Sculpty exporter for Wings 3D

darnit, the 256-bit version looks worse. Until they get rid of jpeg compression, sculpties are only for curved surfaces, and when bunching vertices, do it carefully to round an edge -- don't try to make a sharp edge by lining up vertices exactly. Compression will jitter them.

See /13/15/186127/1.html for a topic where I propose a feature to inhibit jpeg compression for sculty textures.

On my Core 2 Duo iMac the latest "universal" release crashed constantly, and there are threads to this effect in the Wings3D forum. And the last version that works reliably (something.4) doesn't support this plugin. I have even tried to compile the damn thing from source but it needs three different supporting packages compiled as well and, well, it just didn't work for me, and I'm not going to spend a week trying to find out why.

Basically: Intel Mac and Wings3D at this point is a waste of time as far as I can see, and I understand that the developers don't have access to an Intel Mac to build and test on, so, well, back to Blender you go!

I'm using a PPC G5. I downloaded the app and it's working. Then I went back to the wiki and saw the link to this thread and the plug in (Thank you, Omei for the plugin and to everyone who contributed to this discussion), but I'm not sure what I should do with these files: wpc_sculpty.beam & wpc_sculpty.erl

Can someone please post a directory path(s) for each of them?

TIA

I'm certainly struggling with UV mapping, so thank you Hypatia!

Experimenting, I have found the following steps useful with the demo (free) version of UVMapperPro.

1. Import your 6463sphere.obj file (or create mu own with the same parameters) into Wings.
2. Scult away.
3. Export my mesh as both a scultpy .bmp file and a .obj file.
4. In UVMapper, load my .obj file as the model and your 6463shere.uvs file as the UV map.
5. Load a texture I might want wrapped around my sculpty.

UVMapper previews how the loaded texture will be displayed in SL. (After rotating the texture 180 degrees, I think.) Conceivably, I could crate a custom texture with any 2D paint program, and by going through enough iterations, could "paint" my sculpty however I liked. Used this way, I wouldn't need anything but the demo version of UVMapper, since I am never saving any files from UVMapper.

But am I overlooking other ways that UVMapper can be helpful for texturing sculpties?

Ok, I did this thing to make a symetrical shape by slicing it down the center exact, virtual mirroring it, and modeling it. It all looked good, but when I exported it, and previewed it, it got all mangled.

I really want ot do symetrical things with the magnet tool, but this little bug is well, annoying.

Grafix, took me hours to figure that out too. In the Mac version, you install plugins via the file menu. You'll see 'Install Plugin' and find the '.beam' file. Works great. However, I'm like others here where it crashes and crashes on my Mac Pro. So, I'm trying blender.

On a Mac you can also see where Wings3D stored the plugin after the app installs it. I have mac os 10.3.9. If I hold my control key and click once on the wings3d app, I get a contextual menu. If I look half way down that menu, and select "Show Package Contents", I get access to all the hidden subfolders making up that app. I find the "plugins" folder is at the path of "Wings3D 0.98.36.app/Contents/Resources/lib/wings-0.98.36/plugins". But unfortunately Wings3d 0.98.36 doesn't run on macos 10.3.9. so I'm waiting for other alternatives.

Omei, could you make the relevant part of your original bold and all caps? People keep not noticing it and ask this question.

Rapton, you cannot slice the mesh and have it work with this exporter. You cannot mirror the mesh. You cannot extrude any faces. You cannot do any operation that changes the number of vertices, because that messes up the vertex order. The only operations you can do are moving vertices around; the modeling approach that works with this exporter is to create a sphere with the correct number of sections and then push vertices around into the shape you want.

It's not a bug, this has been noted before in this thread, you cannot add or remove vertices from the model, only move/scale/rotate etc. This is because the vertices are numbered and the export system requires the numbering to remain as it was from the creation of the sphere, otherwise it wouldn't know how to lay out a sculpt texture from the vertices.

Okay, I installed from the file menu and it said the plug-in was successfully installed. But, I didn't see anything that looked like sculpty or .bmp export. Then using your suggestion, I navigated to the plug-ins folder, and the file was there, but outside of the import/export folder. So, I moved to there and restarted the app. Still nothing. I noticed you referenced using 36, whereas, the only OSX app I found at sourceforge was 32a. Where did you get the 36 version? Was thinking I would try the newer version and see if that works. Also, shouldn't that .erl file go someplace? Why would they stick it the folder, if all you need is the .beam file? Thanks for replying so quickly.

Bug in SL?


I get these same results with 8x7 spheres that I flatten into a (semi-)cube. Since SL's upload previewer shows it fine, I'm thinking it's a SL issue.

Good suggestion, Johan. Formatting seems to be disabled right now, but I did attempt to make it more prominent.

Can you oly make objects out of sphers

i tried wings3d today, and its sooo much easyer then screwing with maya, i was about ready to throw my comp out the window trying to get maya to work well with the right exports and all, but this is great!

my only problem so far, and i havent noticed if someone ele mentioned this or not, but all the scuplties i end up making in wings all have a very jaggy, geometric shape, even my test sphere was more of a polyherdron then a true curved sphere.. has anyone found a way to sofen the models before exporting? or did i just miss that part altogther? XD

I think you pretty much have it there However, if you are using my sphere mesh, you don't have to load the UVS file (it's already uvmapped) - I only included the UVS file for people who may have made a sculpty before and haven't figured how to uvmap it.

with the importer - one can import a 64 x 64 sculpt map in wings, reconstructing the mesh and export it as OBJ from wings, import to UVMapper, and apply the UVS file. With the Classic version - they can save out the mapped obj, and use the Demo version of UVMapper to preview textures.

Poor man's Zbrush

I use Zbrush for texturing meshes, but the demo for UVMapper will work to preview a sculpty with textures for those who don't want to pay the bucks for Zbrush

I still worry a lot about texturing the sculpties ...

Is there, in Wings (or Blender) really no other way of applying different textures to different faces than the following way? :
- Paint over spherical/cylindrical UV map in paint program
- Preview it in Wings/UVMapper/Blender


I'm very much a newbie so maybe I'm missing something ... But does it really have to be this difficult?
From Qarls posts I get the impression that in Maya, one can apply the textures to faces in the geometry/3D view .. and the program subsequently generates a SL-suitable texture map. (Is this wat is called 'baking'?)


In Wings it seems you can't do much texture importing/manipulating.
In Blender you can nicely do manual painting, but that's not the same as using a bitmap photograph for some face on the mesh. I've seen two Wings tutorials where UV maps are made, and where texture (-maps) are made from them, but either:
- they're edited externally and then refreshed in Wings, or ..
- they're not using a spherical/cyllindrical UV projection that uses the whole rectangle, like SL does. (like the tutorial with Egyptian textures) And anything that's not spherical/cyllindrical i.e. unwrapped to a rectangle, is probably not going to work in SL. (SL treats a texture differently than Wings does in this tutorial: http://anuk-su.frobozz.us/tutorials/UV/UV-19.htm)


External painting .. sigh .. does it *really* have to be this hard? All I really want is to apply different *pictures* to different faces, like with SL's default box/cube prim, and get them all the right way in a rectangular bitmap (for SL). And not spend an hour in Gimp to squeeze and stretch it into a UV-square with at right angle etc. Please prove this newbie wrong!

In a sense, yes. Sl currently only supports shapes that can be derived from a sphere. But any solid that doesn't have holes can be derived from a sphere.

I suspect you mean, can you save yourself some work by starting with some other shape (cube, cylinder, himan bust, ...) that is closer to what you want to create? And the answer to that question is yes, if someone has already made that shape. (Or you make it yourself.) The easiest way to exchange starting shapes is to import a sculpty .bmp file for that shape. Several people have suggested building a common repository of common shapes, and someone has probably started such a project. Perhaps they will post a link here.

I would love to have someone prove us both wrong. But to my knowledge, there is not yet a really "good" way (i.e. fairly easy to use, free, and cross-platform) to put textures on sculpties if you want much control over how the texture lines up with the shape. Zbrush sounds like it works well, but that's ~$500.

Have you tried Wing's "AutoUV" process for putting textures on a Wings model? Even though it does require an external paint program, it seems to me to be easy enough, because you have the UV template to tell you where to paint each face. As I see it, the only problem is that I haven't found a way to get the results into the necessary SL-formatted texture bitmap. I'm still investigating how I might do that in the exporter. If the exporter were able to produce both the sculpty bitmap and the sculpty's texture, ready for SL, from a textured Wings model, would you consider that a "good" solution?

Hi Omei, thanks for the fast reply!

Sounds like a brilliant solution What texture info/painted picture would it take as a basis? Would such a script transform a painted, non-SL UV template (e.g. unwrapped human face) into a SL-friendly bitmap?

You mean this: http://anuk-su.frobozz.us/tutorials/UV/16.jpg ?
Yes, but *that* map is not what SL can use (=my problem)

And the default UVTemplate: http://schallplatten.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/uvtemplate.jpg
I bet that there are cases when this get totally warped and messed up on the sculptie, isn't that the case?? (=my problem)

extruding and such are key features to vertex editing. In the future will these be able to export using Omei's plugin?

Just curious

Finally, i got Wings running (flying?) like it should.
There is a Bug in Nvidia's Drivers, causing big slowdown in Wings.
If you import a Sculpty and try selecting Stuff but nothing happens
and Wings takes a Coffee Break when you click a Menu,
get the 94.24 beta Driver from the Nvidia Website.
(the beta download Page for beta Drivers at this Place )
This one works for me.
Wings is always a bit slow, but now i can use it.

I have and it produces these strange colored letter blocks. However, it is faily complicated and will work. But you wont be able to do much with it.
I keep forgetting about using my zbrush to paint.

No, because SL can't handle it. If you need to do that, make it as an obj and then use the obj to scultpie program posted here.
I will say that, that decent function shapes can be made with that limitation. It won' be pretty or clean but this is SL. Unless you are making a house the inperfection will be so small as to be unnoticeable.

Not in the forseeable future, at least not by me. The mesh that SL (implicitly) requires for sculpties is very constrained. I could probably come up with an algorithm that sometimes did a good job translating a different mesh into a sculpty-compliant one. But I think the unsatisfactory results would far outnumber the good ones. So for now, its up to you as modeler to define your desired shape in terms of the constrained mesh.

On the other hand, creating new Wings commands that are specialized for working with SL-compliant meshes would be feasible.

There are different ways to use Wings' texturing capabilities. Have you seem the tutorial at http://www.davidbrinnen.com/tut_wings_3.html ? I'm sure that isn't as slick as using Zbrush, but it seems to me to be quite useable.

A warning to those who haven't been following this thread -- you can follow this tutorial to see how the texturing process can be done in Wings. But I don't know of a way to get the resulting texture into SL. ... yet.