Day 312 – Learn Something New Every Day!

Happy new year, dear ones! I hope you all have had a great start to the new year!

So, I’m not a mesh maker. At all. Seriously. I’ve dabbled in Blender and made a mess. Aldwyn bought me Hexagon for my birthday and I promptly made a mesh penis that looked okay in the program, but was totally sad when I uploaded it into SL. [And trust me, not many things are much worse than a sad penis.] I’ve wanted to learn how to do my own mesh items but my brain doesn’t quite understand it all.

But! I’m making it one of my 2014 goals to learn new things. Some time in the past week, I saw someone on plurk mention that you could export your prim builds [full perm ones that you made] as a .dae file. [If you’re less of a mesh maker than I am, .dae is the extension of a mesh model file that you upload to SL.] I didn’t have a chance to read the whole conversation but I filed that tidbit away in my brain under “Ask about this later.” I thought that maybe it would be of interest to Ulaa and Abby since they both are pretty good builders with prims, but haven’t quite made the transition to mesh yet.

Today I asked on plurk about it and was given two links to read. One about how to do it with Firestorm and one about how to do it with Singularity. I use Firestorm, but you don’t get to keep your textures with it the way you seem to be able to with Singularity.

And before anyone starts screaming about copybotting, you can only do this with things YOU made. Although, I think if you use sculpts like from sculpt kits, you have to have the full perm sculpt map still in your inventory.

I wanted to play with this to see if it worked, so I pulled out the AFK House I made several years ago to put on someone. It’s just made from 6 plain prims, and not very well, but it’s 100% mine. Left click, Save As, Collada, and even though it said PNG, when I went to save, it saved as a dae. I imported that dae file into Blender, and holy cow. There was my dumb little house. If I wanted to edit it in Blender, I could have, but since I suck at that and I just wanted to see what would happen, I just exported it as a dae again, and then uploaded it into SL.

AND IT WORKED.

My dumb little house was 3 land impact now and considered mesh.

So then I got fancy. I opened up the file in Blender, this time saved it as an OBJ file, opened the OBJ file into Hexagon, got crazy on it, saved it, put it back in Blender, saved it as a DAE, uploaded it into SL and….

Well. That happened.

But, I learned something, and I taught a few people something on Plurk, so all in all, it was a good day.

Day 271 – Girl Chat

I spent a couple of hours tonight just sitting and having girl chat with two of my favorite redheads, my goddaughter Abby and her mom, December. Abby, of course, stops over at our place frequently, but this was the first time I’ve ever gotten to just hang out with December when it wasn’t a big party or something. They’re both pretty awesome and funny, so we had a lot of laughs. 🙂

After they headed to bed, I had a few minutes alone before Aldwyn came home. Poor guy, he’s been a little under the weather the past couple of days. But, he gave me my anniversary gift! I’ve been wanting to learn how to make mesh a LOT but I’m honestly not very good at stuff like that. I mean, I’ve been in SL for almost 7 years altogether and the only real skill I have is running my mouth. But we know some people who have been using Hexagon to make mesh, so he bought it for me! Yay!! I played around a little bit with it tonight but of course didn’t come up with anything. A friend of mine pointed me towards the tutorials she used to learn it, so tomorrow I’m definitely going to be watching and trying to learn.

Of course, tomorrow can’t be a full day of learning because… PARTY!!

I’m so so excited!! I’ve been trying to 2 days to find a dress that I felt comfortable in. I wanted something kinda fancy, but not TOO fancy, and not too “sexy” or revealing or anything like that. The one I found IS a little on the shorter side, but it has long sleeves and doesn’t really show cleavage, so it’s awesome. Once I decide on a hair and on jewelry, I’ll be all set!

But before all of this can happen… I need much sleep. 🙂