Wings Tutorial #3 - 1 Prim Interlocking Rings

This will be the last tutorial for a bit until I get some feedback as to what most people want to see next. So if you want to see more, please comment!

In this installment we'll make a pair of interlocking rings that look for all the world like they're not even connected to each other. You could stretch them horizontally to make long rounded-rectangular chain links that you couldn't do with a traditional torus prim, too.

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To get started, you'll need a copy of Wings and Omei's excellent Sculpty import/export plugin.
I assume you've at least played around a bit in Wings before and have a general grasp of basic camera controls. If you're having trouble getting Wings or the sculpty plugin to work, please do a search and find one of the existing Wings troubleshooting threads.

Here's a quick hotkey reference, just in case:

x, y, z - Look down the x, y, or z axis
v, e, f, b - enter vertex, edge, face, and object selection mode
o - toggle orthographic view
r - reset view
a - aim camera at current selection
space - deselect current selection
tab - numeric entry
w - toggle wireframe view

One important step you will need to perform before following along with this tutorial: in Wings, go to Edit, Preferences, Advanced, and make sure Advanced Menus is checked.
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You'll need to use the SLImageUpload tool to complete this tutorial (As of SL Version 1.18.3(4)) , available here:
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLImageUpload

If you want to skip to the final version without using the SLImageUpload tool, here's the relevant LSL code:

default
{
state_entry()
{
llSetPrimitiveParams( [PRIM_TYPE, PRIM_TYPE_SCULPT, "72711f3c-08c5-dd1f-6a67-a9cd4ec613f9", PRIM_SCULPT_TYPE_SPHERE ] );
llSetTexture( "961df592-d871-23da-4e2c-c098e51b7df4", ALL_SIDES );
}
}

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If the video is huge and blurry, go to the lower right corner of the video window and click on the arrow, and select 'double size'. Then it will be small and blurry.
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Video link:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1896380109653226562


Thanks for watching! Please post your comments and suggestsions if you want to see more! I hope I'm not teaching crickets and tumbleweeds...

This is great, once again, Daniel! Your technique for breaking a single prim into discontigous pieces is really innovative. I sure hope you get enough positive feedback to do more tutorials. You are taking sculpties to a new level. If people are slow to give you specific feedback, it may be because many (most?) Wings users here are still using Wings at a fairly basic level, and it isn't easy to immediately grok your methods. But just knowing that these things can be done in Wings is going to spur more people to go beyond the basics.

Seriously! This is fantastic. I just finished all three tutorials and they are truly amazing.


Exactly! It actually took me several attempts to get these to work (and my stairs are still seriously bad ) but once I got some of the basic steps and commands figured out it made sense. The tutorials are as useful for learning some basic Wing3D commands as they are for making sculpties. Now that I have watched these I feel much more confident in trying to make other sculpted shapes. Until now I've been using Rokuro and some of the in-world modeling programs - with pretty limited success.

Please - make some more tutorials - doesn't matter what. I'll probably not ever make rings or necklaces but the information I got with these tutorials has been fantastic.

Thanks again,

Doug Danforth

One question about Wings as seen in the tutorial.
How do you pan the camera view as seen in the tutorial?
Thanks
Ethan


As mentioned above, these tutorials are great for learning the basic commands. Please give us more, perhaps a curvy, bumpy pathway to which we could apply a ground texture or a moving water texture?

You can pan the camera by hitting Q when you're in tumble mode (click middle mouse button). Pathways and other such heightmaps are more easily done in a paint program. Thanks for your feedback

What is "tumble mode"? The only thing that happens when I use my middle mouse button is that the "Erlang" Window opens up.
Thanks again

tumble mode moves the camera around the selection focus ( your object usually) as you move the mouse around. If you don't enter tumble mode on clicking your middle mouse button you should check that your middle mouse button or scroll wheel or whatever it is is set to generate 'middle mouse click' in your mouse control panel.

That did the trick, my middle button needed adjusting. Thank you very much.
Ethan

Great stuff, Daniel, as always.

Here are some ideas for future tutorials.

A few more basics, like how do you apply the materials.

A conceptual one. How do you think? For example, you decide to make a ladder. OK. How do you think about the ladder shape before you start?

Some other generic projects, that illustrate useful principles. Such as...

A Cowboy Hat.

A Face Mask.

A Rugby Ball.

A Sword Blade

A Furry Head.

A Tail

Fake Ground.

A Coral Reef.

Half eaten ice cream cone

hands

feet

elf ears

well, the list goes on and on. I am NOT saying you should do all of these, but if you see one that you think would illustrate great Wings3D technique...

regards,
lee

Moe about creating textures for the sculpties...

Yes, thanks for these tutorials Daniel. They're a big help for us 3d novices.

And just keep making the tutorials that you think we need, not the ones we ask for.
I might have asked for a staircase tutorial, but I would never have thought to ask for a tutorial about interlocking rings, because I never even knew that it was possible. When did the students ever set the agenda in a classroom?

Thank you so much Daniel your tutorials are not only educational but inspiring and motivational makes me want to get creating! Please keep them coming!

Suggestions for future tutorials:

Applying Textures
Baked Textures
Baked Lighting
UVMapping



Thanks again,
ORO

Applying Textures
Baked Textures
Baked Lighting
UVMapping

Second that.

These two I would find very useful; just creating reasonable organic shapes is useful.

I'm going to follow the tutorials later on, but are these created in a way specific to sculpty creation? A guide on how best to take an existing 3d model (or one developed using regular 3d tools) which is then to be turned into a sculpty would be great. Since it allows an object to be developed using any tools and then hopefully tweaked to become a sculpty.

hello Daniel, first i come from Germany and my english is not the best,
but i wanna congratulate you are blessed with an talent teach complex situations
in round terms i watch your tutorials and lern a lot, not only about sculptie creation
but also about 3D generally thank you very much
best wishes
greets
Markuso

Again, Daniel... wonderful tutorials, and hope to see more ^^ If I find something I can do that you haven't shown how to here, I'll make one too perhaps.. though I doubt it would have your quality lol... but I could try =P

Maybe for MoI....

Anyways, here are my rings.. I was worried that the Windlight 'glow' effect would end up showing the tiny strand...but alas, just the two rings! Wonderful, and glad to know that glow won't hurt it ^^

EDIT:: One thing that I didn't follow exactly was when making the two cylinders, I did not make it perfectly aligned, tucking in the ends. I did it by eye, so that it would be imperfect, as metal rings like this would be welded, not perfect in most cases, and I felt it might look more accurate ^^ Cant realy tell in my shot though because of the glow

Hey folks, I'm trying to download the tutorial template found in this thread but the zip is corrupted. Anyone able to upload an alternative? I really really need it. I managed to save over my copy with a sculpty lol!

Thanks in advance,

Thas

LOD is the simplification of the object mesh depending on your distance from it. The first LOD level reduces the amount of verts by half, then half again for the next level.

The smaller the object is in the bounding box, the further away you can see it. Pulling 1 dimensionally pinched lines of verts away from the model will increase the bounding box in that direction. It's a messy and impractical way of doing it.

There are a couple of other ways of doing this, but not in wings.

I see that I am a late arrival to these tutorials, but they have been very helpful to me as I struggle along. I have many questions, but I will start with a simple one. Why isn't there a SL cube in the list of pre-made starting shapes?

I would also love to see tutorials on texturing these scupties.

THx
BM