Sculpty exporter for Wings 3D

Tesselation wizards, coule we modify Wings to re-tesselate an object? Then we can use the full capabilities of Wings. The exporter would convert the final tesselation into the correct 64x64 grid.

It's a feature. There is no compile time, it's an interpreted language...

We can wish you a lot more than just luck...

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Wings_3D

I have started a Wings 3D tutorial page in the SL Wiki. It is very basic, but outlines the issues that keep coming up here.

Please feel free to visit and edit.

Does it help to Move the object up the Y axis (up in Wings) before you export it?

Speaking of x, y, and z, can someone clarify the relationship between the Wings xyz and the SL xyz?

Wiki, wiki wiki...

TOPGenosse, after reviewing your posts on this thread and others, I realize that the desire for texturing might be be divided into two general categories.

The first category would be taking an existing texture (maybe a photograph) and mapping it onto your sculpty in a controllable way. This seems to be your primary desire. Unfortunately, I don't have any good ideas on how to do that easily.

The second category would be painting your sculpty texture from scratch. This is what (I gather) Zbrush is really good for. It's also the way I was thinking of using Wings' texturing capabilities. So when I talk of wanting the exporter to export a SL-ready texture bitmap, it is really this second category that I am thinking of.

Thanks for the offer, Lee. But I want to keep SL as recreation and not get it confounded with RL income. Just knowing that people are interested in using Wings is enough motivation for me.

Good idea. Thanks for starting it, Lee.

OBJ to SCULPTIE program....posted where? sorry i didnt follow that. Do you mean the wings program itself?

Please explain I am all ears.
smiles


And BTW, Omei if I havent said it before....Thank you!

Well done Omei ... works well. The hard part I think is the sculpting and understanding what SL will do with our creations.

have attached my first real creation ... only mushrooms ... but they are textured with a texture I made. The little inset shows the texturing underneath. The texture was created using UVMapper and Corel Photopaint. Good texturing is going to be tricky I think.

Is the upper limit a 64x63 sphere?

gryff

Amorphium allows on to take an existing texture and apply it, warp it in many styles, and further bake it. The textue can be applied as the actual color of teh object, as the specular map, the bump map, reflective map, etc.

I still use Wings3D to do the final conversion.

A problem solved:
Using Strife's exporter in Wings, sticking to vertex/face/edge manipulation of a sphere only, I was seeing what I wanted in the SL upload preview, but once in game, I saw a mangled heap.

I attempted to open the bmp format exports in photoshop, but got 'disk error' (in both v7 and cs2).

fix: opened fine in... MS PAINT. (OMG LOL). Resaved bmp with no changes. Now it opened in photoshop okay. resized to 32x32 or 64x64 pixels (constrain proportions OFF). Upload. ALL WAS WELL

Nice job with the muchrooms, Gryff. When using Photopaint, did you simply start off with a pretty good understanding of how the texture was going to get mapped to the sculpty, and then use UVMapper as a previewer to double-check it? Or is there a more sophisticated way to use UVMapper?


I think SL will accept a wide range of .bmp sizes. But it is only going to display the sculpty based on a 32x32 mesh (or fewer, at lower LOD). If your mesh vertices don't align with the 32x32 grid it wants, it will interpolate values. So you can't use a larger mesh to get more details. On the other hand, the interpolation used with a large mesh might help balance out JPEG compression artifacts. I hate to encourage the use of large textures for that, though, since a much better solution seems to be for Qarl to use lossless compression for small textures.

I'm thinking I should change my exporter to allow any sphere parameters, and just "recommend" 16x15 and 32x31 as the best for most uses. That way, people who want to experiment with alternatives can do so.

Also, note that 64x63 sphere does give you a few more control points than a 32x31 one, but in a really ideosyncratic way. Basically, you get one extra "slice", at the expense of loss of transparency as to how to make use if it.

If you are going with the second idea, and wings 3d allows it. That would be great. I just figured the first would have been easier.
Also three other things, can who knows milkshape create the plugin for them so they can throwing into the next build it would be awesome.
Two, an SL previewer like the Clothes Previwer would also be awesome. A free standing program (as I don't code .net and my c++ is old, so old) would rock. Just import the scultpie in (tga) and it shows you how the grid would eat it.
I know that would save alot of us would have been uploading at L$10 from being bald etc, at the piles of "vomit" that arrive.
(i haven't had that problem because I have caught it before hand, but others I have read have)
And the final. Can somone explain the letterd squares?
http://anuk-su.frobozz.us/tutorials/UV/16.jpg
I didnnt understand, and it has been a while since I have done 3d design. Thanks everyone.
And if I hadn't said it yet, Thanks Omei for the tool.

I assume this is simply a test image to give an impression how a textured object *would* look. It's like a checker board pattern.

The 2nd category sounds very cool Also, I think, given SL's number of "creative noobs" (incl. me), the 1st category would be very much in demand too.

>> Dzonatas wrote: "Amorphium has the 1st feature"
Thanks, unfortunately I don't have a couple of hundred of bucks to spend on this.

http://forums.secondlife.com/showpost.php?p=1505114&postcount=14

Don't know if there are updates following this particular post.

Funny you should mention that, I was just thinking of doing a texturing tool for sculpties. My thinking was actually something to help in creating textures, by projecting decals onto the mesh. Not sure yet I can do that, was just something I started thinking about.

Considering that the clothing previewer has saved me dozens of times this would be wonderful.

It's only US$79. The others, Zbrush, Mudbox, Silo, are $400+.

Download the trial...

http://www.eitechnologygroup.com/products/amorphium


I'm working on an importer for SL to automate it all, but for now I use Wings3D to convert.

Cool! Um... where do you put it to use it onna mac?

Mari

I can't get sculpties to work with 8x8 textures. Omei, can you verify that your exporter is working correctly in that size, so we can see whether it's an SL bug or Wings/exporter problem?

Or if anyone listening uses other programs, can you please try an 8x8 that's not too symmetric?

Thanks,
Jeff

Put it anywhere and use the Install Plugin option under the File menu; I think that you can delete the .beam file after that, because Wings copies the plugin to it's secret hiding place.

Note though that it'll only work on the latest version of Wings, and the latest version of Wings only works in the latest version of OSX.

ADDITION: If you really want to know where the secret hiding place is then someone mentioned it earlier in the thread, but for most people it doesn't matter.

Okay, I installed the the dev version (36), and installed the plugin, then created an object from a sphere, but when I went to export, I got the the "bad match" crash dialog that was mentioned earlier in this thread. Has a fix or workaround been found for this?

If not, would somebody be willing to covert my Wings3D .obj file, so I can upload it?

I'm trying to learn Blender...