[Archived - RigsK] Room & Furniture Creator Spotlight - jazzKat

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Posted by “RigsK” on June 09, 2022.

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Hello, jazzKat here, since 2005!

Ever wonder how things got started and how they’re going?

In the beginning there was Max. Max made the stuffs ™. Then Max said go forth and derive (but not ZCD for they are ebil!!). After many trials and tribulations and much shenanigans, Blender 3D finally managed to create and published rudimentary rooms and furniture. Max cared not of these things.

Blender continued unnoticed and of course being rude, textures were upside down, room skeletons had one bone to aid export using CAL3D (*/ppffftt), and users could only sit or stand using the default poses IMVU auto-dropped in place! Ah the joys of ‘Static Rooms’ – standard pose spots and no furniture! That was “The Before Times”, days of bobbleheads and cartoon caricatures no longer spoken of, half remembered through strange gliffs on this thing called the Interwebs, 2006 or so if lost souls are to believe.

Looking back, the time, effort and expletives expended just to get this type of simple product into IMVU using Blender is largely forgotten (due to age), especially now Studio Toolkit (https://create.imvu.com/articles/studio/toolkit/) makes it a (relative) breeze to not only make rooms and furniture, but also add custom poses and animations! Oh, how the youngling vampires no nothing of their cave dwelling, prune-wrinkled ancient ones! “Keep quiet vamppa” they shout “No one wants to listen to your origin stories; we just want our haemoglobin latte’s”!

Since then of course a ton (imperial, not metric, which is ‘tonne’ BTW) of resources have been made available to help Creators create all sorts of IMVU content, in the Blender section of the Creator Education Centre specifically (see here for legacy tutorials and articles while the new Toolkit material is published https://create.imvu.com/article-topics/blender/), and KatsBits more generally (https://www.katsbits.com/codex). If you want to Create (https://www.imvu.com/creators/creator_dashboard.php) start with a browse through those.

Speaking of which, creating that is, rooms can be tricky to make because there’s a bit more to them than other items, and they can be huge, which can make room wrangling “warrrrg!” inducing! It’s a good idea then to have a general plan in place before starting, simple thumbnail sketches are more than enough to aid project organisation, not just for sake of the rooms design, its look, but also their function, what users can do in them.

Similarly have an idea of the sort of poses a room or furniture item might need, the default sitting/standings, or custom to fit the item, which itself requires use of the pose tool and employing a different skill set.

As rooms can be big keep an eye on texture use too, be mindful of texture scaling and how obvious it is that an image is repeating when aggressively tiled, or how they can heavily pixelate when stretched across large areas.

Similarly watch file size, use JPG more generally and leave PNG for detailing that can be otherwise lost. Adjust image compression for both depending on use; noisy images like grass won’t compress as well as single-colour painted walls for example. And if using normal maps save those only as PNG.

In addition to that, keep meshes as low resolution as possible, use only what’s needed to describe the shape of something, or at least manage polygon use; more where Users can get close to a feature, fewer for things they can’t – as a general rule of thumb this approach to ‘optimising’ can be applied to texture use as well!

Aside from those tips, start small and keep it simple.

*/slinks back into the shadows and slips on a latte cup left on the floor like an OG.

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