No progress without process.

So, making buildings in mesh.  It's...more involved than I expected.  There is so much I don't know, but every day that I work in Blender, or in any other 3D modeling program, shrinks that mountain by a little bit.

I've been working on a church intended on being a livable space for Second Life.  The mesh, turns out, is larger than I realized (because scale is tricky, even when I took initial steps to try to make it reasonable within SL's scale).  The structure is quite formidable, and this makes getting nice final textures (after baking, I mean) very challenging.  All of today has been experimenting with bake settings, sample settings, settings settings settings, changing texture resolutions, and so on and so forth.  This has produced exactly zero acceptable results, except at insanely high resolutions -- which reduce in Photoshop down to an unacceptable degree of blur, pre-upload, for SL.

It's maddening.

After today's battery of educational failures, I meditated some more upon my problematic mesh, and have now concluded that I need to break up the sections (it's not all one mesh) into even smaller sections, so I don't have to jam so much detail into one 1024x1024 UV texture space.  This goddamn floor alone has been giving me the middle finger, even at 4096x4096.

I mean yeah, it's common sense, right?  Get smaller.  You'd think I'd deduce that sort of thing right away, but for all my fooling with Blender over the years (most of that time being legally blind which made things very hard to focus on, figuratively and literally), I'm still a relative noob when it comes to modeling and texturing models.  I'm in the catch-up phase now and it can be brutal.

I'm sure I'm missing something obvious that the pros know, but I'm my own teacher, and for me, there is no progress without process.

Stopping for tonight, though.  I've had enough of waiting for bakes, and tomorrow is another day.


~EC