My new plane seems to be coming along. I spent most of yesterday and today learning how to map textures onto the mesh objects in Blender. This is my first set of test textures.
You can texture all objects in your model in Blender, which saves time.
The textures are rudimentary right now, but now that I’ve mapped them, it’s just a matter of adding detail in an image editor. Before Blender, texturing meant creating many iterations of a texture and uploading each to Second Life to test it out on the prim. Then make edits, re-upload for another test. Rinse and repeat ad nauseum. With Blender, I can see exactly how the texture will look before I upload anything to Second Life.
Today, after fixing some annoying issues with the mesh, I was finally able to upload the whole model into Second Life’s Beta Grid. I slapped on a quick coat of paint and, before it was even dry, I dropped in an older flight script and took it up for a spin.
My new plane (as yet nameless) takes its first flight on the Beta Grid in Second Life.
There’s still a lot of work ahead of me, though. As you can see, the mesh needs some tweaking around the trailing edge of the wings. The cockpit, too, needs finishing, which is a huge job — I plan to have working instruments for flying in the first-person view.
After that is the task of writing a script specifically for this plane and building and scripting a HUD in the same style as the plane. Finally, the plane needs a proper paint job. A few options, maybe, just for variety. It’s a slog.
But even so, the first flight is a landmark in the development of any plane — even a virtual plane.
Spent most of my day making subtle changes and fixes to my plane. Can you spot all the changes between yesterday and today?
Subtle changes happen in one day of work (click to embiggen).
Actually, most changes happened on the inside as I made the interior walls and bulkheads around the cockpit. Next step: fill it with controls and indicators.
For the last little while, I’ve been bashing away at my new project in Blender. As a novice, it’s taking me a considerable amount of time to figure out how to achieve the shapes I want. I’ve made several missteps along the way, but it’s finally looking mostly the way I want — on the outside, at least. I have yet to build the interior, which comes with a whole raft of new problems, like trying to fit it to an avatar (and vice-versa).
My retro hot-rod plane in Blender (work in progress)
So here it is, so far. As you can see, it’s kind of a retro hot-rod concept. I’m a little worried about the number of vertices already. In Second Life the Land Impact is a whopping 150, but that can be mitigated with assorted tricks and techniques.
One detail I’m pretty happy with is the propeller blades, which is a complex shape that has eluded me since I started in SL. Blender made it fairly straightforward. So even though it takes 100 times as long to construct a plane with mesh as opposed to SL prims, the results are far more satisfying.
The new year has heaved the bloated, stinking carcass of 2014 over the cliffs of time, and now stands sweating and panting from the exertion in a pool of dried vomit leftover from the New Year’s Eve party. In these first few days, we prepare ourselves for the gauntlet of days ahead, in which we will need dodge boulders in our path, leap over quagmires, duck low-hanging branches, and maybe occasionally take a very soft tomato full in the face. If we navigate the path correctly, the rewards are great; should we fail, we will learn from our mistakes and do our best to put on a brave tomato-covered face.
Blender is a horrible nightmare
My personal tomato-in-the-face right now is Blender. This is the free 3D modelling tool favoured by designers who don’t want to spend any money on 3DS Max. I’d like to say that I’m making great progress learning to create things in Blender, but that would not be entirely accurate. In the weeks since I started sculpting my next plane, I have managed to restart five times after discovering that I was doing it all horribly wrong.
If you’ve mastered the building of objects in Second Life, you might mistakenly believe that you’re ready for proper mesh modeling. You would be wrong. Blender is a nightmare.
Nothing about the UI makes a lick of sense. Everything in the interface is contextual. Controls are completely non-intuitive. Menu items seem to be an afterthought to the extensive keyboard shortcuts. Remember those old WordPerfect keyboard cheat sheets from the nineties? Blender’s keyboard cheat sheet would be novel length.
After my five restarts, I have something that almost resembles the approximate shape of half an airplane. I’m not, however, giving up. While other aircraft makers might be uploading absolutely perfect replicas of real-world aircraft that previously appeared in other games, that’s not my goal. Obviously, I can’t compete with a professional 3D modeller when I have only a few weeks of experience with Blender. No, my goal is not to compete with hyper-realistic planes, but to return to my Second Life roots and explore retro-futurist designs with a touch of art deco. I’m taking my inspiration from movies like Rocketeer and Sky Captain, from old serials with rockets, fins, and chrome, and from 1930s aircraft and artwork. You’re going to see a lot of copper and steel.
Progress is slow, but today I sculpted a tail fin that I’m mostly happy with. Ahead of me, I’m looking at weeks more of careful, detailed work before I even think about texturing. After that, weeks more of scripting. That’s what it takes to create original content in Second Life. It truly is a slog. Yes, I could upload a prefab model to SL and have it flying in a matter of hours, but that’s not content creation — that’s simply adapting (and stealing) existing content — and that’s not what I do.
Over the coming weeks, I’ll post my progress (and possibly my mistakes as well). I’m confident that 2015 is the year you will fly the first mesh-based Terra airplane in Second Life.
