Sculpty Avatar

Hey Community,

Could someone point me to a get started on how to make a sculpted SL Avatar from the mesh that is provided by SL already? I am using blender and was able to import the generic avatar already but I am not sure where to go from where to export it as a sculpt.

Thank You

There's two approaches to doing this. The first is just start adding sculpt meshes to the scene, and use the avatar as a 3D reference to model around. This is the easiest way to do it, and is also likely to give the best results as you can better allow for sculptie limits this way.

The other approach is to take the avatar mesh and split it into sculptie sized pieces. Select the faces you want to be a single sculptie and seperate them (p key). To each piece, you add any necessary seams and unwrap to the entire UV map.

Thank You for the tips.
To go into a bit more of detail and perhaps draw a wider audiance what I am trying to accomplish is make a scult of an avatar that has roughlt the same vertice alignment as an SL default avatar. Reason behind this is to display clothing inworld.

It's not something I've done but here's the approach I'd use:

It's the UV map alignment that is important with this. You'd need to use the second approach with planar sculpties. Each piece must be contained by the avatar UV map, so you'll get front and back pieces. After separating the pieces, just rescale their existing UV map so that each piece uses as much of the sculpt map as possible and assign each to a new 64 x 64 image. Enable fill holes when you do the sculptie bake as this will fill the edges that aren't uv mapped. In SL you'll then need to adjust the texture mapping so each piece gets the relevant part of the clothing texture.

As a big part of clothing look comes from it's shape, not all clothing textures are going to look right on a model done this way. You may need unique sculpties for each outfit. Flared cuffs are one example where the outfit shape has a large impact on the look.

It's also likely to be extremely difficult to get good seams for texturing as the avatar unwrap is not to a nice clean grid like sculpties are. All in all, bringing the outfit into blender and using "bake active to selected" to transfer the textures to sculpties made with approach 1 will give far better results.

http://dominodesigns.info has an avatar.blend file for download that has all the clothing shape keys.