Using Lightwave to create Sculpty images and textures without making UV maps!

So I’ve been enjoying Second Life for about a year now. I have been an avid Lightwave 3D user since its début on the Video Toaster. The whole idea of Sculpty prims has always fascinated me. There are several programs and shaders that boast the ability to create Sculpty images from your object data using programs like Lightwave, Blender, Zbrush and wings 3D. The main problem in using a polygonal system to create Sculpty images is that the object must have a spherical or cylindrical UV map on it to facilitate the “Baking” during render. Baking the object gives you the ability to unwrap the surface of a rendered 3D object and save it as an image. In the 3D production pipeline, this is done to shorthand CPU expensive ray tracing scenes. The first frame is rendered with all the shaders like Radiosity, Caustics and area lighting enabled. Then the whole show is turned over to the more familiar simple textured environment where all surfaces are simply luminescent and lights are no longer involved.

Why is UV mapping an issue? Because it’s a royal pain in the ass to make a clean seamless spherical UV map on any irregular object! Even trying to make a UV map on a globe can be some trouble. Even a clean map will have triangular polygons lining the top and bottom. An obvious outcome when thinking of the nature of a globe.



It occurred to me that the spherical mapping of Sculpty prims could be aided by a rendering setup that involved a negative panoramic camera. I.E. a camera that would behave just like a normal panoramic camera, but point inwards! Thanks to lightwave9’s advanced camera, I was able to create a clean mapped UV globe. I then told Lightwave to treat this object like a camera, with its ray direction pointing toward a null object in the center if the scene. Voila! Anything you place inside the globe is automatically unwrapped as the render output. You can now render your Sculpty and texture maps automatically!

To make Sculpty images you will still need a shader to color the object appropriately.
Found here: (NOT NEEDED IN VERSION III) Lightwave Sculpty Plug-in

Here is the Lightwave project I created for the setup.
Lightwave Project

It’s important to mention that certain objects will still exhibit problems when converted to Sculpty images since all geometry is basically the radial deformation of a sphere. So, any geometry that shadows itself along the radial plane will appear solid all the way to the center. When placing your object in the scene, make sure it’s centered on the NULL object and that no geometry protrudes outside the sphere/cube.

I hope this is useful to someone!

I think this thread should get more attention! You've made creating Sculpty images much easier. I've used your scene with fantastic results! I was also able to turn off the shader and make a few regular image and occlusion maps for my Sculptys.

Only problem IMO is that Lightwave is expensive to own and thusly not many people have it.

links removed?

The links are enclosd with img tags.

This sounds incredibly interesting, CGI. I'm very new to LW, in fact I've only been using it for baking my textures, and I would love to learn more. I've downloaded and installed the plug-ins, but I'm not getting it to work properly -- would it be possible to ask for a very detailed explanation of the whole process?
Thank you so much!!
-Milla

By default, the one light in the scene is at 0%. So if you want to render your textures you will need to assign some luminosity to your object using Occlusion or some other kind of shading. You could just turn on the light if you want to, but that would make an object with the lighting already defined. I left the scene this way to best facilitate the creation of sculpties for SL. After installing the sculpty plug-in:

1- load Sculpt_Maker.lws

2- load your object and make sure to place it in the center of the sphere (helps if the object origin is centered in the geometry also)

3- go to UTILITIES/PLUGINS/ADDITIONAL, and from the drop-down list select: Turn Sculpt Shader ON

4- Select your object in the pop-up window and click OK

5- Press F9 to render a frame

It’s important to mention that the Sculpt shader needs to be applied by the master plugin. You can’t just select the shader from the surface panel like you would any other shader. (I believe this is done because in addition to applying the shader it also sets the diffuse to 0% on all surfaces.) After enabling the sculpt plug-in, I have had an issue where not all surfaces on the object get assigned the shader. You can go to the surfaces panel and make sure to enable the shader on each surface. (make sure there is only one per surface) Also, the sculpt shader may not jive with other shaders, so make sure it’s the only one. There are two camera's in the scene one is a regular Lightwave camera and the other is the default "Spherical UNWRAP Camera" feel free to switch between them to ensure that your object is shaded the way you want it.

That’s the best I can explain it. If you post a specific question about the process, I’ll do my best to answer it for you. It’s very easy when you get the hang of using this setup. You will find that never needing to make and bake UV’s on your target objects is a huge time saver!

Thanks for your interest and happy Lightwaving!

P.S. I was trying to post more pictures along with this post but the *[img]* fields seem to not be working for me!?

I can see the images in your first post. There is a forum setting in the "User CP" which you will need to have checked for images to be visible:
"Show Images (including attached images and images in [IMG]code)"

Thank you so much CGI! I'm gonna do some more playing around now and hopefully get it working

this works great!! thankyou much easier!
im woring out how to make sharp edges better
Thanks!!!

Thanks for the feedback!

OK… After running several tests I have concluded that the d-storm Sculpty shader is UNRELIABLE.

I won’t bore you with the details and comparison; suffice it to say that in several cases the Sculpty map was not using all of the available data bandwidth.
The provided project folder now has a new version of the Sculpt_Maker scene v(III). Included is a surface preset to be used in conjunction with the setup. You must place this preset file into your Lightwave WorkSpace folder. Included is a text file describing the file path to the correct location.

-------copy of text file--------
Place the Sculpty10M_Offset.pst file into the workspace folder
File path example:
c:\Program Files\NewTek\LightWave 3D 9\Programs\Presets\Surface Editor\Surface Preset\WorkSpace
-----------------------------------

The procedeure for Sculpt_MakerIII
1. Same as above
2. Same as above
3. Open the surface editor and select the surface of your object
4. Press F8 to bring up the preset panel and double click the Sculpty10M_Offset to assign it to your surface.
5. Same as above



This scene differs in that the sculpt shading is now a clean global effect. When you load the scene you will see a ten meter cube made out of points. All you need to do is make sure your object fits inside this box. You should stretch out your object in Lightwave so that it completely fills out the cube. That way you’ll be using all the data bandwidth you can. The d-storm shader was empirical in its allocation and would generally map all available values. Unfortunately the X and Z axis were often way off center when mapping more complex objects. (DON'T USE THE D-STORM SHADER WITH vIII)

Remember, you don’t need to deform a cylinder or sphere. You can just model any way you’re used to and load that puppy in. In my provided example I have created a 5 blade propeller. As you can see... The final model is short on the vertical axis. I stretched it up to fill in box before rendering my Sculpty with greatly improved results.

Cheers!

version 2 is working good but version 3 im having trouble it renders inside out
and making a black outline in the sculpt texture
i maybe doing something wrong

Fixed: Inside out Sculpty map

Also you should have an option in game to flip your sculpties.
I have tested the spherical camera again and it’s working fine for me. Make sure you position your object correctly. Any black in the render means that your object does not overlap the center Null. This means that the camera has a view of the background along that axis.

1. Try to reposition your object.

2. Try setting the background color to 128 128 128 (total grey) that will make the background appear as center in your Sculpty.

This is the first method I tried in LW9 when sculpties came out. Although it seems very cool at first, you'll find its very limited and you get no control over the baked vertices, which leads to inefficient, sloppy models. The biggest downside: If you have multiple faces in the rays path, it generally wont work (I think the technical term is concave models??)

Its great for very simple, organic shapes though, with the added bonus of being able to bake out your texture and lighting very easily too.


The only way you'll get a nice clean professional result is by doing it the hard way

I also just noticed that you provided a surface preset to create the x,y,z gradients. This works, but its a pain because it removes all your current surface texturing and you might accidentally save the model and kill all your previous hard work

I guess I can contribute something here. I wrote a quick lscript shader which you can add to the surface shader tab and toggle on/off without destroying your surface texturing. Copy/paste into a text file and call it "sculpty-project-shader.ls". Save it in your plugins directory "\Program Files\NewTek\LightWave 3D 9\Plugins", start layout > utilities > add plugins. This works for the 10m world coords in CGI's scene

//--------- Cut below this line ---------

@version 2.3
@script shader

color;

create
{
}

init
{
//debug();
}

flags
{
return(COLOR);
}

process: sa
{
sa.luminous = 1.0;
sa.diffuse = 1.0;
sa.specular = 0.0;
sa.mirror = 0.0;
sa.transparency = 0.0;
sa.eta = 0.0;
sa.roughness = 0.0;
sa.color[1] = 0.5*(1.0 + ((sa.wPos[1]/10)*2.0));
sa.color[2] = 0.5*(1.0 + ((sa.wPos[2]/10)*-2.0));
sa.color[3] = 0.5*(1.0 + ((sa.wPos[3]/10)*2.0));
}

cools thanks!
ya i tried a concave model it cuts it off inside

funk what is the hard way to make sculptys in Lightwave?

By "hard way" I just mean starting from a predefined shape (eg. a sphere) which is already correctly UV mapped, then deforming it into the shape you want.

I basically use the shapes I found on the wings3d thread on these forums, and fine tuned them for my use as a starting base.

ah ya for making an easy UVmap
thats the way im doing them now

Hey... I'm a Looooooong time LW modeler, and Poser artist looking to convert some of my talent into SL.

If I'm getting this straight, a sculpted PRIM is a UV Mapped sphere that is 32 sides x 33 Segments, and all one surface. Or is it 33 sides by 32 segments?

I've been digging the net for about 3 days now and I'm STILL not sure.

Since I'm a way better modeler than texture artist, and have little to no experience with baking, the "hard way" would actually be a hell of a lot easier for me.

I could do some wondrous things with a 1026 polygon sphere. Hell, I built a whole DAZ Mike 3 texture compatible figure with >2600 polys. (Not a typo. Twenty Six Hundred.)

Is there a place I can download the Prims I have to work with?

Can an OBJ, or even 3DS be loaded into SL instead of all this texture voodoo?
Is there any normal 3D object format LW can output too so I can get my shapes in SL?

If I must go through the texture motions, is there a REALLY simple program that can take a modded Prim, and generate the needed textures from it.

Sorry to come off belligerent, but it's been like asking for a street address to some place, and only getting turn by turn direction to get there in response. FROM EVERYONE!!!
I'm dyslexic. You have no idea how hard it is for me to figure out a long string of "right and left" directions.

As an incentive... I will make a CUSTOM sculpted prim of your choice for every body part you can attach something too, to any one who can show me how it's done.

That's a whole suit of friggin Scupltie Prim armor. And... I share the Sell rights with you.

If that offer doesn't bring the love... NOTHING will.

what you need to do in LW is make a UV texture that fits the shape 32x32 is best but not requirement thats the level of detail on a sculpty more and you get less detail kinda.
with LW9 its easier to render the sculpty
a good basics tutorial is here:
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Patchouli_Woollahra/Lightwave_Sculptie_Rendering

in LW 6-8 you need to make a surface that will render the sculpy
the reason its best to use a sphere,cube,or cylinder is they are easy to UV map then you can form/deform it to your sculpty with out adding polys or points.

I admonish anyone reading to consider this project a viable alternative to all other methods of Sculpty creation. Used in conjunction with Sculpty Paint, this solution provides a very fast and high quality result. As mentioned before, the added surface preset will clobber all your previous surface settings. Just make a second copy of your object and after the color-map render, use the (replace object with) command for your Sculpty render. Or use the lscript kindly provided by Funk Schnook. Good show Funk, TY!

Using only a modest amount of care, you can turn almost any object into a nice Sculpty map. Just keep in mind that the camera will only see one surface along the radial plane. Positioning your object while keeping this in mind will yield good results. (Center null is the radius origin) Breaking up your object into two or more parts will allow even more complex shapes to be created. Also, this project is instantly scalable. Since you don’t need to create a special object before beginning, you can have an unlimited amount of fidelity in your sculpt maps. SL will likely be able to take advantage of that in the not too distant future.
Control points be damned. >




SculptyMakerII and III

Which version of LW are you guys using? I just downloaded v9.3.1 (latest available for Mac) and I get this error message when I attempt to open CGI's Sculpt_MakerIII.lwo file
"This scene file requires a newer version of LightWave"

Thanks,
-Milla

Hello Milla,
You will need the latest version of Lightwave to take advantage of this project.
Lightwave 9.5 build 1445

Not that I condone such action, however, there is a Torrent of the latest version cracked by X-Force. Look for that name. You basically install the program and then replace one or two files with the provided "fixed" ones. I recommend Utorrent client.

Happy sculpty creation!

Final results on a 4 blade ship prop.