Sculpty exporter for Wings 3D

Install the Plugin...from where? I don't understand...all these links lead me to sites that come up as errors ?

The exporter is in the first .zip file attached to the first post of this thread.

Can you tell me what specific links don't work for you?

I have the proper version installed, The plugin installed, and the proper shere saved . When I try to export it it always says unsupported mesh size.It doesn't make any difference what I use,cube sphere, or anything else, always unsupported mesh size. Any ideas?

Chandlr, you need to start with one of the wings files provided and model off that. The exporter expects a certain number of vertices in a certain order, so you can't create an arbitrary shape.

Thank you very much, DanielFox Abernathy. I wasn't getting the whole story somehow. That was the problem. I never saw anything that said I had to do that...I guess I missed it.I appreciate the help.

Does anyone have a link to the version of Wings 3D that works with the plug-in here, I tried the new version, 0.98.32a, and can't get it to work.

Toasty

THats the last stable. You want the newest (dev) one, 0.98.36

The exporter doesn't work with .32a

Daah, why didn't I think of that LOL, Thx for the quick responce Okiphia. It works, your my hero

I intalled wings3d, the exporter and templates a few months ago. Everything worked excellent. I was working with the plane template, but screwed it up. So i downloaded a new set of templates. Now everything seems the same, but when I try to texture it in SL the texture appears as streched lines. I have reloaded the entire program, but continue to have this problem. It is not the textures; it seems to be something in the new download or my set up. Any ideas???

Thanks !!

I can't tell from your description what is going wrong. But I suggest you download the SculptySpace previewer from http://sculptyspace.com and see what it shows. If you get what you expect to see in SculptySpace, SL is probably acting up.

If that doesn't clear things up for you, post a picture.

Ok, after two nights of working on various sculptie whatevers, including my unicorn horn.. I have run into an issue in Wings 3d..

I have the legendary version 98.36, and have installed the SL bitmap plugin..

I finally got one project that I really want to export and bring into SL, but when I try to export, I get this error:

"Unsupported Meshes"

I'm at a total loss, and at this point my mind is completely frazzled. Anyone able to clue me in on what I am doing wrong? I'm having a bit of a blonde moment. lol

Thanks everyone.

Sounds from how it's worded that you have something in it that shouldn't be, like an extra object or an overly complex mesh.

Make sure you ONLY have the horn, otherwise it could decide it hates you. Also make sure nothing happened that would cause more vertices/faces and such to appear.

EDIT:: Also, it's just occurred to me that if you used my tutorial that could be the problem. I've used those methods to make a sculpty, but I'm not sure if twist adds vertices or not.. Doesn't look like it but I'm not certain =/ I can export after using that method though so that should not be the problem.

It means either that you didn't start with one of the sculpty templates, or did something along the way that added or subtracted vertices. Once you have an "unsupported mesh", there really is no good way to turn it back into a "supported" one. I'm afraid you'll have to start over. This time, try exporting regularly as you go, so that if you do something that damages the mesh, you can undo back to a point where it's OK again. You don't need to upload the sculpty into SL each time you export it; all you're doing is verifying that your model is still exportable.

Omei, does this mean that if something is successfully exported it has the correct number of vertices?

Well, it means that it is a plausible number, in the sense that the exporter knows how to interpret it as a supported sculpty size.

Does that answer your question?

Yeppers, thanks much.. since if what I did had added vertices and such it would have probably come out to a number it didn't know how to interpret..thankies!

This is very strange. I keep getting this error, but the only transformation I did was rotation and move. In other words, object one worked, I moved and rotated some vertices, tried to export it and got the unsupported mesh error.

Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

That is very strange. I have to guess that you did something you didn't intend to do. Do you still have your model loaded so you can undo and export one step at a time? Another thing you might do is select all the vertices and see how many Wings thinks there are. (It will be displayed in the upper left corner of the Geometry window.)

Well, I just bit the proverbial bullet and restarted the project, and it saves fine now. I'm guessing you're right and I accidentally did something to destroy a few vertices. I will certainly be exporting more often, though!

Drat, it's doing it again AND all the files I exported do it when I import them.

In other words, I created object 1, and exported it successfully. I kept on exporting it as I worked on it, and made copies 2, 3, etc. Then, when I imported them back to Wings to work on them, the manipulated copy gave me the "unsupported mesh" error.

Just to check, I imported one of the successfully exported files, didn't do anything to it, and then tried to export it. Again, I got the "unsupported mesh" error.

Great, a whole afternoon's work kablooied.....

Ah, this is fixable. What's undoubtedly happening is that you are using the default export size of 128x128. Now there is no "good" reason that sculpty bitmaps should be 128x128. But as early adopters were experimenting with sculpties, we discovered that JPEG compression was causing significant problems, and that these problems were minimized (not good, but the best we could get) if pixels were duplicated to get a bitmap size of 128x128, regardless of the resolution of the model. So I added this option, and made it the default. Also, for my own convenience in experimenting, I had made the importer capable of importing any sized bitmap, even ones that couldn't be handled by the exporter. Together, these created the situation you have run up against -- you've imported an "unsupported" 128x128 bitmap and the exporter can't deal with that.

But the good news is there is both a way to fix your existing sculpty bitmaps and avoid this problem in the future. To fix your existing bitmaps, resize them to the original modeling resolution in your favorite graphics editing program. (I use the Gimp, which is cross-platform and free, but most any editor application will work for this.) Just make sure that when you re-scale, you don't ask for interpolation. (Generally, there will be either a "none" or "nearest neighbor" option.)

In the future, if you know you are going to be re-importing the bitmap, you can avoid this by exporting at the original modeling option. Do do this, click on the little box on the right of the export menu option. If you do this, you'll get a dialog box that gives you some options. Pick whatever resolution you are using for your modeling.

When you're ready to upload to SL, though, you're probably still better off exporting at 128x128. LL has made several attempts at implementing lossless uploads, but so far they all have been buggy. At some point, when correct lossless uploading is available in the standard client, I'll remove the 128x128 option, or at least not have it be the default, so that builders who are just starting out with sculpties don't get tripped up by this.

Thank you, Omei! That seems to have fixed it, though reimporting the objects as 64x64 pixel bmp caused too much loss for my taste when I uploaded it to SL.

So, I think my work flow in the future will be to save works in progress as Wings files, periodically checking to make sure I can export to SL. Final draft will go out as a 128x128.

The only time I think I will then need to re-import a file will be to add the UV grid when I work on textures. But loss won't be too much of an issue there, as it's really more about adjusting the texture, not manipulating the object.

Does that sound as if I am doing things correctly now?

Virrginia, that sounds like a fine workflow. But I'm not sure about your first comment. Importing into Wings is the one step in the whole process that does not cause any loss. Importing into SL shouldn't cause any loss, either, if lossless uploads always worked properly. The main losses come during export (where precision of vertex positions is lost) and in the display of the sculpty in SL (where a maximum of 33 x 33 pixels in the bitmap are actually used.) These latter two are constraints inherent in the sculpty design, and you just have to learn how best to work within those constaints.

Happy sculpting!

Oh, that was what I tried to do to salvage the work I did. I hadn't been saving the objects as Wings files, but only exporting them in bmp format. When I re-imported the bmp files to work on them, I couldn't export the modified object (that's when I got the "unsupported mesh" error).

I did what you suggested and changed the bmp files to 64x64 pixels using PaintShopPro, and then I was able to import these smaller files to Wings, work on them, them export them as a bmp file for Second Life. Unfortunately, the objects lost a lot of detail when I did this, and formerly smooth surfaces turned all crinkly.

So, basically, I had to start from scratch. I save the files in Wings format now, and only export in bmp format in order to check and make sure it is exportable, and of course to upload the files SL.

It's hard to say without seeing your specific models, but you may find that the crinkliness reappears when you bring your sculpty into SL. If so, it is because Wings (like any 3D modeling program) can represent a lot more detail than will fit in the sculpty format. So I would just augment your workflow to import your working model into SL occasionally as you go. You can use the beta grid to avoid the upload fee.