Sculpties texturing

I'm on my first steps on sculpties. I'm quite clear on the modelling options but I'm not clear on the texturing option.

I understood that with Wings3D texturing has to be done in a separate step using a tool like GIMP or Photoshop. The 3D tools helps you with the UV mapping (which part of the texture goes where) but you can't "paint" over the 3d model and having the texture exported as a single image.

Am I correct? Is there any other option (free or low cost alternatives to tools like Deep Paint)? Would Blender help better?

Yes it would. The texture painting support is currently being improved so I'd recommend a test build of the "projection-paint" branch if texturing is your primary interest.

I'd try one of the daily builds for your platform from http://graphicall.org eg Win 32 Lite Projection Paint.

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=139677 is following the development of that branch.

It is not clear to me what you are saying about Wings, so I will say it my way.

You can make a scultpy *shape* in Wings. You can also import a surface texture from a 2D tool such as Gimp or PS taht you apply to the shape in Wings. You can also use a UV map, a sort of ceckerboard pattern, to help you align what you paint in your 2D tool with the Wings 3D shape.

...and yes, ther are other ools that are more like painting directly on the shape.

In either case, you end up with two textures that you upload to SL. On is used to make the shape, the other is the "paint" that goes on the surface of the shape.

Thanks for your answers guys.

What I would like to achieve is to texture the sculpt directly in the modeling program. Then I would like to have the program generating the texture to apply to the sculpt itself.

From what I've seen so far, we have many tools to create a sculpt shape but few or none to create the overlay texture.

You can paint directly on your shape with zBrush. It's not free but there is a free, fully functional 30 day trial. I think it may be possible to paint directly on the 3D shape in the new Photoshop CS4 as well.

I remember a free program that is similar to deep paint, but cannot remember the name.

Hmm, This might be it - Blacksmith3D. There is a freeware version that allows for import of objects and saving of textures. Might be worth a look.

http://www.blacksmith3d.com/index.htm

I just did a quick test with the free version of Blacksmith3D. Loaded in a sculpty that I had made earlier, painted on it, and exported the texture. Works like a charm.

The free version doesn't include modeling functions, but certainly worth a look for texturing.

What a great find, Vlad! I wish I'd known about that back in my pre-Zbrush days. Of course, one quick credit card number and $540 later....

o.O hehe It does look pretty interesting. Of course it is quite limited when compared to zBrush's texturing tools - but pretty spiffy for a free program.

It's not none. There's not a lot in the way of sculptie specific documention for texturing in Blender yet, but you can use the full power of Blender's texturing features and as I mentioned, the 3D painting features are having a major overhaul. Even with these new features only available in a development branch for less than a month, there's already one person who has decided to use it in preference to ZBrush for a commercial project.

http://dominodesigns.info/second_life/blender_scripts_export_prims.html has an example blend file for procedural texturing of a sculptie. I'm always open to questions if you need any help figuring things out.

@Vlad
That seems very promising! I stiil have to get some of the function but seems rather easy to use!

@Domino
Thanks Domino! So far I've been put off by Blender UI complexity. I'm sure I will get back to it one of this days. Is the new version available for preview somewhere? I didn't find the link from blender.org and I'm too short of time to try to build it myself from source.
Maybe the new painting functions will make me decide to jump into Blender

Thanks all!

If you learn Blender from tutorials rather than trying to figure it out by playing with the UI, it's not as scary as it looks

http://graphicall.org has daily builds of interesting development branches. "Win 32 Lite Projection Paint" is the one with these new features.

http://blenderunderground.com has a good introductory set of video tutorials for Blender.

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/ has sculptie specific tutorials.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Ideasman42#Projection_Painting has info on what works and what's planned for the projection paint feature.

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showpost.php?p=1260014&postcount=195 has a tutorial on how to use reference images to make the models texture with projection painting.

I've stumbled upon BlackSmith 3d (http://www.blacksmith3d.com/) that it is supposed to do exactly what I was looking for: painting on a 3D model and getting the resulting texture (based on the UV mapping).

Has anyone already tried the freeware version?

RD

I wanted to bump this up because I was looking for just this sort of info and had to dig - hope it helps someone else- sorry for the necro-post if not of interest.

Can you explain how you did this? When I have tried this, I painted on a texture, and as I painted it on it would look good, and then when I stopped painting it would pause a second and then the texture would just blur out.. as if I had zoome in about 20x on it so I was seeing a giant pixelized version. Even when I have gotten the texture to look ok, whenever I tried to import it back into SL and apply it , it didn't seem to map it nearly the same way it did in Blacksmith.. it came out all distorted.... I don't know what i'm doing wrong with it.

Domino

Does win32 projection paint make is possible to paint direct onto the sculpty?

if so which version should we download from the site?
there appears to be win32 lite and win 32 lite 2.50


thanks in anticipation

You already could. It just gives much better ways of doing so.

The Win 32 Lite one is the one to get from graphicall.org - that's essential what will shortly become blender 2.49

The 2.50 version is a preview of what's coming with the major overhaul of Blender's code. Worth checking out occasionally to watch the progress, but not for everyday use yet.

Not paying enough attention to feature inclusion in upcoming versions... I know that Volumetrics is coming up soon, but I'm not sure if that's in 2.49 or 2.50, would you happen to know?

http://www.blendernation.com/2009/04/24/blender-249-release-candidate-1/

I don't think a version for volumetrics is set yet. Maybe 2.50 as that's the version Durian will use, and that's the movie SFX project where volumetrics would be very nice to have.

Thank you ^-^

Actually 2.51 is more likely for volumetrics. Durian will use 2.50 as the starting point, so any features added for that project will end up in 2.51 if it follows the pattern of the other open projects.

I DL'ed this and for the life of me cannot figure how to even open the sculpt in it to begin attempting to paint on it. The help isn't terribly helpful- how did you get your image in it?

Edted- OK- nevermind - figured, it said drop image on there so i did that - not seeing anything yet though so maybe it takes a while to show... staring at white screen hough after several minutes...

When Vlad says here he loaded a sculpty - that would be the same sort of file we would upload to SL? The 'rainbow' iridescent oneright? I am not seeing anything appear on the screen.
Thanks -

Additional if related question- I have a sculpt I made using Tokoroten - I also have Z-Brush but do not yet know how to use it - is there a way to get my tokoroten sculpt into Z-Brush? I see it wants OBJ files- but the Tokoroten output is tga - is there a program to turn the tga into an OBJ? Damn it- I want to paint on this thing!
Thank you foks.

Blacksmith doesn't understand anything about the SL-specific sculpty format. So you need to give it a format it does understand, namely an .obj file. In addition, the .obj file must already contain the sculpty-specific UV map. There are undoubtedly other ways to produce an appropriate .obj file from a sculpty bitmap, but the one I know uses Wings 3D. To use Wings, simply import your bitmap as a sculpty. The importer will automatically create the appropriate UV map. Now export the model as a Wavefront(.obj) file and you're good to go.

To do the painting with Blacksmith, use the File/Import command to import the .obj file. In the main Blacksmith window, you should now see your model with the words "No Map Applied" stamped on it. (If it says something like "No UV Map" instead, your .obj file didn't have a UV map, and you'll have to go back and resolve that.)

Beware that Blacksmith is very loose with their use of the terms map and texture. What we need to do next is create a new texture, but to do that we need to select the "Maps" tab in the panel on the right. Right click on the background of the Maps pane and select "Create new Map". This is actually the texture file you will be importing into SL. Give it a name and size and press OK. Now switch to the Manager Tab, which shows an outline of your model. Expand the Materials node and you should see "default". Click on that and you'll get a window with a number of possible settings. The only one relevant for this task is the Color property. Select the texture you just created.

That should be it. You can now paint directly on the 3D model. To have Blacksmith create the texture file that you can import into SL, go to the Maps tab, right click on your texture and choose export. Make sure you export it in a format that SL can import, e.g. .BMP.

I have not actually done much with Blacksmith beyond verifying that it works in the simple cases I have tried. There may well be gotchas. I would start by doing a rough texturing and making sure it is appearing in SL as you expect, before spending time on getting the painting just right.

Hope this helps.

Thank you Ormei - I will give it a shot too

You can open the TGA in sculptypaint and export as an obj. I'd hurry up and get over to shiny life and watch some zbrush tutorials as Tokoroten, while accessible and simple, makes some rough looking sculpts.