Talk:Modeling Certification

Areas like vehicles, buildings, and avatar attachments should remain a marketing and portfolio issue. There's huge stylistic issues with judging those - camera control, proportions, historical accuracy and realism, etc. --Storm Thunders 08:29, 26 April 2007 (PDT)

I agree that it would be better to focus on testing certain abilities, rather than types of objects.

--Kim Anubis 09:37, 28 April 2007 (PDT)

Topics:

• Proof that a person can use the edit controls in basic ways. Create, select, move, rotate, copy, delete. Hollow, cut, resize, dimple. Convert one prim type into another. Resize using the edit window, resize by grabbing the points. Choosing colors and textures, aligning textures, transparent/opaque, fullbright. Understanding shiny, bumpmapped, and how alpha affects them. Grid modes.

• Linking and unlinking. Manipulating linked groups of prims (individually and as a group) - moving, texturing, coloring, resizing. Deleting a prim in a linkset. Knows that a stable linkset can't be a mix of phantom and real, etc. Understanding root vs child prims, and how that affects position, rotation, etc. Number and distance issues with linking. The existance of script tools that let you work around those limitations. The vehicle prim limit.

I'd suggest changing that last one to "prim limit for physics-enabled objects."

--Kim Anubis 09:37, 28 April 2007 (PDT)

• Knowledge of flexi limitations (only some shapes can be flexi, always phantom)

• Knowledge of lighting limitations( 6 sources, no shadows ).

• Alpha flicker and techniques to prevent it. Positioning, "blacksiding", etc.

• How to make a prim into an attachment. Setting it to an attachment point. Using the edit window's grid mode for attachments. Making a basic one-prim HUD.

Gee, if we have to use the grid, I'm gonna flunk. ;) There's more than one way to do some of these things.

--Kim Anubis 09:37, 28 April 2007 (PDT)

• Making "mini" prims with different techniques - cutting, dimpling, hollowing with a transparent texture on the outside.

• Oversized prims. How to do the ones that are technique (like flattening a 10M box to create a 15M plane) and best practices with the huge or mega prims that were introduced thru the Havoc hack (phantom is best, don't make them physical, bounding box and hollowing issues, beware of parcel boundaries).

I never bothered with megaprims because early on Linden Lab said they wouldn't be supported. Just went digging through the SL Wiki and the Knowledge Base, and did not find anything saying they're being supported now, but maybe you can turn up something?

--Kim Anubis 09:37, 28 April 2007 (PDT)

• Prim torture shapes.

This might be in an "advanced" section of the test?

--Kim Anubis 09:37, 28 April 2007 (PDT)

• Techniques to minimize your prim count.

• Texturing techniques that influence building. Shadowing, lighting, details, alpha games... texture maps. Textures and lag. Size, tiling, alpha channel issues, formats for upload. Common uses of alpha textures.

I often hire different people to do models and textures -- texturing is really a different specialized area and I'd like to see a separate certification for it. If I need someone to create a texture that will tile, I don't ask a modeler.

--Kim Anubis 09:37, 28 April 2007 (PDT)

• Balancing and minimizing lag. Textures, shapes, levels of detail, etc...

• Working with curves and organic shapes.

This area is about to change drastically, with the advent of the new Sculpted Prim. Eventually I suppose the certification will probably cover importing functional Sculpted Prim textures and applying them.

--Kim Anubis 09:37, 28 April 2007 (PDT)

• Basic script usage, more of a "drop it in and let it run" sort of thing. Animating textures, basic sound use, setting sit targets and assembling pose balls, removing hoverscript and particles, basic doors...

I don't know how much of this should really be included. Although some of them can do it, I don't require all of the modelers working for me to know how to do these things. I'm more likely to either hand them an already scripted door blank, or have the modeler pass the chair model to a programmer who'll add the sit target and sound player (whoopee cushion!).

--Kim Anubis 09:37, 28 April 2007 (PDT)