Inworld Sculpted Editor, Cloner, and Tools

Anjin kinda already did when he mentioned grabbing data from the OpenGL stream.

Oops... I thought the real challenge was doing it inside SL myself... I really thought it was common knowledge what you could do outside of SL... Will make sure I meter what I say far more carefully.

Anjin--
I would be interested in being a beta testor if you have spots left

I was intending to send you an IM in-world, but, well, the last I looked your Avatar name wasn't "Service unavailable", lol.

Trevor

A cheap work around would be to activate the 'wireframe' option inworld and take a few snapshots of of your land. And use them as references to use with your outside modeler.

Definitely less cool than getting a whole sim height map, but still an option.

I met Anjin in game and he spent the time to show me how his tools worked, it's very impressive, I would recommend you go and see him for a demo (if his got time of course),
you should be more then impressed. I hope that the Lindens are going to work with Anjin, he is a powerful scripter/programer.

Anjin, please set up a donation box so everyone can thank you and support your project further, this is a big turn for SL and you are the right man. The rock you made in front of me simply ROCKS

Yes, he used his clone tool to created a nice rock out of many spheres stuck together, I saw it from my yes in real time, and I look forward to be able to use it. It should be seen as a tool to enhance creativity and cut down on prims, he will not make a perfect clone, it averages out the shape, and output data to make a sculptie out of it. Once you see it working you will appreciate the purpose of such a tool. I am very exited. Thx Anjin.

Took me a bit to wrap my brain around what the tool does. It's truly a brilliant idea.

A nice model of SL inside SL is one of the things I thought would be a cool use of sculpties. I don't know how to generate sculpty maps though so if Anjin does that it'd be cool to check out. He/she asked to join SL Cartographers so maybe he/she has already done it.

Yes, the way I've been doing it is to call llGround() a lot, e-mail the data off-world and generate a grayscale bitmap for the heightfield. Currently I'm using 16-bit grayscale PNGs which allows for a high resolution with a fixed scale. I can donate a number of these existing heightmaps if they would be useful, especially if people shared their progress.

I came acrosss this thread: /8/1a/188870/1.html

And it looks like Anjin is indeed already generating sculpties of sim terrain and has his/her own tools for collecting the height data. Cool.

Cadro,

Yes, I have already done it. Currently takes my probe from any where from 2 min, to a few hours... (shows the server health quite nicely eh?) to gather the data. I then so some edge folding and convert the data into a height map and create a sculpted prim. Currently the process is fully automated and just spits the final map image out to a webshare for pickup.

Ill be sending out a list of UUID's for textures that show examples to your group tonight.

James Gill has been spending many a late night using the tool to create a set of maps of an SL train line. He just showed me some of the work last night. I lost a copy onto the teen grid by accident... And now I see my server tearing up 30~40 sims a day.

The maps in these images are full sim to one prim. The samples are averaged down to fit the 32x32 mesh minus some margins for mesh management. But, enough data is collected to produce a layout of a sim using 16 primatives with great detail.

And there are functions to do animation frames for fun. Producing a set of 10 slides that when cycled in order on a prim will produce the affect of the ground raising to the height. A stunning effect when comparing a flat 2D map and then watching it morph to the ground height.

I have also included some pics of sculpted prims. I am going to refer to this system now as a Sculpty Casting system. It makes 'molds' of objects, that can be 'cast' into a sculpted prim. Keeping in mind that scupted prims are based on approximation of a fit to a mesh, and nothing states they will be exact.

The system works rather well now, I have improved speed quite a bit, and played more with the UI. But know, using any modeling tool requires some thought. This tool allows you to get close, but close is still up to 1cm off. The operator should be aware that for the best final fit, some effort must be taken to align and manipulate the mesh after the mold is made, before final casting. The algorithms to find edges, fill sides, and reduce the mesh to fit on the surface... Well, they are just taking a SWAG at it in the end, and can off a bit.

So its not a point and shoot replication system. It is a functional in world editing system that is easy and fun to use. I have cranked out tons of sculpture, rocks, and misc pieces using it.

Cheers,
Anjin

That is seriously cool, Anjin. I love the sculpty sim maps!

yeah, the sim maps are so cool! I bugged Anjin in-world and he helped me make a sculpty map of a Sim. His system is super-slick!

The maps look great with no texture, but when you grab a texture from the SL Map API and slap it on there- it is like having a whole sim in your hand. Anjin mentioned the possibilites of mulptiple sculpted prims forming a more detailed grid as well.

He's even rigged the sculpted mesh in a clever way to get all the detail on the top of the sculpted prim.

Anjin - Yup, that's the kind of thing I was imagining Very cool. I think there are a lot of uses for these kinds of in-world 3d sim maps (other than looking neat). I just wish I had the time and knowledge to make them myself!

Imagine SL architects being able to show their clients mockups when preplanning sims. Too cool.

Working with various folks thruout SL, we have setup all kinds of tools using these maps.

Example, for display to potential renters. The entire chain of estates shown with teleport points, little houses and the like built in.

Sim scanner/radar toys? Why just show a flat 2d map of the sim, with objects floating over it in 3d space! The bottom prim of the scanner/radar can just be a sculpted terrain map.

There are other folks doing the same work. And again, for those who want it, I have an open source version available. The nice thing about the open source code is that it does all the work inside SL. The file format it exports can be run thru a standard graphic format conversion tools typically found on most *nix's... Chances are your web server already has all the required pieces installed.

The current release is no longer open source. I have moved all the work to the server side, and as my server bandwidth and resources are not free... I would hope folks do not mind paying a bit for using them. Help feed the tree after all... I made this change to my own policies when I found the huge demand for the tools, were cross by a very limited knowledge of the server side. I really had thought I made it as easy as possible, forming the open source release around common and well described tools....

If anyone wants to work with me to provide a texture service that can supply finished maps that are already in world, give me a ping.

Cheers
Anjin

Bleh, is there another way to get the .tga output into blender or zbrush? That script for gimp (http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpt_Texture_Export_Script_for_the_GIMP) isn't working for me.

EDIT: KK, gotta open a new file before you're able to see the export options if anyone else is wondering.

you have mentioned before that the Snurb-O-Matic requires a server to operate, but I have managed to create my own tool that allows you to make the map directly from SL so that you only need a snapshot and the map is made, but the accuracy of the mesh is also affected by the kind of snapshot. directly uploading a snapshot had a middling level of accuracy while saving the snapshot as a full res BMP and converting that to TGA provides a very accurate upload of the map, all of this is done without the use of a 3rd party server.

currently my tool is mearly a bare bones version of what I want it to be but it assured that the tool will always work because even the best servers go down to things unforseen like power outages.

the tool itself takes time to gather vertex data but that is only for increased reliability in stressed sims, once thedata is gathered the processing normally takes only 5-10 seconds and the mapping itself only 2 at max.

the mesh for the tool can be stretched as far as you wish because the data is processed based upon a bounding box determined by the highest and lowest axis values and provides outstanding maps for the method used

so i need a server to use Snurb'o'matic? or is that just for sim mapping?

also, i found that the idea that sims would be multilevel with little floating islands very interesting. too bad i'll need to wait for LL to get sculpties' bounding boxes worked out. i could see selling mini islands very profitable .