Sculpty exporter for Wings 3D

Coady, I'm glad you were able to roll your own solution. I hope you'll post it, for other Mac and Linux users.

Thank You soooo freakn' much for this post!!!!!! I've been looking for a way to do this for 2 days!! You are GOD!!!

This is how my sculpt looks in SL

And this how in Wings 3D


Any way to fix it?

Yes.

Sculpties that are long and skinny like yours create a special problem for the limited (8 bit) spatial resolution of the sculpty bitmap. To work around that, when exporting, click on the box to the right of the File/Export/Seconf Life Sculpty menu. This brings up a dialog box with some options. Check the "Allow rescaling" box and press OK.

What this will do is "squash" the long direction out of the exported version of your sculpty. This allows the other dimensions to be represented more accurately. After you import your sculpty into SL, you'll need to stretch it back to its original lenghth. But the end result should be very much closer to the original Wings version.

I have kind of the same problem as described in the post above...

I'm creating some sculpts in Wings3D that have some 'sharp edges', if I export them and load them into SL all the sharp edges get 'smoothed' and everything more looks like a pancake ...

I thought maybe this:

Sculpties that are long and skinny like yours create a special problem for the limited (8 bit) spatial resolution of the sculpty bitmap. To work around that, when exporting, click on the box to the right of the File/Export/Seconf Life Sculpty menu. This brings up a dialog box with some options. Check the "Allow rescaling" box and press OK.

would be a solution for that too, but in my sculpty export option there is NO box behind it...

Anyone an idea how to preserve sharp edges when making the scultpy export ???

If you model at 32x32, then every sharp edge you see in Wings should be sharp in SL when you're viewing it at the maximum level of detail. (That is, close up.) But if you're modeling at 64x64 and you want a sharp edge, drag adjacent edges together where you want the edge to be sharp.

OK- in the course of learning how to make Sculpties I followed advice and am trying to learn Wings... following a tutorial I have created a little something i want to upload to SL -- the tut says i should next export it as a bmp... problem is every time I try - it says I ha e to select and object... but no clue how to select the whole thing...

There are a number of ways to select things. Perhaps the easiest way to select your whole model is to first put Wings in "object" mode by clicking on the right-most of the four pyramic icons lined up near the top of the screen. When in object mode, if you click on any part of your object, it will select the whole object.

Turns out that while I was tweaking the resulting sphere I must have changed the number of vertices or planes or what have you because following your advice about selecting got me a different error message that stated I could only use a grid with x amount - so- I then made a plain sphere, morphed the shape a wee bit and uploaded that with no problems...except when it got into SL it was an amorphous glob not my gloriously shaped little mushroom thingie.... back to the drawing board ...

I'm using Mac OS X 10.5.2.

I get "unsupported mesh size" errors, no matter how simple my test models are.

As a test, I brought in a sculpty bmp that I made in Sculpty Paint. Those would not export as well.

Mimi

Mimi, have you looked at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Wings_3D#Troubleshooting_Tips yet ? Most probably, the two tips there will cover your problems. (It sounds like you have been tripped up by both cases.) However, it is only recently that Mac users have been able to download a ready-made version of Wings, so there is always a possibility that there is a Mac-specific problem that no one else has reported. If you feel you have a problem that isn't covered by those tips, please post again.

Hi,

I have never used Wings 3D before, but I recently got my hands on a cool .obj file that I would like to import and play around with in SL...I was easily able to import the file into Wings 3D, but whenever I hit the export to SL function (the one that you generously created), it keeps telling me to select the faces i want to export....?? am I doing something wrong?

THanks,

V

You're not doing anything wrong, Vanya. The exporter just isn't capable of doing what you want. Sculpties are too limited in their capability to represent an arbitrary .obj file, and the exporter doesn't even try.

There are techniques for attempting to convert an arbitrary model to one or more sculpties, but all require expertise and generally fall short of expectations. I even have one for Wings. (See /8/b1/219540/1.html#post1735775). But frankly, unless you are unusual or your cool .obj file is atypical, I doubt you will find it satisfies your needs.

I am working with your wings3d importer/ exporter and I have a question:
I can easily import sculptmaps or .obj files I created in Sculptypaint (http://www.xs4all.nl/~elout/sculptpaint/)

But then, even if I dont touch the model at all, and try exporting the sculptmaps from wings, it tells me that mesh size is not supported.
I use an annoying workaround and save the modified imported sculpty as .obj and use the .obj2sculpt program (http://slhungary.hu/request.php?2) to create a sculptmap outside of wings3d.
This is working quite well and I dont get mesh size problems. SL can easily read and render them.

Only problem is, that .obj2sculpt creates a map that looks like small triangles and it is impossible for Sculptypaint to render it, and I love the smoothing options in Sculptypaint.

Is there a way to avoid this?

Hi Myria. It has been awhile since I looked at SculptyPaint, so I downloaded a new copy and took a brief look at it. Seems like Cel has added a lot of cool functionality. But it looks like interoperability with other sculpty tools hasn't been high on his list.

Potentially, you should be able to exchange models between Wings and SculptyPaint in one of two ways -- either as a sculpty bitmap or as a .obj file.

The thing making the exchange of sculpty bitmaps awkward is that SculptyPaint seems to only support .PNG format and the Wings 3D importer/exporter only support .BMP files. Since these are both very common formats, you should be able to work around this for now by using your favorite 3D graphics program to convert between formats. I tried tried one example and it worked, and I wouldn't expect there to be a problem doing this in general.

The thing standing in the way of exchanging models via .obj files is that SculptyPaint is exporting models that don't match up with the convention for sculpty .obj files that early sculpty tools people (mainly Hypatia Callisto and I) agreed on. So although SculptyPaint .obj files are perfectly legal as .obj files, they have a bunch of degenerate faces that the Wings exporter doesn't know what to do with.

So for now, converting bitmap file formats is the way to go. If you want to encourage better interoperability, the best thing to do is pitch in and help in some way. Volunteer efforts thrive when others show their support by contibuting, in whatever way their skills and resources allow.

I am getting the same unsupported mesh size error when I convert the sculptypaint .tga or .png file to .bmp and import it.
Importing works very well, export is impossible.

Use your favorite graphics program to reduce the size of your sculptie map to 32x32 then import that into wings. That will solve that problem.

I don't see a SculptyPaint option for .tga files, which makes me wonder whether we're using a differernt version. But in any case, Jillian's suggestion is probably relevant; the bitmap you are importing is probably a size the exporter doesn't supported. Unfortunately, the importer will import any bitmap size, without giving any warning that you won't be able to export it.

Under normal circumstances, the imported bitmap should be 64x64 or 32x32. If bitmap dimensions isn't the problem, can you post an example?

The older versions of sculptypaint allowed export as .tga or .dxf. I used a copy of an older one to try it with .tga maps.
LUV ya, guys, it WORKS! Save sculptmap as 64x64 .png and convert to .bmp

Will there always be the "unsupported mesh size" error,or it can be fixed?
Are there are some problems with SL supporting it or ?
Also is there a way to use all tools and upload as sculpt map?

I guess there are several answers, depending on your perspective and time frame.

First, you should understand that sculpties, which were created by Qarl Linden especially for SL, are quite constrained. Once it is inside SL, every sculpty is represented as a "sheet" of 32x32 rectangular faces, each rectangle of which is divided by a diagonal into 2 triangles. (This isn't complete accurate for the poles of the spherical type, but it's accurate enough for this discussion.) "Always" is a long time, but I haven't heard of anything that suggests that the Lindens will make them more general in the forseeable future.

Any general purpose modeling tool (i.e. one not created just for SL) is capable of creating much more general models. So something has to give when an exporter saves your model in the sculpty format. Qarl's original idea was that sculpties would be used for "organic" shapes with mostly smooth curves, and his Maya exporter works by making approximations to those curved surfaces. This has lots of advantages, but it does make it more difficult to precisely place vertices and edges, if that is what you want to do.

The Wings exporter takes an entirely different tack -- it not only lets
you explicitly place the vertices, it requires you to. The advantage is you can be confident that what you see in SL will match what you see in Wings. (Or at least it would, if SL didn't also have significant precision issues.) The disadvantage is that if you try to add or subtract vertices, it's no longer possible to map them directly to the sculpty format, so rather than creating an unpredictable result, the exporter just says No.

Is the Wings exporter ever going to take a completely differernt approach? The source code for the exporter, like Wings itself, is open. So anybody with the requisite skills can do what they wish with it. So maybe someone else will. I probably won't.

On the other hand, I actually do have something in mind which I think would speak to the issue, and perhaps be even better. The general idea is to add a "Sculptify" command which would convert an arbitrary Wings model into a mesh that the exporter can export. It would use the same general approximation technique that the Maya exporter uses, but it would happen not on export but whenever you asked for it during modeling. The advantage is that you would get immediate feedback as to what approximation was being made. If you didn't like the result, you could undo the Sculptify command, tweak things and then try again, without having to go through any export/import sequence.

If anyone reading this has experience with OpenGL and programmable shaders, and wants to help out, please speak up. I have a prototype procedure that uses the UV map in conjunction with some simple shaders to do the aproximation. But I am learning OpenGL as I go, and I haven't figured out how to properly control the points on the border of the UV map. You wouldn't have to learn Erlang -- just help me to better understand the details of OpenGL rendering to an image buffer.

Help! I finally got my sculpty built the way I wanted, without changing the number of vertices, but I can't find the exporter for SL.

I have export options for
Nendo
3D Studio
Autodesk
Cartoon edges
Lightwave
Wavefront
POV-Ray
Renderwave
Stero Lithography
URML 2.0
Direct X

Do I use one of those, or am I missing it? I thought I had downloaded and installed all the plugins.

You are missing the Wings exporter, Josie. It doesn't come with the standard Wings package. Download it from the first post of this thread and install it according to the directions there. If, after that, you're still having problems, post again.

progress, of a sort. Now I get unsupported mesh size. But I didn't change any vertices!

It says that it is 128 polygons, 240 edges, and 114 vertices, mode is material, exactly what I started out with, just the basic sphere.

silly me for thinking that the basic sphere in wings was the right size to start with.

Used a template for a start point, and got it to upload. Now I can just tweak it, to get it where I want it.