http://halfpastnull.com > Division by Zero. Singularity terminated. Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:56:08 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/22/primblender-setting-importer-permissions-and-creator-tags/ http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/22/primblender-setting-importer-permissions-and-creator-tags/#comments Tue, 22 Jul 2008 05:44:11 +0000 MrGomez http://halfpastnull.com/?p=97 Prim.Blender. For the tutorial index, click here)

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Setting Importer Permissions and Creator Tags


From the previous tutorial, you should have been able to import your creations from Prim.Blender.

Normally, this would be the natural end of these tutorials.

However, and perhaps irritatingly, there is a step that’s very commonly overlooked when importing objects: setting the correct permissions and creator tag for imported objects.



This is a critical step for creators that wish to receive credit for their work, and is very often overlooked when using resident building tools.

Using old revisions of the Prim Mirror as an example, I receive at least one comment every couple months attributing work that was not mine to me, because a resident used my tools and forgot to set themselves as creator.

Don’t make this mistake.



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The easiest way to set permissions on your object is to link a prim that you created as the last [selected] in the set, then set permissions as normal.

However, any prims created with the tool via Select Linked Parts will still be visible as “Creator: Jeffrey Gomez”.

Furthermore, you will need to do this every time you import, which can be quite an undertaking.

Fortunately, there are more permanent ways to set this.

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Here’s how to set up the tool to use your own custom permissions and correct creator tag.

Start with the image presented at the top of this post:



Select “Child Prim” as pictured, and drag this out into the world:



Copy the script within this object to your inventory.

Also note the permissions and name of the object:



Now create a new prim.

Be sure to name this “Child Prim”, exactly as the object you’re about to replace.

You may also set your own custom permissions in this same window.



Now drag the script you copied from inventory to the new prim you created.



And once you’re done, delete the old Child Prim from the importer’s inventory and replace it with the one you just created.



That’s it! Now be sure to save this new importer to your inventory.

Using it, you’ll properly receive credit for your work with permissions you specify.

(And, you’ll be saving me the work of telling countless people to do the same!)

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Care to head back to the tutorial index?]]> http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/22/primblender-setting-importer-permissions-and-creator-tags/feed/ 0 http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/22/primblender-internal-blender-scene-saving-and-loading/ http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/22/primblender-internal-blender-scene-saving-and-loading/#comments Tue, 22 Jul 2008 04:57:24 +0000 MrGomez http://halfpastnull.com/?p=80 Prim.Blender. For the tutorial index, click here)

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Saving and Loading Blender Scenes with Prim.Blender

So let’s suppose you have a lot of work invested within Blender itself, and can’t save all of it as .prims.

Or, let’s say you don’t feel like hitting the “Save” or “Load” buttons twice every time you want to work.

Enter the ability to save your work as a .blend file!



Actually, this is much easier than one might think.



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All you have to do is exit Prim.Blender via the Exit widget, then save normally.

Don’t know how to “save normally?” Simply select File > Save from the upper-left hand File menu, or press Ctrl-W and accept the given prompt.

Technically, this can be done while Prim.Blender is still running.

However, it is strongly recommended that you exit first, as this will prevent unforeseen errors from occurring, and supports far more Blender versions.

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That’s it! When you load this .blend file again, all your work will be there.

All you have to do then is execute the script again after loading, as explained in the basic usage tutorial.

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Care to head back to the tutorial index?]]> http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/22/primblender-internal-blender-scene-saving-and-loading/feed/ 0 http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/18/primblender-textures/ http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/18/primblender-textures/#comments Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:04:20 +0000 MrGomez http://halfpastnull.com/?p=55 Prim.Blender. For the tutorial index, click here)

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Textures

From the previous tutorial, you should now have a decent grasp of how Prim.Blender functions.

This tutorial shall cover texturing. It’s not done yet (because texturing still requires a ton of testing), so please be patient.



The ideal workflow is to do texturing entirely within Blender and then “bake” the desired image for import into Second Life.

In practice, this must be done manually in Blender, due to the myriad texturing techniques available. Many of these are covered in Blender’s wonderful tutorials and documentation.

Once your textures are set up just the way you like them, you can save the scene as a .blend file, preserving all of this information for later retrieval.



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Sorry to disappoint, but the remainder of this article is currently a stub.

Have ideas for texturing support? Email them to me!

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Care to head back to the tutorial index?]]> http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/18/primblender-textures/feed/ 2 http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/15/primblender-importing/ http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/15/primblender-importing/#comments Tue, 15 Jul 2008 23:04:02 +0000 MrGomez http://halfpastnull.com/?p=27 Prim.Blender. For the tutorial index, click here)

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Once the build’s done, it’s time to import your creation into Second Life!



Most of the work is completely automated, especially for sculpties.



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To begin, you must first obtain the latest build of Prim.Blender.Importer.

Unless you’re a geek with time to compile things by hand, you’ll want to pick up a copy from my store:



Buy a copy of the importer for L$1:



Find a good place to set it out and enter edit mode:



Now alt-tab or mouse out of Second Life. Open your .prims file in a text editor.

If necessary, rename the file “.txt”, all you Windows users.



Don’t worry if the output appears slightly jumbled up; it’ll format just fine in Second Life.



Up until version 0.5.4, Prim.Blender saves linebreaks as “\n”, or UNIX mode. This has been altered to DOS Mode “\r\n” in subsequent releases, making output format properly in Windows Notepad.

Both format in SL just fine, regardless.



Save the output you just copied to a notecard. Name it whatever you like.



If any sculpties are present, you’ll also need to bulk upload the sculpt maps.



Be warned: this operation costs L$10 per upload. Unfortunately, there’s no avoiding this currently.



Now, shift-select all of the images you just uploaded and drag them from inventory to the importer:



And finally, drag and drop the notecard you saved to the importer.

If everything went as expected, you should see these messages, and when the process completes, “Done.”



Be warned that if you see warnings about missing images, you probably skipped the image step above.

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If everything went as expected, congratulations! Your prims should now be imported:





As a follow-up, you should set the correct permissions and creator information for your imported objects, or the importer itself.

You can do this by linking a prim you created as the last in the set, or altering your importer through this tutorial.

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Of course, if things didn’t go as expected, you can always poke me by email and ask me what went wrong

If things went well, be sure to tell me about it, too. I’m always interested in new builds.

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Care to head back to the tutorial index?]]> http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/15/primblender-importing/feed/ 3 http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/15/primblender-sculpties/ http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/15/primblender-sculpties/#comments Tue, 15 Jul 2008 22:07:37 +0000 MrGomez http://halfpastnull.com/?p=24 Prim.Blender. For the tutorial index, click here)

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Sculpty editing is more than a little weird.

A sculpty, or sculpted prim, is the brainchild of Qarl Linden, though the practice he uses has been suggested before.

Think of sculpties as elaborate origami; you’re given a surface with 32×32 faces to fold into any shape you please. These “folds” are then saved as an image file, where each color’s RGB data represents a direction: red for X, green for Y, and blue for Z.



If I just lost you, don’t worry: making them is easy with the right tools.

Such as, say, this one!



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Sculpties are a relatively new addition to Prim.Blender, after nearly three years of builds (!). I have, however, strived to make working with them as painless as possible.

Sculpties in Blender are tied directly to mesh editing and Blender’s “sculpt” mode. The basic idea is to grab and manipulate the surface of the sculpted prim, then save (bake) it as an image file for use in SL.

Just so we cover everything, Edit Mode looks something like this:



And Sculpt Mode looks something like this:



Yoink!



Most of the tools are fairly self-explanatory: right-click a few verts in edit mode and move them around (G Key + mouse), rotate them (R Key + mouse), or scale them (S Key + Mouse).

Or, go into Sculpt Mode and use the Sculpt button (left of circled) and Blender’s fine sculpting tutorials to create most shapes you can imagine.

—-

From the interface pictured way at the top, you’ll see all of the standard UI components seen in SL. However, you will also see a bunch of foreign buttons that might not make a whole lot of sense at first glance:



For starters, what the heck are these buttons?

Number of Wrapped Faces? Multires? Sculpt type? There aren’t such things in SL’s sculpties, are there?

Actually, Qarl’s implementation of sculpties supports all of these things in one capacity or another. It’ll become more clear after a bit more exposition:

• Number of Wrapped Faces: Describes the minimum number of faces to use for this sculpty, in the X and the Y direction. Because sculpties are elaborate origami, this describes the number of creases you can create in each direction before fancy tricks like Multires (explained below).


• Multires: Adds additional levels of detail to this sculpty, in addition to the values described above. This is tied directly to the level of detail slider, and lets you inspect what Second Life™ will do to your sculpty when viewed at varying detail levels.


• Sculpt Type: A bit of smoke and mirrors that is hidden away from the in-world tools. Sculpties may be created in four different ways: with no merged edges (plane), one merged edge on the top (torus) or the side (cylinder), or two merged corners (sphere). In addition to these options, several different shapes may be created from the “base” type.

If this is all gibberish to you, don’t worry: the defaults and randomly pressing buttons works well enough for most purposes.

The only important thing to remember is the highest available level of detail will be the one used when creating the sculpty map. To avoid unexpected results, make sure to inspect your sculpty at this setting before baking (hint: it’s the Level of Detail slider).

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Now that we have those covered, how about those other buttons just below the sculpty image?



Those, at least, are a bit easier to explain:

• Bake: Lets you bake the sculpt map for this prim. This lets you inspect and manually save the map, if you’re into that kind of thing. This is done automatically when you save, for all sculpties.


• Load Texture: Lets you load a sculpt map as a texture. Should not be confused with the texture attributes of this prim. (Note: In future revisions, this has been renamed “Load Sculpty”)

Neither of these options should ever be required, unless you’re working with other tools (like Domino’s), or just happen to want extra control over your sculpties.

However, in releases at or beyond Prim.Blender 0.6.0, you may use sculpty loading to load a series of default shapes, found in the PrefMaps folder of each release.

These shapes are given by type: tsph for sphere, tcyl for cylinder, ttor for torus, and tpla for plane, and are included as starting points for various advanced shapes.

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That covers the basic explanation. Hardcore sculpty geeks can stay for all the details; everyone else should move on to texturing or importing.

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Caveats

• Face values are limited to powers of two, from 4 through 32. This is done to make building as seamless as possible, and prevent any “weird” texturing or multires errors.


• Values that do not add up to 32 faces on a side (the number of faces in a sculpty) will follow the shape of the current faces.


• Multires is capped at +2 levels, because this should be way more than is sufficient for testing level of detail changes in the SL viewer.


• Multires only works in Blender 2.46+; all other versions allow the slider, but ignore its value.


• Multires is turned off at a value of 0, for purists that just want a sculpt map to mess with.


• At the time of this writing, sculpties that are copied are treated as separate, instead of sharing the same image file (as in Domino’s implementation). If enough demand for this feature is present (email me or comment here), I may add the ability to create “groups” that share the same map.


• A “sculpty library” of shapes has been added to releases of Prim.Blender 0.6.x and above. If you have ideas or suggestions for shapes to add to this library, email them to me and I’ll offer full credit.


• The sculpty code in Prim.Blender is originally based on Domino Marama’s scripts, but may deviate significantly from his design, as my version represents a fork (or perhaps a spork) of his code. Furthermore, he and I exist within two very different paradigms for building with Blender.


• Sculpty image sizes in Prim.Blender should always be 64×64. This is the rough minimum for retaining full sculpty detail, while being entirely usable in paint programs, and addressing certain averaging and compression bugs.


• The “pixelated” effect exhibited by baking is intentional. This is the “compressible image” fix, first suggested by Aminom Marvin and implemented by Domino Marama. It is also used in mirroring.


• All images are automatically saved as .tga. Sorry. Blender is anal about that, currently.


• Duplicate images (ie, sculpties that are *exactly* the same) will be culled. This results in far fewer texture files to upload, making the process cost a whole lot less.


• Occasionally, Blender will save images as Targa files that aren’t 24 bit. This will be noticed during bulk uploading. In these cases, please manually save the file as a different type, or change its pixel depth to the correct value.

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If you have suggestions regarding my design or documentation, please email me.]]> http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/15/primblender-sculpties/feed/ 0 http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/15/primblender-basic-usage/ http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/15/primblender-basic-usage/#comments Tue, 15 Jul 2008 01:24:42 +0000 MrGomez http://halfpastnull.com/?p=22 Prim.Blender. For the tutorial index, click here)

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Basic Usage

From the previous tutorial, you should now be able to access the basic Prim.Blender screen:



For those that have used SL’s internal editor, the majority of the commands should be very familiar.



—-

The interface will appear slightly different depending on the primitive that’s currently selected. The primitive type may be changed in the same location as the Second Life UI: in the upper-right corner of the Prim.Blender interface, under “Type.”

For boxes, cylinders, and prisms, the interface will appear like this:



For spheres, the interface will appear like this:



For tubes, rings, and tori, the interface will appear like this:



And for sculpties, the interface will appear like this:



None of this should be unduly surprising, with the exception of the sculpty interface (which will be covered in another tutorial)

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For those that haven’t used SL’s internal editor: primitives are described as a series of parameters applied to basic shapes: box, cylinder, prism, sphere, torus, tube, ring, and sculpted at the time of this writing.

These parameters describe permutations of the basic shape. For example, twist applied to a cylinder will create a corkscrew shape around the Z axis of the basic cylinder shape.

All primitive types, with the exception of sculpted prims, can be altered within Second Life™ using these parameters. Sculpted prims, on the other hand, require a special image map that can be created with this tool.

Basic primitive operations and “prim torture” will not be described in these tutorials; far better examples of this behavior may be found here.

All primitive types are available in Prim.Blender, with the exception of trees and grass, as these cannot be easily scripted at the time of this writing.

After all, we’re here to build without having to log in, right?

—-

Instead, we’ll cover the portions of the interface that aren’t known to someone that uses SL’s internal building tools.

These fall into three distinct categories:

• Features of Blender itself


• UI components not seen in the Second Life™ viewer


• Sculpty operations

We’ll cover each of these in turn.

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Features of Blender useful in Prim.Blender

While attempts have been made to put the most useful commands in Prim.Blender itself, several Blender features may be used with Prim.Blender. Some are restricted, however.

The full commands for all of Blender’s functionality can be found in the excellent documentation for Blender itself, and are not necessary for building with this tool.

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Here’s a short list of features that are compatible with Prim.Blender:

Press G once — “Grab” — move the primitive
Press R once — “Rotate” — rotate the primitive
Press S once — “Scale” — scale the primitive

Tap X,Y, or Z once after the above to move, rotate, or scale in a given direction
Tap it again to move, rotate, or scale in a local direction.

Left-click: Place cursor (position to spawn new primitives)
Right-click: Select this prim, or a group of prims
Ctrl-Z: Undo an operation (Blender 2.46 required; only works with Blender position, rotation, and scale)
X: Delete a primitive

Camera (if no mousewheel, use numpad 2 and 8):
Mousewheel: Zoom Camera
Shift + Mousewheel: Translate Camera (up and down)
Ctrl + Mousewheel: Translate Camera (left and right)
Ctrl + Alt + Mousewheel: Pan Camera (left and right)
Mouse 3 (mousewheel button) + mouse movement: Free camera

Certain advanced features, such as adding textures through Blender itself, shape keys, adding cameras and rendering options, CAN be used, but will NOT be saved through the Prim.Blender interface. To save these changes, save the entire scene using Blender’s internal save command.

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These internal Blender operations are not supported by Prim.Blender:

• Copying (Ctrl-D) of primitives; use the Prim.Blender interface for this


• Mirroring (Alt-M) of primitives; use the Prim.Blender interface for this


• Altering the name of a primitive outside of Prim.Blender’s interface


• Mesh editing on non-sculpties


• Texture coordinates on non-sculpties


• Material settings for internal Blender objects


• Arbitrary mesh exporting; several tools already exist for this purpose


• Dupliverts and Crowd Simulation


• Particle settings


• Scene settings

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UI Components not seen in the Second Life™ viewer

Several components of the Prim.Blender UI do not appear within the client viewer. The most obvious of these include the Object name dialog (upper-right), Level of Detail slider (pictured next to the Type button), as well as the Copy, Mirror, Save, Load, and Exit buttons at the bottom of the UI.



Most of these are fairly self-evident:

• Object Name: Allows you to specify the name of the primitive, when imported


• Level of Detail: Specify the current level of detail to display for a primitive. This has no import implications; this is simply a convenience function for testing detail changes of a given prim. Ranges from 1 (cardboard cutout) to 12 (processor-rending insane), with a default of 3.


• Mirror (X, Y, Z): Mirror along a given axis. May be done around a prim’s local axis, or global relative to the origin.


• Copy: Copy a primitive and all of its parameters, and places that copy at the location of the Blender cursor (left-click). Combine with mirroring to get a mirror image of an object.


• Save: Save all of the prims in this scene out to disk


• Load: Load prims from disk into the current scene


• Exit: Exit Prim.Blender. Does not exit Blender itself.

In addition, a helpful image at the top of the UI contains every primitive type, sans random grass and random tree. These can be used similar to SL’s version, to create preloaded primitive shapes.



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That about covers it! Mouse around, make some shapes, and get used to the interface. Create a new building, an avatar, a space ship, or a simple pair of shoes.

Or if you prefer, a whole lot of random shapes:



Then save it to disk and import it into SL!

Or, you can move on to the next tutorial.]]> http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/15/primblender-basic-usage/feed/ 0 http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/14/primblender-installation/ http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/14/primblender-installation/#comments Mon, 14 Jul 2008 23:38:37 +0000 MrGomez http://halfpastnull.com/?p=21 Prim.Blender. For the tutorial index, click here)

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Prerequisites:

We’ll begin by downloading a copy of Blender from their main page:



Begin by browsing to www.blender.org, as shown above. Go to the download page:



… and download the latest copy of Blender for your OS. If given the option, use the download with the latest version of Python.







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Once the installation completes, you may optionally install Python 2.5.

While this is not required, it is strongly recommended as certain features will require a full installation to work properly. Installing Python will also disable a deliberately irritating warning every time you start Prim.Blender.



To install Python, navigate to www.python.org/download, as shown above. Download the latest copy of Python 2.5 or above to your hard drive and install it:






Note that for some operating systems, such as Ubuntu, Python may already be installed, or may be better obtained from your package manager.

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Downloading and Installing Prim.Blender:

To get a fresh copy of Prim.Blender. navigate to https://sourceforge.net/projects/primdotblender (or just http), as shown:



Select “Download”, followed by “Browse All Files”:



Select “Prim.Blender” from the Package list:



And download the latest release of Prim.Blender:



Unzip the package. You should have something like this:



Navigate to where you unzipped the folder. Double-click “Prim.Blender.blend”. You’ll be presented with a Blender window.

If necessary, Right-Click and choose “Execute Script”:



If you’re presented with this screen, congratulations! You’ve properly installed Prim.Blender.



Now pat yourself on the back, go grab a soda and some chips to reward yourself, and move on to the next tutorial!]]> http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/14/primblender-installation/feed/ 6 http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/12/primblender-how-to-use-it/ http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/12/primblender-how-to-use-it/#comments Sat, 12 Jul 2008 23:58:31 +0000 MrGomez http://halfpastnull.com/?p=18 Prim.Blender is a tool for building Second Life™ works offline. While the tool is made to be as simple and user-friendly as possible, a bit of documentation can go a long way.

What you’ll find here are useful tutorials to cover the rough patches: installation, basic usage, importing, and advanced tricks that may otherwise be strange or obscure.

(Caution: Prim.Blender is no longer actively supported. If you would like to support this tool, or take over as project maintainer, please see my email below.)

Without further ado:

—-

• Prim.Blender: Installation


• Prim.Blender: Basic Usage


• Prim.Blender: Sculpties


• Prim.Blender: Textures


• Prim.Blender: Blender Scene Saving and Loading


• Prim.Blender: Importing


• Prim.Blender: Setting Importer Permissions and Creator Tags

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Have ideas for a tutorial? Email me!

Send your idea, posting, or link, and I’ll post it here with full credit. ]]> http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/12/primblender-how-to-use-it/feed/ 0 http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/12/new-tutorial-section-and-primblender-version/ http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/12/new-tutorial-section-and-primblender-version/#comments Sat, 12 Jul 2008 05:17:16 +0000 MrGomez http://halfpastnull.com/?p=19 Prim.Blender: How To Use It series, as well as a few sites from past and present.

Prim.Blender has also been updated to 0.5.4, with a *ton* of fixes for Windows users.

Full changelog:

- Added new params: Faces and multires (previously hardcoded)
- Added new GUI components for faces and multires values
- Added “Reset Mesh” to sculpt type options
- Fixed default Prim.Blender.blend file for a GUI bug with new objects
- Performed additional regression tests
- Added Windows XP to tested OSes
- Fixed a bug related to not having a full Python installation present
(we now warn the user and catch exceptions as necessary)
- Fixed a directory bug on Windows
- Reformated this text file back to DOS mode to be readable by Notepad.exe
- Updated .prims save output to DOS mode to be readable by Notepad.exe
- Fixed a bug where changing the mirror mode would nuke sculpty meshes without warning
- Changed default LOD back to 3

—–

Enjoy! ]]> http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/12/new-tutorial-section-and-primblender-version/feed/ 0 http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/05/primblenderimporter-posted/ http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/05/primblenderimporter-posted/#comments Sat, 05 Jul 2008 04:01:31 +0000 MrGomez http://halfpastnull.com/?p=16
Built copies are available here:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Great%20Pubnico/23/71/93/

—

Happy 4th of July!

(Even if it’s technically the 5th on the server’s clock)]]> http://halfpastnull.com/index.php/2008/07/05/primblenderimporter-posted/feed/ 0