Starting With Sculpted Prims Using Blender
I’ve been wondering how to make sculpted prims using free software if possible. It seems it is feasible with some provisos.
Blender is the free 3D modelling software of choice on the web, so I’ve downloaded and installed it to my computer. First impressions are that it is a completely impenetrable piece of software, with a user interface designed by idiot savants who have key combinations for everything that run into the hundreds if not thousands. Now this is to be expected. I’ve found that freeware often suffers from the problem of a less than intuitive interface, mainly because of the collaborative developer approach with no one in overall charge of things. We’ll just have to live with that, and try to learn, although it’s migraine inducing – I ended having to have a nap after an hour or so. There are some video tutorials that make things a little clearer, and I’ve had a little look at some – without much understanding as yet.
Download Blender here……
http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/
Video tutorials here……
http://www.blender.org/tutorials-help/video-tutorials/
Now there’s a problem with Blender – it won’t produce the necessary texture maps automatically. So thanks to Amanda Levitsky for producing this tutorial on how to create them in Blender – though there’s a whole bunch of missing images on the page which might (no, will) cause problems……
http://amandalevitsky.googlepages.com/sculptedprims
Don’t expect me to produce any sculpted prims in the near future as this seems to be a highly complex thing and my only experience with 3D modelling was using Caligari on an Amiga many years ago – a program that had a wonderfully simple and intuitive interface that ran in half a megabyte - not unlike Second Life’s interface and way of doing things – I’ve often wondered if they took their influences from it, or even if some of the same people worked on it.
Just a little bit of information for you; First, Blender’s imposing interface and outlandish hotkeys are not the result of it being open source. It was originally developed as an in house tool for NaN technologies, and was never intended to be used outside of that company. By the time it had gone open source (years after NaN had released it to the public), those who had been using it for years had become accustomed to the way it was set up. And, to be perfectly honest, once you get used to the interface, the workflow is much quicker than with other similar programs. Second, there is a much better tutorial on making sculpted prims, written for those new to Blender which can be found here: http://iramblesorry.blogspot.com
Actually I’d already seen that tutorial – and it doesn’t make things much easier. I’ve pretty much moved on to using Wings 3d rather than blender – much easier to use.
I would have to agree with Paul on the fact that Blender is not a tool for the general public, it was designed for 3D animation and modeling professionals who need a crank out complex projects in the shortest amount of time. Using keyboard short cuts and and different type of interface gets that done.
Having an interface that uses oodles of keyboard shortcuts as Blender does is okay if you’re being paid to to sit and learn the interface for months on end, but if all you want to do is turn out a sculpty or two every once in a while (which is what I do) you’ll never master it.
I think Blender is really not that difficult to use and is a perfect tool for creating Sculpties. Now that there are some great Python scripts available, exporting a sculptie is very easy. It took a few hard days of working through the video tutorials at blenderunderground.com to get past the daunting user interface. Let’s face it… any power user of any application is using keyboard shortcuts constantly. If you don’t want to get your knees scuffed, you should stay off the field…