Sculptie Texturing

Well I guess I have my first success with texturing. Not that the texture looks anything like it should (a checker) but at least it looks undistorted in SL just as in Maya. Now it's more a matter of learning texturing within Maya.

It was done by baking the texture including lighting and shadow to a 512x512 tga. Then all I had to do is change the texture rotation from -90° to 90° in SL.

That is good Patrice! Do you also have the link to tuts you used to learn texture baking in Maya or did you just use the lessons in the Maya documentation?

I used random googled documents, just search for maya texture baking or such. The command is a little hidden. After you assigned a material to your mesh through the hypershade, you need to select the mesh, shift-select the material in hypershade, then press and hold the spacebar inside hypershade to get the context menu, choose edit (the lower one) and there it is called "Convert to File Texture". Click on the cube next to that to get the options dialog where you can enable it to render in lights and shadows, choose a file format (including tga) and the size of the resulting texture. So 256 x 256 or 512 x 512 for SL will work just fine. Of course to end up with any lights and shadows in the first place you need to add some lights to your scene.

Hope that helps a little.

Indeed a good tutorial. But, the final product there is a 3d image. Now what ? The Wings exporter creates the sculptie (colorful 32x32 map) BMP, how to I get the corresponding texture BMP ?

Good question, I'm still looking for an answer myself. Someone told me that Amorphium has a function to get the various applied textures into a (square, SL-friendly) texture BMP, but I haven't found where that option is. I'm sure Maya, ZBrush and 3DStudio have this too, and it seems to me that Blender must have it too (something like baking the RGB colours with the Levitsky method).

But .. Like many people I'm a n00b and can't find it yet ..

Anyone care to enlighten us n00bs with some screenshots?
(the cheaper the software the better)

here's a work in progress using blender's texture paint functionality. The model started as a sphere 64 vertices. The key is to build a set of prim like objects from which you start each new model. eg some shapes work best with a cylinder some a sphere. Blow a cylinder out at the corners to make a cubelike object. tip: Take the subdivisions up a bit in the cylinder from the wiki software tutorials, i have tried 64 by 64 or 32X64 even.

Keep in mind that when you first import any sculptie into SL it's gonna look wierd as crap. Take a close look in the preview. It will be a really fat lumpy version of what you made in blender.

Scuplt a prim with the texture, it will still look like crap. scale the prim to similar dimension as your original model -poof- wait it looks kinda good!

photomapping is possible, start with the largest image possible, load the image into a texture, select it in the brush and paint with it. A nice technique is loading the image into blender as a background this way you can see the dimensions of what you are modelling. Still trying to figure out the cloning brush...

I found the following video tutorials useful for learning techniques that can be used on sculpties in Blender:

Material Indices
The Mixing Materials ones
Fake SubSurface Scattering

http://www.geneome.net/index.php/blender-tutorials/

Export from Maya to OBJ format, import OBJ file into zBrush as a tool. Drop the tool on the canvas and paint away... the UV is done automatically when you pickup the tool (it becomes the texture which you can export) and it will map correctly to the SL model.

Good Luck!

Nulflux, would you mind elaborating a bit on that. By dropping and picking up do you mean using the projection manager ? It seemed to ruin the front and the back of the poor sculptie. Other things I had trouble with were using different textures on different part of the sculptie. Also, any way I can get zbrushe's material or even the shadows on my texture too ?


I realise that these are more a zbrush questions than anything to do with sculpties.

Just to clarify for myself... (trying to learn Maya 5. picked it up for $20 new at a thrift store. w00t! but it's been years since I've used 3D Max and Maya is new to me)

The very basic steps you would take are:
1) create model in Maya
2) use the script to export the sculpt map
3) apply surface textures (using zBrush?) and lighting to model within Maya and bake them
4) export surface texture and upload into SL

Or can you do the sculpt and surface textures together and applying the sculpt map will also apply the surface texture?

Sorry if I'm being too basic here. Trying to follow along and the wiki didn't entirely explain the "coloring" process at the end.

Is there any way to do the bake-to-uv as seen in the qarl tutorial (http://www.qarl.com/qLab/?p=18)?

I would love to just texture as I normally would, then just convert it into the proper repositioned image.

Yes. This is actually what you are doing when you bake textures to create the sculptie map. Just do the same process to a bigger image but with your materials set to the proper texture rather than the sculptie one.

The texture map for the head was created the same way the sculpt map was. It was textured and lit inside 3ds max and a texture map was baked at the same time the sculpt map was. You can see exactly how I did it here: http://home.comcast.net/~pixelforgeltd/Tutorial.htm

I struggled with that for a while and finally got it working after a number of tries. I'm new to Maya and 3D (outside of SL) so terms like 'baking' were completely new to me.

As others told me at the time, read the manual. Qarl posted the .MA file on the page you were looking at...download it and take it apart to see how to achieve the effect. Granted, there is some 'unnecessary' stuff in there that goes beyond simple texture baking - Qarl makes the whole thing attractive by adding the bubbles, some extra shading, etc - which is not necessary for projections.

If you are also new to Maya, take some time to experiment with Maya first before trying this since learning this and Maya can be difficult.

-2fast

Lol.. I forgot to mention I was using blender, I put it in the title instead of the body ^_^;; do you think it will still be the same process anyway?

I've been on a lot of forums working out problems with sculpted. I've got wings just about learned and have made alot of stuff. I even made a Boat Hull, but ran into problems.
I like your info above and I only touched a little with Blender, but I think it's a good working program if you know how to use it.

Keep in mind not everyone has a couple of thousand dollars laying around to buy these programs. that's why most modelers like myself get stuck on good projects with poor programs.

I would just once like to have someone tell me how to take a prim go all the way to bake and then upload to SL using Blender. The above came close. But I get confused fast.

Here's some of my work.. but no texture

Without knowing where you are stumbling I can't really help in a response here.

Feel free to IM me in world or drop by my place, I can for sure give you some tips.


-whyroc

I've sculpted a basic flower with Zbrush 3, and I'm having big problems texturing it properly. I've tried using the projection master tool inside Zbrush, didn't work out. My Zbrush texturing skills is limited and I would much rather paint the textures inside Photoshop.

So I tried extracting the UV-map (image). There's five mapping options: planar, box, cylindrical, spherical, and polar. I tried the spherical, but I just can't seem to get the texture aligned properly.

Should I try one of the other mapping options or does anyone know what might help?

-Heidi.