Split Screen

Open up Blender, if it isn't already.

Before we go too far, I'm going to have you split your view area.

Hover your cursor over the edge between your 3D View area and the top menu. When your cursor changes to the double-arrow resize cursor, right-click and select "Split Area." (Click the image above to enlarge.) Then place the split line somewhere in the middle of your 3D View division. You'll now have two identical 3D Views.

Of course, you can change the angle of each division separately now to see different sides of your mesh at once, however, you can also change the divisions to show something else entirely.

On the bottom left of each of your 3D views, you will see a tiny menu with an image that looks like a grid. If you click it, it will give you a list. You'll see that your current division type is named '3D VIEW'. Oh my gosh.

Most of the other types are irrelevant to sculpties, but I want you to change the right division from the 3D View, to the UV/Image Editor. Right now there isn't anything in the UV/Image Editor, but this window will probably become one of your best friends in the long run. This division setup is actually very common for making sculpts. Eventually you may want to make it part of your default settings.

Adding a Sculpt Mesh

Right now, everything in your 3D space is probably useless for making sculpts. Tap A once or twice to select it all, and tap the delete key to get rid of it.

Adding a sculpt mesh to our 3d space (or scene) is made ridiculously easy by the Primstar scripts. With your cursor in the 3D View, tap SPACEBAR, and then go to Add > Mesh > Sculpt Mesh.

You're then presented with a dialog. Click on the Shape field to choose which shape you want to start with. For this tutorial, start with a Cylinder).

There are a lot of other options for your sculptie. For now, I want you to change Subsurf to Multires (marked in red). Check "default" and then click "Build".

Edit Mode

Blender works in several different modes. Luckily you only need to know about two. You are currently in Object Mode. You can only select entire objects in your 3DView.

The other mode we need is Edit Mode, which will allow us to move individual vertices on our cylinder. Tapping the TAB key toggles between Object Mode and Edit Mode. Switch to Edit Mode now.

The lower division of your screen is the Buttons division. The menu of the button division lets you look at different button sets, depending on what you want to do. Tap F9 or select the Editing button in the Buttons menu if you aren't already looking at the Edit buttons.

Lets also turn off that axis thing by clicking this button:

Selecting Vertices

You'll notice that you can select individual vertices by right-clicking, and you can also shift-click to select additional vertices. But there are other selection tools that make selecting a lot of vertices very easy.

Press B once to start Box Selection mode. Your cursor will become a cross hair, and you can click and drag to define an area to select.

If you press B twice, you'll start Brush Selection mode, which will change your cursor into a circle that you can use to 'paint' your selection. You can make your brush larger or smaller by using your scroll wheel.

Finally, if you hold down ALT and right-click on one of the lines (or edges) of your mesh, you can select an edge loop.

All of these methods of selecting vertices will be useful while you're forming your sculptie.

Falloff

The next thing you will want to know about is Proportional Falloff, as it cuts down on a lot of work.

Select a few vertices using whatever method you'd like and press G, R, or S, to manipulate them. Notice how, by default, Blender only moves the vertices you have selected. We can change this default behavior by using Proportional Falloff.

Depending on your screen resolution, the Proportional Falloff icon may be hidden because of the split screen. Use the mouse wheel to click on the 3D View menu and drag it to the left until you see the icon.

Find the icon that looks like a donut (shown above) and select either On or Connected. (All of our vertices are connected, so either mode works the same.) You're now presented with another menu, but we'll play with that later. Make sure all of your vertices are deselected (tap A) and then choose one vertex on one edge of your mesh. Tap G to grab and watch what happens! Now try R and S.

You can change the area size that the falloff effects by tapping Page Up or Page Down.

Now fiddle with that other menu to the right of the falloff button.

Now select an entire row of vertices by using the Box Select tool, or Alt-Right-Click on a horizontal edge. Now scale (S) to see what happens. Try making a chess piece or a table let.

After you've finished your mesh, we need to convert it to a sculpt map image. We'll be doing this by using the Primstar scripts.

Baking

Before we get any further, you should rename your object to something meaningful. I've marked in yellow the Object name field on the image to the left. Click on the image to enlarge.

Your object is probably named something like "Cylinder." I've already renamed this mesh to "pawn." This is the name that Blender will assign to your sculpt map.

The Bake Script

Now go to the top menu. Select Render > Bake Sculpt Meshes (marked in red). You'll now be presented with the Primstar bake dialog. There are a lot of options, but the defaults should be fine, so just click the Bake button (marked in yellow).

You should now see a rainbow image in your UV/Image Editor division.

Now all you need to do is save the image. In the UV/Image Editor menu, go to Image > Save As. (Marked in green.)

Browse to your desired save folder and save the sculpt map.

Importing into Second Life (or other Grids)

Log into Second Life, or your grid of choice and go to File > upload image and select your sculpt. In the preview menu, select Preview as: sculpted prim, and it will show you a preview of your sculpt. If something looks wrong, check the troubleshooting section of this site.

These screenshots were actually taken in a grid called Avatar Hangout. Uploads there are free, which is convenient for tutorials.

Anyway. build a default box on the ground somewhere. Make sure that you're seeing the advanced tabs (click on More>>), then go to the Object tab (marked in green). Now change the Building Block Type to Sculpted (marked in yellow). Now you can replace the default sculpt mesh with the one you just uploaded.

This is my sculptie imported into an OpenSim grid. Notice it looks pretty much exactly as it did in Blender up close, but as I zoom away from it, it loses a lot of detail. This is referred to as LOD. With Blender, we can actually have almost complete control over how these different detail levels look. So lets go on to the next tutorial: Multires.