I used to use modo and zbrush to create sculpties (sculpted prims) for Second Life. Yesterday, I stumbled on Blender and spent a huge part of the day throwing things on various objects in draping experiments (it’s kind of mesmerizing in a similar fashion to action painting). It generally takes me a few days to get used to a new 3d modeling program, but I found myself getting into Blender in just a few hours, and even had time to record a tutorial on draping cloth in Blender that first day. Now, more and more, I think Blender is AWESOME for making sculpted prims because:

1. You can reorient the bounding box of the sculpty simply by re-setting the Axes (Press F9, Center New).
2. Realtime-esque Cloth-draping, and select whichever frame of the simulation you want to use, then 1-click export using the (also) open-source Blender sculpty conversion scripts by Domino! (See the 5-minute tutorial here.)
3. Blender’s OOP-ness makes it easy to automagically turn things into other things (literally!), as well as to rewire things from a “holistic Matrix-sort of backend view”, and its non-linear layers make it fun to have a variety of sculpts (especially simulation-based cloth-sculpts) in the same file, without the scene getting grotesquely messy. It’s also an interesting way to get organized.
4. Using a lattice modifier to sculpt is awesome!
5. Blender is not only free, but also open source!
   1. If you’ve got that crazy idea weighing you down, you can go right into it and mod it from code!
   2. Also, I’m of the belief that traditional modes of software licenses will soon become extinct… While it used to be that o/s software often died out after their lead gets corp-cannibalized, it seems the exact opposite nowadays. Migrating to open source now is, interestingly, an investment for the future — both in funds saved and time saved.

After a hiatus of about 4 years, I stumbled back to Blender (which I used to write tutorials for on Wikibooks) today to do some CG fur and cloth tricks. I’ve been using Modo for the past two years or so, and have long since forgotten how to use Blender. Blender seems much more intuitive and loads more developed, and I found myself getting in sync with it pretty quickly. It seems like a nice (not to mention free!) tool to create sculpted prims for Second Life — and I thought I might contribute a tutorial on how to make cloth in Blender for use as sculpted prims (”sculpted cloth?”) in Second Life.

Now, there are several ways to do this, but I’m using the Cloth simulation tool (which also lets you select which keyframe to choose to freeze it at — you can even make a sculpted cloth animation in SL using this, by exporting the sculpt texture from each frame). Details are summarized in this quick and dirty screencast tutorial I’ve put together. (I also discovered a new free online service and free screencast software called Jing. Here’s my first tutorial video using Jing & Screencast!)

Selecting in Blender Edit Mode

Blender offers several convenient means of selecting things, when you want to grab multiple vertices, edges, or faces.

• Border Select: Press B, then LMB and draw a box around what you want to select. | MMB deselcts
• Brush Select: Press BB, then “brush” over the vertices you want to select. RMB or ESC to exit. | MMB deselects
• Lasso Select: Ctrl + LMB selects | Shift + Ctrl + LMB deslects

Selecting in Blender Object Mode

Home, fits all on screen; Right click, press . to zoom into that object

Local View, shows only currently selected object: /

References. These Glen Moyes video tutorials go over the basics in a decently organized way.