Sculpty exporter for Wings 3D

yea i have the 32a, thanks

My mistake. I should have said File/Install Plug-In command.

Omei, I was just wondering does your wings3d exporter round off the vertex coordinates when quantizing into RGB values? Or are you doing something more like anti-aliasing?

In order to fit into the bitmap format currently supported by SL, each vertex coordinate has to be mapped to one of 256 values. This most definitely introduces rounding error.

Qarl Linden has raised the possibility of accomodating more than 8 bits per pixel, but so far there has been little push from the user community. I'm guessing that most builders don't know how to distinguish errors introduced by compression from errors introduced by rounding, so compression is getting blamed for everything.

BTW, an easy way to distinguish quantization (rounding) errors from compression errors is to export your Wings model at the modeling resolution (e.g. 32x32) and then importing it back into Wings. The errors you see are quantization errors. If SL imported the bitmap with lossless compression, what you see in the re-imported model is what you would see in SL. Any additional errors you see in SL are introduced in SL's compression process.

Ah so you are using rounding. Um, there's no nice way to say this so I'll just blurt it out, rounding may have been a bad choice.

You see, I have been making sculpted heart balloons using both Wings3D and Blender. I noticed that my wings3d hearts always have a rough and uneven surfaces even though I only use scale and tweak operations and never manually adjust or move any single vertex. In contrast. my blender created hearts are much, much smoother. Its not a jpeg compression issue or all sculpted prim would have the identical uneven surface issue. So the only logical conclusion is that the wings3d exporter is doing a not-so-good job of generating the sculpted texture.

I took my undergraduate computer graphics course over 15 years ago, so I'm a little rusty but one thing I do remember is that rounding is never a good choice for discretization (or quantization) in graphics. Rounding introduces gaps and holes in the quantized product that show up as all sorts of weird graphical artifacts. I don't have any direct proof, but I suspect it is the cause of the rough and uneven sculpties generated by wings3d.

Unfortunately, I'm not exactly sure how to solve it. Hopefully someone better at CG can point out the proper solution, but I suspect a 3d variant of Bresenham's line drawing algorithm might be a quick and simple stop-gap.

Lila, thank you for your interest.

I suspect that what you remember from your computer graphics course is that calculating an exact position and then rounding each coordinate _independently_ is not the best way to approximate a smooth curve (or surface). That's not immediately applicable to the Wings exporter because the Wings representation has no notion that there is some underlying desired surface. I think to do better, the exporter would have to try to deduce the desired shape (which might be a smooth curve, or might be a sharp edge) and quantize the vertex accordingly.

But then, I don't have any special expertise in computer graphics, so if someone can point me to a particular algorithm that they think would make the exporter better, I'm open to learning something. But Bresenham's line drawing algorithm, even when generalized to 3 dimensions, was just a non-obvious way of calculating all the rounded values for a line segment using only addition in the inner loop. (Something that was more significant in the 1960s than it is today.)

If you're willing, I would like to see some of your examples of hearts done in Blender and Wings, to better undestand what makes the difference. If you don't care to make them publicly available, you can send them to me in a PM.

Confirm works

Windows 2000 SP4

Wings v 0.98.32

Doesn't work

v 0.98.32a or any source release so if you compile your own plugin won't work.

Tested several source builds using Bloodshed C++ and also Borland C++ builder. Under both test compiles Wings compiled and worked, but the plugin failed to work with both. Could be something I missed in my environment setup, I'm mostly setup for building the SL UI.

Great exporter Omei...



My blog review (spanish)

RaH, I'm not sure what you are trying to do. I use the source tree for version 0.98.36 to build the plugin. But you don't have to build all of Wings to build the plugin. I have the .erl file in the plugins_src/import_export directory but then build just the sculpty plugin.

I can't get the exporter to show up in the list.
Heres what i did.

1. Put wpc_sculpty.beam and wpc_sculpty.erl into a folder called wpc_sculpty
2. Put the folder into the plugins folder for wings3d
3. Started up wings3d and chose File > Install Plug-In
4. Closed wings3D and Re Opened it.
5. Checked the exporter menu and it doesn't have anything new...

What am i doing wrong? I tried every exporter download listed in this topic. God i wish i knew more about this stuff...

I don't have those 2 files in a folder called wpc_sculpty. In my plugins folder is a folder called import_export..... put the files in there.

I Tried that too just now and still no go. :/

I even tried uninstalling and re installing the app. I've never used this app until downloading it from the website this morning. v 0.98.32a (Windows)

Ok i figured out the problem so i will share it with everyone. When you download wings3D make sure you get the beta version NOT the latest stable release.

I'm not seeing the Second Life exporter when I pull up Wings where it's supposed to be (under file - export like you said)

Can anyone help?? What's going on?

Read the messages. Many people, myself included, had this problem, and many solutions have been posted.

I figured out how to do the entire process but i suck at these tools so bad i can't even build a perfect shaped death star. And it looks very lumpy. XD Oh well at least i got it working and will eventually master it.

Any ideas?

Thanks

[Edit] I do have version 0.98.36 of wings and i also successfully exported one of the samples that came with the exporter.

[Edit] Nevermind. I didn't realize at first that you couldn't just model something and export it, but rather that you had to start out with one of the provided samples.

When I right-click and select sphere, it just comes up. How do I control the # of sections/slices in the sphere?

in the menu when you click sphere there is a tiny icon on the far right, you click that.

Thanks!!

I should add that you're better off _not_ making your own spheres any more. Use one of the templates from the first post of this thread instead. It won't make any immediate difference. But if you work hard, get something you really like, and want to add a custom texture, you'll wish you started from a template because it includes an appropriate UV map.

Duly noted. I ran into that yesterday.

I cannot get the export option after installing the export add on and installing the add on (wpc_sculpty.beam) no additional options come up...

please help

I have shut down and restarted Wings I also have completely shut off my computer no change

The most common reason for not seeing Sculpties in the File/Export list is using version 0.98.32a by mistake. Try Help/About and double check that the version number is 0.98.36.