As some of you may know, I've been dipping my toes in Blue Mars. I think it has a lot of potential -- what attracts me there is that clothes are treated as dynamic meshes, not just as flat textures. The drawback to this is that the entry-level for creating content is higher than in SL, and it isn't helped by the lack of step-by-step tutorials on how to convert Blender files into something understandable by Blue Mars.
So, here's a few quirks I've noticed, that were not immediately obvious and got me go "uh?".
- If you can't see the Blue Mars avatar after importing it into Blender, you might think you have failed. Think again. The beast is freaking huge. Zoom out as much as you can until you find it. Also, check your outliner: the import process might have created a new scene, and you're looking at the wrong one.
I usually scale down the avatar (I'm comfortable with a scale of x0.01) while working on it, and scale it back to the right size just before exporting it as a collada object.
- Alpha: the alpha value is inverted. So, if you make an opaque shirt in Blender, it will be transparent in Blue Mars.
- UV map: after unwrapping your mesh in Blender, you have to mirror it (UV > Mirror > X axis in the UV/Image Editor view), otherwise it'll end up wherever in Blue Mars. Thanks to Estelle Parnall for explaining that to me.
That's it for now... I hope it will be helpful to someone. :-)
