Mesh clothes continued ... getting things into SL

Well, I was able to get my .dae file into SL finally. (The mesh viewer only has the "Upload Model" dropdown choice under the Build Menu I discovered. The upload menu options in the inventory window doesn't give you that option.) Of course once I uploaded the model v1 things didn't go quite as planned. My jacket popped up in world in 5 separate pieces, with parts missing here and there. Back to C4D for more tweaking.

First thing I learned ... your object needs to be connected into one piece. That means, even though I'm able to work on the jacket as body, sleeves, lapels, and coattails, using symmetry to give me matching right and left halves, it all needs to be connected before exporting it to DAE. no problem. (And I did expect this would be the case, but I had to test the theory.)

Second thing I learned ... there is only one side to a polygon, and in SL the other side is invisible. This is fine as well, it just means that whatever is visible to the world needs to have a facing side. I had already planned for this, and built my collars, cuffs, and coattails with multiple sides (and thickness). However I forgot to check which side was facing out. In the 3D world, this is called "normals". I was surprised to discover that even though I had created my collar by extruding the jacket, for some reasons my normals ended up flipped the wrong way. Have to remember to keep an eye on this in the future. However, this was also an easy fix. it just required a close inspection of all of the polygons in my model to make sure the normals were all facing out, and flipping those that weren't.

Right! looking all spiny, fingers crossed ... let's import that puppy into Second Life!

 

BAM! We've got a mesh model, looking very much like my C4D model! *doing the happy dance*
Step one complete and highly successful. hooray.

Next step: unwrapping the model and figuring out how to texture this jacket. For this I'll be using BodyPaint within C4D for the UV unwrapping, from there I'll move to photoshop to do the intricate detailing that I love so much. :D

Stay tuned. The journey continues!

=^.^= blakopal =^.^=