Sculptie Texturing

So there is information floating around about how to create sculpties but I have found nothing about texturing. Take a look at the textured sculptie in the picture. I have applied a random checkered texture to show the distortions that happen. Is it even possible with a tiling texture to get rid of these distortions? I have tried to add more isoparms at the top of the model for example, that didn't change a thing. The sculpt texture remained exactly the same. Obviously I can't change any offsets or anything because it's only 1 prim and that would affect the whole surface.

I'm really quite confused as to how we're supposed to texture these prims. If I had a way to UV map that model I could create a texture that would fit exactly, although even if I had that possiblity I imagine it would still be really hard to create a texture that would negate these distortions.

The second picture shows the same thing with planar texturing.

Can anyone please elaborate

I think the answer is that various people are tackling this. I haven't tried it, but here's what Hypathia Callisto said in a post:

"take the sphere as it was generated by Wings

"I exported it as obj and then imported it into UVMapper, and applied a quick spherical mapping, making sure to fill the entire uvspace. This will match to how it will map in SL.

"I used Y axis and gaps in map, spread facets at poles. You can then use it to paint on in programs like Deep Paint and Zbrush. When taking the file into PS, just run a plugin like Flaming Pear's Solidify on it to fill the gaps at the poles. I still have to test to see if the poles are handled well enough in this method, but should be good enough to work out the kinks in PS where the map gaps."

If whatever method you are using to create the sculpty doesn't export obj files, you can import the sculpty bmp file into Wings and export the obj file from there.

Did you get that from the Wings3D thread? Guess I gotta read it, didn't understand a thing of that.

Yes, it was from the Wings 3D thread. But you probably won't find much more of an explanation there. Hypathia was clearly writing for someone who already knows a lot more about 3D modeling tools than you or I do.

From what I understand about it, you gain greater control over 3d model texturing when you are able to paint directly onto your uv map. This is increased if you are working with a quality map in the first place.

A uv map is a grid of values that correspond with areas on a 3d model, which tells a texture
how to be applied to the model.

In my study of 3d uv maps is one of the hardest concepts to wrap my head around btw.

I am assuming that in SL the uv remains the standard initial prim type, i.e. sphere or
half sphere. In other words no matter what your sculpt texture does to the prim, it is still
wearing the initial prim type map.

So since a baked rgb texture in this case changes the mesh of your prim, if you could also
take the uv map along with the rgb sculpt map with you then you could apply your texture
to the uv map in an artful way.

Then go ahead and use the rgb map to effect the prim and the uv map = new texture to apply to it under the texture tab.

The intent here would be to gain a texture that refers to and is guided by the map and which in turn becomes the texture that you then apply in world as a texture.

So a particular texture made in this way sort of anticipates the changes the rgb map will make to the prim as the uv map is a direct relative of the rgb map.

Making a texture and applying it to a uv map with the intention of applying it to a sculpty
is an art form in itself so they are speaking about the technical hoops you have to jump through to get there.

I have a much easier time figuring stuff out if I have a rough outline of what the sequence
is and does.

I am sharing what I think I know is correct about this, so if any 3d experts want to correct me on this feel free.

So hopefully this post contributes that way.

Well I've read through the whole Wings3D thread but I still don't see how texturing really works. Yet I see the pics on the wiki with properly textured sculpties. The fruits had to get their textures somehow right? Also Chips head with baked diffuse lighting or the Xenius' couch with baked ambient occlusion look great. I'd really love Qarl or Chip or any other knowing person to explain how that was done. Even if it was done in 3dsmax I imagine that the process could be adopted to other 3d software.

I think that's important now because all the sculpties will be worth nothing without proper texturing.

I've been working on some avatar heads in beta, and I found that I did a simple cylindrical map (I'm using maya) and colored it in ps, then imported it. It was distorted, but I was able to make it mostly fit with the texture movement tools.

Hello All,

Just a response to the "How did he do that couch thing?"

Firstly, texturing these things manually is a royal pain in the ass, truly. I tend to generate just about all of my texturing data inside Maya, and just do assembly/cleanup in Photoshop.

Basically, there are two types of texture information that you can create inside Maya:

1. Via Projection. Say you wanted to project a logo on a hat, you create a projection of your given logo file, position it on the offending object, then in the hypershade use "Convert to File Texture" to create a .tga of it. If you made your sculptie correctly, it has now "baked" the position of everything correctly on your texture, and all you have to do is clean up the poles and import into SL.

2. Via Advanced baking. There are third-party renderers available ( i use Turtle but there are other less complicated solutions that aren't $1500 out there ) that allow you to bake in the full lighting solution of your scene in multiple layers, using different shaders. As example is the aforementioned couch on the wiki in which was a combination of ambient occlusion, photon mapping, final gather, and diffuse render passes. This sort of thing isnt for the light of heart, and if you're interested in this i would suggest the following reading/training dvd material:

http://estore.autodesk.com/dr/sat3/ec_MAIN.Entry10?V1=839889&PN=1&SP=10023&xid=19515&CID=248742&CUR=840&DSP=&PGRP=0&ABCODE=&CACHE_ID=248742
http://estore.autodesk.com/dr/sat3/ec_MAIN.Entry10?V1=884567&PN=1&SP=10023&xid=19515&CID=248742&CUR=840&DSP=&PGRP=0&ABCODE=&CACHE_ID=248742

http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/dvds/pca01.html
http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/dvds/pca02.html
http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/dvds/mha03.html

FYI, all of those are at the intermediate to advanced user level, just so you know what youre getting into.

Also, for those of you who are heavily into maya, and are used to using advanced rendering features (MR, PRMAN, etc.) I heavily suggest Turtle 4. Its shaping up to be one of the best real-time solutions for Maya.

I hope this all helps some of you, if you have any questions, feel free to contact me in world. Sculpts go live in 90 minutes (hopefully).

-Xenius Revere

Thanks a lot. I found this rather interesting, seems to show some of the process: http://home.comcast.net/~dpattenden/hi_poly_tut_uv.htm

What I still don't understand is how the UV map gets into SL, or how else SL would know how I arranged my UV map for the given model. But at least I'm starting to grasp the general concept.

Hi I have a question Hope i dont sound silly

is there a particular version of the UVMapper u have to have, like the professional one thats like 50 bucks..... or can u use the uvmapper classic? (i hope so !)

thanks so much

Tisha

SL's UV map is identical to the UV layout of the object's geometry in whatever program you make the sculpt texture from. If you're working with nurbs, its a grid that you can change, uniform detail. If its a poly mesh you're exporting, the UV map is whatever you make it to be.

Say I start from a nurbs sphere and then I move some of the top vertices upwards to create an eggy shape, that results in isoparms at the top to be farther apart and whatever texture applied will distort up there as well. Correct so far? So I would go adding some isoparms up there to make the mesh more uniform and so the texture wouldn't distort anymore? That is actually what I described in my first post. I tried that but the sculpt texture and hence the sculptie in SL ended up exactly the same and the applied texture still distorted around the top.

How do I get around these distortions? I mean any mesh I make won't be uniform obviously.

Being fairly new to maya, maybe this is a "duh" kind of question, but once i've created my object and applied a shader, how exactly do I export that shader as a texture for my object into a file usable for SL? Is it a matter of having a specific plugin for Maya or is this functionality built into Maya?

much thanks for all the info, Xenius.

i just want to reiterate for all to hear: the secret weapon of sculpties is texture baking. you get wicked cool control by baking your textures.

check-out a couple examples here:

http://www.qarl.com/qLab/?p=18

http://www.qarl.com/qLab/?p=22



K.

If you meant the sculptie texture:
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims:_FAQ#MayaExporter

If you mean the shader material you need to bake that texture, still getting into that myself. May wanna read the link I posted in a previous post here.

God I think that just gave me the answer I was looking for.

"use projections so that textures cross geometric boundaries."

I would think that is what gets rid of texture distortion

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.
(and anything that's not spherical/cyllindrical i.e. unwrapped to a rectangle, is probably not going to work in SL)


External painting .. sigh .. does it *really* have to be this hard? All I really want is to apply different *pictures*, 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!

I will say this Qarl is right. The problem is that the version of Maya he is using a pro version worth about $5K. Its sweet, I say that consider I had access to Maya 6 of the same level as a gift years ago for saving someones bacon.

What I am doing now is Using Rokuro, then wings3d, Milkshape and uVmapper classic.
Milkshape you can texture directly on it. I used it for when I was making sims meshs and other game meshs. It was designed for games making mods. it Costs about $50 and I am using 1.78 which not a current model. (i think they are 1.9)
So far I made a tie that works, went thru 5 iterations of my sneaker, made a flask and an easybutton.

The important thing about the texture is that it will generally lay out how you placed it unless you tell it otherwise to try to make it easy as possible.
IE: The easy button would be laided out Top down as opposed to side cut.

About what Milkshape can/can't do ..


So, to put it un-nuanced:


- If I have a sphere with 64 faces, I can put 64 images of different 64 babes on that?
- And have Milkshape export that as a rectangular texture that SL needs?

Nope. But then again I haven't tried.

What do you use it for then?

Blender 2.43 has the ability to paint directly on the UV object. It's a matter of first baking off the sculptie texture, than creating a second .tga to paint on, exporting that with the same UV map although you can use a bigger size output, 512px for example. Probably touch it up in PS before import to SL.

Another program renound for this kind of thing is zbrush, I'm not too famliar with other high end programs like Maya or 3dsmax but I imagine they have similar capabilities.

The other option is to use trial and error in PS or something simliar. You would first want to take a generic mapping image, like some of Robin Sojourner's sample textures, where you could texture your sculptie in world. Take some snapshots at all angles so you can see which part of the UV mesh lines up with what parts of the 'square' texture.

-why

I know, and I like it .. but this is more like a brush/painting program, right?

Is it also possible to apply pre-existing textures (like a photograph), to faces of the model in Blender?

(And I don't mean: whole UV map = 1 photograph, but .. each face = different picture, and in the end combine them to a square texture SL can use.)

working on it... here's a quick knock off example of painting...

It was late, I know what you are asking now. And I agree. I use Zbrush myself.