Making A Second Life Mesh House In Blender – Part 2: Planning is Important

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Before starting a Blender project, it’s important to have a good feel for the structure you want to make. That’s why referencing a floor plan is a good idea.

You can make your own floor plan using free online software. Here’s a few I found with a quick Google search:

I’m sure there are more, but you get the idea. Find something that works for you.

I’m not so skilled at creating a floor plan, and I just went into this wanting to learn Blender, so I did a search for house layouts. I found a house that looked like it would be fairly easy to start with:

A little boxy modern house with a lot of windows and a loft inside.

This came with a floorplan, which I chose to reference and follow really loosely. The idea isn’t to be exact, but to have something to work from. To have a plan to follow.

To start out in Blender, I began by watching videos on how to create a house from a floorplan. Here’s one of them:

Resource

This is a lot more complex that I’d suggest someone new to Blender try. Me being me, I did try it.

I failed completely the first time (having no knowledge at all of what I was doing), then got something workable the second time. But when I tried importing it to the SL Beta grid, it was all wonky.

So, I decided that this method of building wasn’t going to work out for me. However, I learned a lot of neat and important skills from this video. Namely, how to duplicate objects and how to work with edge loops. I’ll go into some of that in my next post!

I decided that building with shapes, much like you build with prims in Second Life, was easier for me to wrap my head around. It wasn’t too difficult to rez some boxes, resize them to be walls and fit them together.

Here’s a sample of a very hastily put together set of four outside walls created in that method. Looks a lot like something you’d make in Second Life, doesn’t it?

But a house needs doors and windows and textures and the like. Well, unlike Second Life, you can actually slice and dice these rectangles to cut shapes out of them! And that’s exactly what I’m going to show you how to do in the next post!

See you then!

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