Ok, so. I've been using Blender forever. I'm pretty darn good at makin' all sorts of sculpts, but until recently very precise edges and 'things that look like ladders' and other such configurations completely mystified me.
I've been working on the interior of Vicky Green and having found a really awesome sculpted staircase all I needed was some sort of railing around the perimeter of the open space above the entrance 'hall' of the house. I'd used a 3-post railing for the outside porch area, but I'm becoming prim-conscious again (there are currently over 400 prims on the build parcel!) and wanted something simple with more posts per prim. I had no idea how to make this happen and all my inworld shopping turned up nothing I liked.
I had looked at this tutorial a while back and about the time the little voice says 'collapse the something or other' I had gotten lost. Whatever I had done at that point in the instructions was very, very wrong and looked nothing at all like the demonstration. I missed the class on collapsing the something or others and so, as I often do, I gave up and wandered off to do something else for a few weeks.
While messing about with Rokuro (look 'mara, I spelled it right!) I had a sort of revelation.
I had moved a bunch of little points in Rokuro and made a stack of lines that when imported into blender looks like a nice plateful o' pancakes. Mmmm, pancakes.
The significance of this didn't really hit me until a few days later. With some obsessive compulsive handy work I managed to turn that stack of pancakes into something that closely resembled a stack of very square pancakes.
I uploaded my fabulous new sculpt map and that's where it all went to hell. Sort of. Here is the stack close up with my graphics object slider on about 'medium'. Followed by the same stack at about 6 or 7 meters away.
This will never do. The rail posts that resulted from this mess were absolutely unacceptable. My beautiful 'space in between pancakes' was gone! So, again I wandered off to work on something else - sleep and actual work.
Sometime this morning it dawned on me that I could reproduce this stack within Blender. D'uh, you say? So did I. Looking at what I'd done in Rokuro, I finally understood what the something or others were that I ought to have been collapsing.
13 hours - a full day of work, a fabulous turkey and veggie soup and tons of profanity - later, I had managed about 15 sculpt maps that were completely useless. I learned quite a bit about multires and levels through trial and error, lemme tell you.
And I have this to show for it. Each prim has four posts. The posts are not perfect. No matter what I did, I could not get them to be more 'square' but I'm actually really happy with the way they turned out. They've got sort of a hand chopped wood plankie feel and I think they fit in nicely with the rest of the build...or they will when the rest of the build is finished :D Also they don't turn into a mess of weird flattened arrows until I have cammed quite far out.
I present, La Railing de Tormie.
15 prims including the the banisters up top and the cute lil columns.
P.S. I'm totally gonna go watch and kick that ladder tutorial's ass, now!
I've been working on the interior of Vicky Green and having found a really awesome sculpted staircase all I needed was some sort of railing around the perimeter of the open space above the entrance 'hall' of the house. I'd used a 3-post railing for the outside porch area, but I'm becoming prim-conscious again (there are currently over 400 prims on the build parcel!) and wanted something simple with more posts per prim. I had no idea how to make this happen and all my inworld shopping turned up nothing I liked.
I had looked at this tutorial a while back and about the time the little voice says 'collapse the something or other' I had gotten lost. Whatever I had done at that point in the instructions was very, very wrong and looked nothing at all like the demonstration. I missed the class on collapsing the something or others and so, as I often do, I gave up and wandered off to do something else for a few weeks.
While messing about with Rokuro (look 'mara, I spelled it right!) I had a sort of revelation.
I had moved a bunch of little points in Rokuro and made a stack of lines that when imported into blender looks like a nice plateful o' pancakes. Mmmm, pancakes.
The significance of this didn't really hit me until a few days later. With some obsessive compulsive handy work I managed to turn that stack of pancakes into something that closely resembled a stack of very square pancakes.
I uploaded my fabulous new sculpt map and that's where it all went to hell. Sort of. Here is the stack close up with my graphics object slider on about 'medium'. Followed by the same stack at about 6 or 7 meters away.
This will never do. The rail posts that resulted from this mess were absolutely unacceptable. My beautiful 'space in between pancakes' was gone! So, again I wandered off to work on something else - sleep and actual work.
Sometime this morning it dawned on me that I could reproduce this stack within Blender. D'uh, you say? So did I. Looking at what I'd done in Rokuro, I finally understood what the something or others were that I ought to have been collapsing.
13 hours - a full day of work, a fabulous turkey and veggie soup and tons of profanity - later, I had managed about 15 sculpt maps that were completely useless. I learned quite a bit about multires and levels through trial and error, lemme tell you.
And I have this to show for it. Each prim has four posts. The posts are not perfect. No matter what I did, I could not get them to be more 'square' but I'm actually really happy with the way they turned out. They've got sort of a hand chopped wood plankie feel and I think they fit in nicely with the rest of the build...or they will when the rest of the build is finished :D Also they don't turn into a mess of weird flattened arrows until I have cammed quite far out.
I present, La Railing de Tormie.
15 prims including the the banisters up top and the cute lil columns.
P.S. I'm totally gonna go watch and kick that ladder tutorial's ass, now!
No comments:
Post a Comment