Wings 3D Specific Questions for Sculpties

I would like to start a branch of the Building Tips specific to Wing 3D. The reason for this is that there are many tutorials out there for Wings 3D that show how to create objects which cannot be exported as a sculpty texture map for import into SL. These constrains make me thing an area of focus just on using Wings 3D for sculpties might help other would-be sculptors as well.

Beyond the concept of a thread, a branch of the Forum under Building Tips might also help us sort through the clutter of all the other Building Tips. For me, my in-world building skills are well developed, but for now my focus is to branch out to the creation of original sculpties using Wings 3D.

Some basic issues that confuse me are:

1) There are only a limited number of shapes that can be successfully exported as Sculpt Maps. Why is this the case? This is a hard concept to understand.

2) Some of the Wings 3D tutorials indicate that basic starting shapes were imported into wings, while other tutorials indicate that we can start with shapes created directly inside Wings 3D. How do we know which shapes work and which do not?

3) There are sculpty shape TYPES in SL that can be altered from the basic sphere mode through scripts. What relationship does this have to the shape we choose to use in Wings 3D for our starting point?

Some operations in Wings 3D will destroy the ability of the object to be exported as a sculpty map. What is the best way to understand this beyond simply listing and memorizing all of the operations that will destroy the ability to export the object properly.

Anyone have other thoughts on this approach to isolating Sculpty/Wings3D as a separate branch of the Building Tips?

Hi;

i am not a wings expert, but i think i can answer your questions as they are of general nature and not wings specific.

To my knowledge LL has stopped to add new branches to this forum. I found a note about this some weeks ago, when i was thinking about proposing the same idea for a blender-branch. Sorry, i couldn't find the link to the note but i remember it was written by a linden somewhere in the knowledge base...

Sculpties are technically spoken just "bended planes". So only object shapes, which can be created by bending a plane can be exported as sculptie.

For which types of objects work, see the answer above. For how sculpties are implemented in Wings i cant tell.

This has to do with the "stitching type":

PLANE: no stitching

CYLINDER: stitched at one side. think your plane rolled up and glued together at one side, hence you get a cylinder with open ends.

SPHERE: same as cylinder, but the end caps are pinned all together thus closing the mesh. I think, that the only difference between cylinder and sphere regarding implementation is that SPHERE objects always get automatically closed at the poles, hence the lowest and the highest row of the sculptie mesh get pinned alltogether automatically regardless, where they are (i am not 100% sure though and at the moment i can't check it ...)

TORUS: stitched like cylinder, then the cylinder is bended to a 360 degree circle and stitched together again thus forming a donut.

Sculpties can only have a very specific mesh topology. Think about a plane with 33 vertices along the x-axis and 33 vertices along the y-axis. all vertices are connected vertically and horizontally with their neighbours. THis is the mesh topology, which can be used to create a sculptie. Every operation, that destroyes this mesh topology will in general make the shape "unexportable" to SL. e.g.: You cant make holes in your sculptie. You cant add vertices to your sculptie...

Put it in the Wiki.

Ethos,

Sculpties are idiosyncratic beasts, unique to SL. Any general-purpose 3D modeling application is going to have lots of capabilities which are not appropriate for creating sculpties. But the rules of things to avoid will vary from tool to tool.

In the case of Wings, the modeling constraints are pretty easy to state. 1) Either start with one of the provided templates or import an existing sculpty, and 2) Don't use any commands that add or remove vertices. The reasoning behind these rules is that the exporter knows what to do if you follow them, and probably won't know what to do if you violate them. If at some point you decide to get a deep understanding of sculpties and the exporter, you may create ways to get around these constraints, but I suggest you not worry about it until then. If you just can't wait, http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims:_Technical_Explanation is a good place to start.

Note that this does not at all limit the *shapes* you can export. Any sculpty that can be imported into SL can be built with Wings.

As to starting a Wings-specific forum here, I think that is a non-starter from the Linden's point of view. I'm not sure why, but they seem to see the forums as an albatross that they would be just as happy to see go away. I'll echo Lee's suggestion -- put your energy into the SL Wiki. Coming to Wings and sculpties afresh puts you in a good position to see gaps that Lee or I might see right past. As you come to learn things that are useful, but aren't in the Wiki, please add them. Don't even worry if they aren't 100% accurate; I can fix them up.