Sculpties texturing

I'd be interested to hear of your experience. If it works as well in practice as it seems to, it deserves more visibility.

This!! Excellent- I had not thought of doing that- the sculpty paint step. I made a rather decent torkoroten sculpt of some butterfly wings (a tad thicker than they shd be but the shape overall is good). Just had not figured how to get my Gimp made texture on to it in an attractive fashion.

I have been watching the Z-Brush tuts by Vlad for the last couple nights. As I have no need of a mushroom right now I am attempting same butterfly- I was at a friend's sim last night and she had made some beautiful floating lily pads and swimming fish! So I am diligently tryig to get thru the tut. While it has been helpful since Z-Brush is far from anythng that could be called intuitive for some one not familiar with 3-D apps - me - his tut has been helpful so far. It gets a little hard to follow at times 'cause he kind of meanders off the topic then comes back and sometimes the cam moves way to fast for me to catch. But still it has helped me to at least figure out a little better how the interface works. I tried using my Gimp image of the wing to 'form' the z-brush clay over it- I am having some issues with that, but I have only tried it the one time. Will keep hammerign away

Most of my work is on macs. Is this available there?

Yes. http://dominodesigns.info/second_life/blender_scripts.html has instructions and a link to Blender in the useful links at the right hand side. I'd recommend the RC development scripts for normal use.

And projection paint is now a standard feature in Blender 2.49, so just the normal download for mac will do.

I got the download pack and installed. How do I import the sculpt into the painter? Tried for quite a while to figure it out and hunted all over for info on it but found none. Can anyone give me pointers as to how to import the sculpt map into blacksmith as an object?

See post #22, above, no?

Eegosh, how'd I miss that on the first run through here. THANK YOU!
I thought I'd read the entire thread, my mistake.... I do try to read first and then ask.
I suppose I should try reading after I've had enough sleep!

I've tried Blacksmith 3d based on how it is explained in #22. That set of instructions did come the closest, but the scale of the graphics texture was very small. Example: solid color on a face in Blacksmith 3d becomes a tiny version of it somewhere on the sculpted prim in SL. The SL parts were done with a matching set. The sculpty I painted on was the same model I put the graphic on in SL. I don't think it is actually scale though. I was unable to find parameters in the Textures tab (in SL) to adjust the graphic to fit the prim in a correct way.

Davoda, it sounds like the .obj file you imported into Blacksmith didn't have a proper UV map. The UV map is what specifies how a texture is applied to the sculpty. I'm guessing your sculpty .obj file was made with a tool that doesn't put a proper UV map into the .obj file.

There is more than one way to get the UV map into the .obj file, but the simplest one I know of is to use Wings 3D with the sculpty plug-in. Import your sculpty .bmp (not .obj) file and then export the sculpty as a .obj file. The import process will create the UV map, which will be transfered to the exported .obj file.

Wings3d is the only one I've used for the model making, SL sculpty exporting and also OBJ exporting. The obj exports from Wings 3d sure do turn out perfect in any other application I import those obj's into... graphic texture and model. I'm getting closer with Blacksmith 3d paint jobs in SL. At least my colored polygons are closer to the size of what is on the prim today. Still not fitting even with stretching and some other parameter adjustments. It is looking hopeful with Blacksmith 3d at this point.

OK. I hope you'll post whatever errors/omissions you discover in the instructions of post#22. Or start a Wiki page for Blacksmith 3D.

I've tried it a few more times. I have to put Blacksmith in the scrap pile and find something else.

My latest attempt was to open the .wings file with the properly sculpted model which always works to make a sculpty in SL. I exported a new SL sculpty from that. Closed everything. Imported the new SL sculpty into Wings. Exported new obj for Blacksmith to paint on. That scheme resulted in the very tiny squares that I wrote about. In SL, I used the new file made from wings and the new graphic made in Blacksmith3d.

The later attempts were done by exporting obj files from having the .wings project loaded instead of making a sculpty file and importing it back into Wings. Those made obj's which had Blacksmith treating each polygon as a larger square, but still not fitting when all was taken into SL.

Amorphium is looking like the last hope for painting on sculpted prims.

Do I have this right: I can only import spheres into Wings?

Is there a way to make a cube? I read some discussion about it but could not understand it. I can't understand most of what I read about anything that has to do with sculpty modeling and texturing programs. It is making me feel quite stupid.

I use a lot of the "wrong tolls" for sculpt making. zBrush, Sculpt Studio (an inworld tool), sculptypaint, tokoroten, etc. None of these programs (except Sculpty Paint) has a way to "bake lighting".. Those simple grey textures that are darker on the faces facing down, and lighter on the faces facing up. SculptyPaint does it.. but it seems that every time I make a "folded" sculpt (something using corners), the baking tool totally flips out, and only bakes for the hidden faces.

Is there some method, some simple tool, that I can use to take an existing sculpt MAP.. and load it up, and bake a lighting base for it? Not a full on texture or reflection mapping.. just the light and dark. I really get tired of hand-shading things like chairs.

don't beat me for this, but with blender you can make such things within a few minutes if you know how to get along with the tool. The only problem is how to get a quick start.

You might want to try out the Jass-1.* distribution though. This is a customized blender (newest release) with add on scripts from Domino designs and some modifications added by myself. It works on Windows xp. Just download the tool, unzip it anywhere on your harddisk and start the blender.exe program off you go There is no installation needed for it.

ah... watching our videos can let you jump starting within an hour or so. And if you dislike it, just remove the jass-folder from your computer.

The binaries: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2009/05/17/jass/
The videos: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/video-tutorials/

You can also upload your already existing sculptmaps into blender, then just bake your shadows and that's it. If you just want a quick dark/light map:


1.) File -> Import -> Secnd Life Sculptie
navigate to your tga or png sculptmap, Enter

Now you have your sculptie uploaded into blender.

2.) set up one or 2 lights

SPACE -> Add -> Lamp -> lamp

3.) Render -> Bake render meshes -> Full render

That already should get you a greyscale map with shadows. They look way to rough ?

4.) modifiers -> add modifier -> subsurf

render levels : 3 or 4

5.) like 3.) Render -> Bake render meshes -> Full render

satisfied: -> Image -> save

well you might need some time to find the buttons but if you watch our movies,
then you should be well prepared.

Zbrush does, actually, but it's somewhat clunky. If you check "shade" when you pick up your tool from the canvas using Projection Master, the visible part of the tool will get shaded using your lighting arrangement. So, in order to do it all the way around the object, you'll have to drop and pick up the object at least twice, then probably fix the overlapping sections in Photoshop after.

Don't forget that matcap materials have their own built in shading, so when you're setting up your lighting, you'll want to use a non-matcap so you can see what is going on (fast shader works fine, really).

There's a material baker plugin that automates this process, but truthfully, I've always gotten better results doing it manually. But if you're interested, the thread about it is here:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=49966

Final point: as I said, you'll invariably want to mess about in Photoshop, as the results from any of these methods will need clean up. So, you're best off creating the shading texture separately from the rest of your diffuse texture, then compositing it Photoshop (or whatever your 2D editor is)

No, I won't. (want to mess about in Photoshop)

zBrush's ability to bake textures is hackish in the best of cases. Ususally i have to do a bunch of different bakes and then spend hours compositing them in photoshop (trying to get shiny textures, forget it).

But even then, that doesn't solve the main problem. zbrush is only one of 5 different tools I use to generate sculpts, (not to mention buying 3rd-party sculpt packs) and the only thing they all have in common is that they all produce a sculpt map.

There's no real way to get a sculpt map INTO zBrush as a model.. so the idea of using it for baking only helps (at best) in less than 20% of my use cases, when I have a properly formatted obj file to import.. (and honestly, far fewer than 20%, since I only use zbrush for fully freeform, organic builds)

the zBrush plugin that the Lindens promised us in 2007, never came to be.. so it's always been a bit hackish anyways trying to get sculpts OUT of zbrush.

Well, if you want a user friendly experience without the need to fiddle, yes, I suppose Zbrush is certainly *not* the first program I would pull off the heap

FWIW, I've successfully uploaded sculptmaps to Zbrush via Wings3D (using Omei Turnbull's plug-in to convert to .obj format). But it's been a while since I've done that. By the time one gets done with all the fiddling, it turns out that it's usually easier to make the base mesh from scratch.