Blender 3.5 Tutorials

[Cristy Borovetz]

Thereare so many Blender tutorials available that it can be overwhelming when you're just starting out. The incredible free and open-source 3D software is a powerful package and a firm favourite among creatives, but as a beginner, there are always new things to learn to unlock new creative possibilities. Whether you're a complete novice or an intermediate user looking for helpful hints to speed up your processes, there's a tutorial below that's bound to help.

Because of the sheer amount of tutorials I'm offered on all the sites, including youtube, I am unsure how to proceed now that I have the interface and very basics down. Most of the time when I open up a tutorial it feels like I've missed something in between, or I'm asking myself whether or not that that certain tutorial is even needed for an SL creation.

I've seen the Builders Brewery offers a blender teaching course, but it's not a single course but progressive and there's no way I could make it to all the lessons due to time zone differences and my ever changing work schedule or I'd be all over that like hot cakes :(

If perhaps anyone could mentor me in the client as far as linking me to tut's goes, and perhaps being open to questions as they should arise I'd be very thankful! I'm determined to get the hang of this!

Message me in-world and we'll see if we can't get you started on learning blender Think of a poject you would like to start off working on and through making that project we'll get you on the track to learning blender. Anyhow, message me in-world and I'll try to help you get on the right track.

Furthermore many tutorials are made without taken the noobie status ("what, where, why") into account. And it is damn complicated to explain every single bit of what is done in a way that is not boring and still keeps the watcher on track.

of course there is a lot more on the web and as you already stated the amount of information is overwhelming. But the starting points above should provide a safe approach to mastering Blender. At least to become able to decide what to do next.

Next I'd advise to have a visit at Polycount and Polycount forum, here you will learn a lot of the ins and outs of modeling

and optimization as far as limiting your polycount goes as well as learning the raw basics and knowledge behind

everything. modeling, normals, displacement, smoothinggroups, poly- / vertices- and faces- counts, topology, edgeflow

and many more things...

Because knowing what everything is /and does and how to achieve certain things- is a good step towards being able to

produce "useable" content. (and there is a lot to know ^.- )

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As Gaia Clary has sent them to you already. The video tutorials on Gaias youtube page are also very helpfull for starters.

One last tip: to test your meshes ( no matter if rigged, physic or static models) use the enable Grid-Login option of your

viewer and log in to the Aditi Grid / also named Beta-Grid. Here you will be able to upload your builds without actually

spending your real SL money on them. And once it is stable and in its final state you can upload it in main secondlife.

(this will save you a lot Linden, especially since mesh uploads - depending on vert/faces count, physics, normals and

LODs can be a lot more expensive then just the usual 10 Linden for an image) (how to get into the testgrid ? - you can

find many helpfull infos about that on this forum and here: _Grid)

Hope this helped you to get started.

Cheers, Code

I so feel your pain. I ran into a lot of brick walls and dead ends when searcing. I also didn't know what the proper pipeline was and not too many people are eager to help, though this forum was awesome. I'm no expert, I'm still asking question on the forums and everywhere else I can to get the information I need. I would have killed for a list of steps with included links at the start of this. I'm glad to send you what I've found and hopefully it will help. Just drop me a notecard in world and I'll respond with all the great stuff I found: 1.2.3 steps, tips, tricks and links.

Thank you all so very much with the overwhelming help to make it easier (as easy as it can get with blender!) to help me move along with learning the program more smoothly. It's really really appreciated!

One thing I would like to mention that was touched on is to be sure you are watching CURRENTish versions of Blender. If you try and follow OLD tutorials it will be pretty much impossible as the interface changed greatly.

I gave myself a month a year or so ago to "learn blender". Of course I am still learning, BUT after about two 40 hour weeks I felt a bit more competent. It is NOT a fast skill to master; no 3D program is. So be patient, ask lots of questions (I certainly did) and know that you aren't the first one to tackle mesh creation .

EDIT: One more thing. You will find some tutorials that while good are not meant for game engines. You want LOW POLY tutorials. Once the video maker start hitting the sub surf modifiers or you see a very SOLID looking mesh on the screen -- not for SL or any similar platform.

Appreciate seeing people who answer questions with good solid advice, particulary for difficult subjects like Blender. Kudos to you. I would like to add a reccommendation which is BraydonRandt (resident) who does blender basics and a sofa project from cube to SL import.

In Blender everything looks nice and smooth, in SL my plane is black or white (depends what kind of color ive choose for the new image at uv unwrapping), with baked shadows at it. Thats not what I want

Hi folks, and a happy New Years to all of you.

I fear this can be a bulky post, so to summerize.

- New to Blender (2.8)

- I create scenery (not planes, which is where most "dated" tutorials are)

- Having issues and find tutorials for XP11 specific things very lacking and sets the bar for scenery dev. etc higher than it need to be.

1. I am able to export an object from blender 2.8 to XP but the texture are not written in the obj file, I need to add the code manually in the obj file. What am i missing? Baking or something before exporting?

2. Tried to make a simple animation, a box moving from A to B, added the dataref and time values but then get an error when exporting (most likely I make a lot of mistakes, but there are no guides outthere as of now).

So I am in doubts if I really want to spend time diving deeper into Blender with tutorials for scenery dev. in Blender so lacking, and if any program need tutorials It sure is a software like Blender. Dont get me wrong, there a tons of tutorials on Blender with regards to building things etc, but only few and old ones for Blender with regards to XP dev. and most if not all are aimed at planemaking.

For the last couple of months I have been sucked into the black hole that is scenery development. Basically I have been working on an airport that has had very little attention from devs, and finally took matters into my own hand. I started out with Skethup and since it is very intuitive and dead simple to use and learn I have been with it up until now.

The issues I have with Skethup is specially errors with animations causing the S2XP addon to fail with Skethup 2019 Pro, and I really want to add stuff like walking shadows in termianls, subway, radar dished etc. to the airport. Also I find texturing and faces in skethup to be a pain and have no doubt that Blender is the better software for the job! Problem is, when it comes to learning Blender and its bridge to XP11, its all in chineese and very few hands on tutorials for scenery dev.. Guess most knowledge is kept in-house at various devs.

I dove into the world of Blender 2.8, And I did in no way expect it to be easy street and heard everyone say Blender is the way to go for everything XP11 but is a very steep learning curve, I think Blender looks awesome and is mindboggling that such software is free.

I have tried to reach out on various forums, but with little to no luck, so I am hoping that there still are some kind and helpful devs here that may find the time to help out a struggling noob ?

Some thoughts on your 7 (??!) questions. But first a caveat: I build aircraft, not scenery, so this all may be bad advice if some scenery guru comes along and corrects everything I've mentioned below.

1) IMHO you are better off texturing outside Blender. Make sure you first have UV unwrapped your object in Blender's UV editor view (Shiftf10). Using that views menu, export the unwrapped UV map you just created. (UV>Export UV layout). Texture that 2d UV map in some paint editor (gimp, Krita, PShop etc etc). OR you can export the 3d Object itself into a 3d painter like Substance or other 3d paint software/equivalents after unwrapping it by using File>export *.obj or *.fbx (usually that's what they require) instead. Once you have the texturing/painting done, then point the xplane2Blender exporter (in Blender) to your just created default, normal, and LIT textures. (lots of SDK docs on what these are). Export to Xplane in the right place for scenery. I don't do scenery, but for airplanes, you also need to also tell XPlane about your aircraft obj's in Planemaker

2) Mainly its some key modeling stuff -- delete duplicate vertices, animate using xplane datarefs, delete unnecessary/hidden faces, check normals, assign materials to every part...this can be just white paint -- blender materials are all throw away as the xplane exporter does not pick up materials, but just needs a materials' property to tell glass/non glass etc.

3) This is done in the xplane2 blender exporter. Basically I export every object with metalness. And obviously Glass as Glass (make sure Glass is the last object listed in Planemaker) Once you have your obj exported and in XPlane, open the OBJ file with any text editor and change the Global Specular value found at the top of the file to some number lower than 1, to reduce gloss globally if you want.

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