Introduction to Furniture
The most straightforward products to make for IMVU are furniture item. They are a class of item that can be put inside a room. They can be interactive or non-interactive; static or animated; wall, floor, or ceiling mounted. They enhance a rooms appearance or function.
What is Furniture
In a nutshell, furniture is a class or category of items that can be placed by the user into rooms onto various nodes called furniture nodes. So long as a furniture item is correctly set up to accommodate this furniture » room node system the item itself can be anything from chairs, to flying bats, swimming fish, to drivable cars. Imagination is the only limitation!.
Where to Start
Before starting it’s important to first get to grips with Blender, although furniture can be very straightforward to make for IMVU, doing so requires being able to ‘mesh’, that is make and manipulate objects in Blender, to generate Materials and assign them along with UV mapping images so meshes look like they’re made from something other than flat colors.
All a furniture product is at its core, is a mesh, attached to a node named “Root” which tells IMVU where to place the mesh.
More complicated furniture products will have more nodes to accommodate places for users to interact with the furniture product.
Physical size:
there are no limits on how big items appear to be to the User (visual size).
File size: project size is limited to two megabytes (2MB) – think of the final project contained inside a folder, everything in this must total no more than 2MB per product otherwise upload will fail.
Texture Size: the images assigned to meshes should generally be 256 x 256 pixels wide/high, and no larger than 512 pixel in any one direction, i.e. 256 x 512 or 512 x 256 but not 512 x 512 (this will be automatically resized by IMVU on import to 256 x 256 resulting in detail loss).
Relative size: make sure to use small textures for small elements or features that are rarely seen, using a full 256 x 256 consumes precious file space.