take when seaming simple primitives.

And there it was: confusion. I seemed to be almost the only one clearly knowing why we had to seam at all, and visualizing the relationship seams-unwrapped model. Barely nobody knew why I was taking those decisions, how they would apply them on their own... Why I was doing everything I was doing. It actually was a struggle.

So 167 pages after, I decided to sort of start again. Taking advantage of the fact that we already knew the tools, we would seam models, from basic to a little less basic, to adding a bit more of detail. I took the chance to introduce more concepts, more insight to the process and nomenclature, and more methods. It seemed to help fixing my initial mistake of assuming that some of my experiences were a common place to everybody. Fortunately, my students have patience with me, and they know we eventually reach to somewhere.

That mistake makes me think (worry) about being too self-centered, and if perhaps my little world is too little. But how does one go about being more social, to learn about more experiences from others, when you're devoted to your work and said work requires concentration?

I don't know the answer.

Creator Resource - Moving to Blender 2.70 (and 2.71)

This tutorial is available at: Creator Resource - Moving to Blender 2.70 (and 2.71).

---

There's a new version of Blender since some months ago, 2.70, recently updated to 2.71. This has been a major release with many new updates. If you're following my Blender books, you may wonder if it would be advisable to update, if you can update, and if there will be problems following the books that refer to a previous version. In this post, I will address all the interface changes that may make some Blender screen snapshots to look different, and where some tools are located now. My apologies I couldn't do this before: RL has been a little crazy in the past months, and catching up with all the delayed work involving my Blender classes and books has been quite hard.

Would it be advisable to update? Yes, no doubt, go to the Blender website and download Blender 2.71 right now!

All published books up to date are affected. However, don't feel "oh my gosh, do I need to learn everything again?" You will see that almost everything we learned behaves exactly the same. There are not many interface changes with respect all that was explained in those books, but please refer to this post if you find differences and feel lost :-)

(The affected books, in case there are doubts: Interface Basics, Modelling Basics, UV Mapping and Texturing Basics, Curves. About the upcoming books: Although they say they're using Blender 2.69, I tried to check all the screenshots in Blender 2.70 and 2.71, and there should be no differences.)

Remember two important things before going for the changes that affect the Blender books series:

• You can have different versions of Blender installed in your computer, and execute each time the one that would be more convenient. As long as different versions are installed in different folders, all is fine.
• Remember that you do not need to set your user preferences each time you install a new Blender version. This short tutorial covered how to move your Blender settings from one to another version.

Blender 2.71 makes even easier the task of moving our settings. Open it up, and read carefully the splash screen:

Yes, it says "Copy Previous Settings" and it's going to do exactly what you think it will do. Click it. Yay! :-)

With that said, let's go now for the changes that are relevant to all of the books published until now.

Tabs

This is the first that's going to strike us as "hmmm... Where did everything go?" When we open up the Toolshelf, we see that it presents this appearance:

Instead of having that long list of tools that made us to scroll until finding them, they have now been arranged into tabs, categorized. There will show more tools if something is selected, related to what is selected:

Hitting TAB for Edit mode we continue to see that the tools change to tools that are available only in Edit mode:

And notice how in particular, the Shading Smooth/Flat buttons that, in Object mode, were under the Tools tab, in Edit mode are under this new Shading/UVs tab, giving us shading option not only for faces (as we were used to), but also for edges and vertices, all in the same place:

By the way, maybe you have noticed that the Info Toolbar no longer has an Add menu:

This has been moved to the Create tab of the Toolshelf:

Personally, I find this to be a more consistent place for these options to be. SHIFT A continues working over the 3D View, showing the Add menu.

Where else are we going to find tabs? Within the Image Editor, in the Toolshelf, for now:

Also, notice that in here there's another consistency change. We know that when we hit T over the 3D View to open up the Toolshelf, it opens to the left, and when we hit N for the Properties panel, it does open to the right. When we worked in the UV/Image Editor, the T panel opened to the right, and the N panel opened to the left. This has changed: Now, when in the UV/Image Editor, the T panel opens to the left, and the N panel opens to the right, to be consistent with the behaviour on the 3D View.

Menus have now separator bars, which in my opinion makes them clearer, specially since similar options are grouped together:

What else?

Not much is left that could affect us and the material that's up to date in the Blender course. So as you can see, even though Blender 2.70 and 2.71 have been major releases, there's not much that did affect us :-) There have been a lot of new features, but our course hadn't reached them yet.

If you want a full description of all features, Gottfried Hofmann from Blender Cookie has made a wonderful course, available for free, here (The course is in video tutorial format, with some text as a summary per section.)

If you have heard about Cycles render, or have worked with it, here it comes the big news: Blender 2.71 supports baking for Cycles! See: You wanted to download Blender 2.71 right now :-)

PS: If you're following the books, remember that in this page you will find a list of questions and answers related to the books, from people having followed them. When other people had trouble and completed the right form in the store, I've tried to help them sort the issues. I find that kind of material quite relevant to learning too, which is why it's published in the store blog. All names are removed. The important is what they asked.