Sculpty exporter for Wings 3D

I looked around for an open source, cross platform 3D modeling program that might be easier to pick up than Blender. I settled on Wings 3D; it has a pretty intuitive UI and a shallow learning curve, and there are lots of tutorials on the Web for it. So I wrote an exporter.

To try it, download the Development Rel: 0.98.36 or later version of Wings 3D from http://www.wings3d.com/ and install it. Extract the wpc_sculpty.beam file from the first of the attached zip files and place it in the Wings plugins/import_export directory. Alternately (and easiest in particular on a Mac), use the Wing's File/Install-Plugin command. (You'll need to restart Wings after installing the plugin.) Extract all the .wings template files and put them wherever you wish to keep your sculpty files.

To model a sculpty, start with a template mesh of the appropriate size and then move the vertices using the Wings tools. To export the model as a bmp, select File/Export/Second Life Sculpty. Templates are now provided in the attached zip file.

!!! MAKE SURE TO READ THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH !!!

Keep in mind that you can only use tools that preserve vertices e.g. Move, Scale, Rotate, Flatten, Slide, ... . If you do something that changes the number of vertices, you MUST UNDO the change. You can't simply add or remove vertices to make things look right, because the vertices will get renumbered and the exported sculpty will be whacked.

[Update for 1.16.0.1] I've updated the attached exporter for the new surface orientation in the .1 version on the beta grid. While I was at it, I also changed the axis interpretation so that "up" (which is the Y axis in Wings 3D) stays "up" (the Z axis in SL). But I'm not completely sure this is the best choice, given that textures are going to be coming from a third source. If you youve tried applying (asymetrical) textures to the sculpties modeled in Wings, let me know what you think.

[Update to add importer] I've implemented the importer. Why would you want to import a sculpty, you may ask? I'm not sure how useful it will be, but if your favorite method of creating sculties doesn't give you complete control over the mesh, you might find it useful to import the sculpty, tweak the mesh, and then export it either as a sculpty .bmp or in one of the many other formats that Wings supports.

[Updated 5/31/07] See post /8/20/183764/11.html#post1531212 for details.

[Updated 6/21/07] See post /8/20/183764/14.html#post1559747 for details

[Updated 8/07/07] See post
/8/20/183764/19.html#post1620435
for details.

[Updated 8/23/07] Fixed orientation of plane template. Re-uploaded all files because of file corruption problems.

[Updated 8/25/07] Added missing UV map to plane template.

[Updated 12/02/08] If SL is having troubles with the files, the alternate place to get them is http://pkpounceworks.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=28&func=fileinfo&id=119

This sounds great - haven't tried it yet. Can't,, really, till the beta grid gets a version that doesn't crash on my system.

This list:
8 sections and 7 slices (will create an 8 x 8 bitmap)
16 sections and 15 slices (will create an 16 x 16 bitmap)
32 sections and 31 slices (will create an 16 x 16 bitmap)
64 sections and 63 slices (will create an 16 x 16 bitmap)

looks to me like the last two entries might be supposed to say 32 x 32 bitmap and 64 x 64 bitmap. Am I right?

Yes, thank you. I've made the correction.

I've tried installing the plugin as described, but it's not appearing in the Export menu like I expected. Any troubleshooting ideas?

.

I had never used Wings 3D before last week, so I don't have much experience to know what can go wrong. It just worked for me. You unzipped the archive and placed wpc_sculpty.beam into the same directory as a bunch of other wpc_xxx.beam files, right? You might try verifying that you have the right directory by removing one of the existing import/export plugins (say wpc_3ds.beam), restarting Wings and checking that the 3D Studio export capability has gone away.

Yeah, I'm not getting the sculpty option in the export menu either. Removing the other wpc_xxx.beam files makes those options go away... but the wpc_sculpty option isn't there :-/

Oh man this is great of you to do, I hope this works. Wings3D is one of my favorite modeling tools. Will this work on any platform, or only Windows?

I've only tested it under Windows, but there's no reason it shouldn' work anywhere that Wings 3D runs.

i run wings 0.98.36 on XP and get the export option, seems to work

EDIT : created sphere, exported, used previever... its a sculpty

congratulations, this is so far the easiest way to create sculpties, well done !

Thank, Cindy. Good to know it's working for somebody.

Those who are having problems -- is it on non-Windows machines?

I just tried it; on a Mac it took me a bit of fiddling to find the plugins directory because it's pretty hidden, not openly exposed like on Windows. It didn't work though. Does the Install Plugin option I saw in the File menu do anything?

ADDITION: It just occurred to me maybe the plugin only works with the latest version of Wings; I downloaded it years ago. I'll try downloading the latest version.

ADDITION2: Well it still doesn't work with the newer version. Note that this still isn't the latest version; I got the latest version that works on 10.3, but the latest version of Wings only runs on 10.4

darn, I was hoping to play, but oh well.

Yes, it works for me on 0.98.36, the main link on their webpage goes to 0.98.32a, for which it doesn't work. Good job!

Thanks, Seifert, for figuring that out. I've updated my original post accordingly.

.. baking the textures? Modeling a sculpty does you no good unless you can control the texture map, and that will require baking - this is something Wings3D is completely unable to do, last time I checked, so unless you're into monochrome prims...

Omei: Great work! This is upto now the best way to export a mesh to a sculpt. The only drawback is that you need to start from a base shape that has the vertices numbered correctly. But it should be possible to create a few starting base shapes (cylinders, cubes, ...) that conform to your requirements.

Kalel: For texturing you should be able to simply export it from Wings (e.g. in OBJ format) and import it in whatever is fine for you. Then proceed and do your texture work there.

Omei You Rock!

I learned how to model in wings so this is awesome!

Johann, make sure you are extracting your plug in into the 0.98.36 version of wings, I did the
same thing the first time and tried to put it into an older version.

first test...

I'd love to play with the source.

Why? What advantage would baking the textures give you? I mean, you still have to create a texture image to apply using those texture coordinates, and that image can be used directly as the texture map in SL.

OK, I installed, and added the Sculpty plugin to the correct folder (import_export). I the added the plugin in the install plugins menu, but no option to output SCulpties appears in the menu.
I decided to check out how many plugins there are in the import_export folder, and with the Sculpty there are 11. Checking out the Import and Export menus, there are nowhere near this many options.
Also, when I add the sculpty plugin it creates a new wpc_sculpty.beam file in the root of the plugins folder.
Something not right here methinks, but what, I have no idea.

Works great for objects made within Wings.

I then imported a 32x31 ZBrush .obj into Wings and tried exporting it to a sculpty map, but the exporter crashed with the error - "{badmatch,"Unsupported mesh shape"}...". I then tried various export options within Zbrush and yet the object still failed to export from Wings. Oh bum!

Are you sure you're using version 0.98.36?

I first tried installing the plugin on my slightly older version of Wings and it failed to show in the Export menu. I then installed 0.98.36 and it worked fine.

Be my guest, Strife. I removed extraneous code left over from the exporter I used as a model, so this will create a smaller .beam file than the one I posted earlier.

I should clarify the expectations for this exporter. It's an easy way for anyone to get started creating sculpties. But it isn't (and won't ever be, unless someone else gets involved) a tool for converting any 3D model into the scuplty format. That will require a lot more time and knowledge of 3D modeling than I have.

Well the original post warns that you must start by making a sphere in Wings and then not deleting or creating any new vertices or there will be an error because the vertices are out of order. That would certainly preclude using an object imported into Wings.

Nice to see Wings3D getting some support!

Thanks for making an exporter! I can mess with Wings3D and know I can actually USE what I make now!