Sculpties with Albatross3D

In my quest for a simpler modeler to create sculpties I stumbled on Albatross3D (formerly known as ppModeler).

After playing around a little bit I was impressed by the user friendliness and the powerful functions.

Just to to name a few, it has a brush sculpting function and an entire set of mesh modifiers.

As it was not enough, it's completely scriptable!

So i put together a quick exporter for spherical meshes. With time I'll add exporters for the other types of sculpted prim stitching (torus, plane, cylinder).

And I also want to play more with materials and textures.

I've put the exporter and a quick explanation here: http://a3dsculpt.blogspot.com/2008/11/creating-sculpties-with-albatross3d.html.

If anyone is brave enough to try it and give me a feedback I will appreciate!

RD

I think u need to check your exporter script in the ZIP file:

exportRaw.pps
exportRaw.rc

both contain RAW export not the SL sculpt map

Damn! Reminder to self, never do these things very late at night!

Thanks Zerlinda, I put the right ones now!

I wonder if the programmer regards this program as an albatross around his neck. What else would motivate calling it albatross?

We should ask him. He's been very kind to answer my questions.

I was favorably impressed by the time I needed to put together the exporter: two half days (well, actually two late nights )

Next step would be a set of primitives that match the sphere (a cube, a cone, a cilinder at last). One can add other "scripted meshes" to A3D menus.

This looks very interesting, Rael. Always good to have another free option for creating sculpties. I'm def. gonna download and give it a try.

If you want to set a bunch of vertexes to the same height, how do you do that?

What's the easy way to rotate the view without making the z axis tilt?

@SuezanneC

Unfortunately I'm not an expert at using A3D (not even any other 3d package). I managed to do what I wanted just wandering around in the interface

Anyway, this post on their forum lists a set of tutorials:

http://www.ppmodeler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=64

In general the posts in the "HOWTO" section are rather useful (some are in French as the author of A3D is French).

I tried the paint3D option and worked well (except that I'm horrible at painting).

Note that the application is not 100% stable and may crash. Consider saving your work often

I'll second the "not stable". It crashes more than SL!

Certainly worth playing with.

Just to give an example on how much I find it intuitive, I've tried to answer to SuezanneC question.

I'm not sure I got her question 100% but I figured out one wants to make a set of faces complanar.

That's my attempt to answer:

http://a3dsculpt.blogspot.com/2008/11/assign-same-z-to-set-of-faces.html

If you don't succeed the first time, try, try again
Exporters are still for raw format NOT sculpty.

There are(or were) exporters for sculpties, I downloaded them and installed them and made a sculpty and exported it and loaded it into SL in the beta grid and it worked.

Perhaps you need to click Refresh or clear your browser cache?

Just checked again, they are there. For sculpties.

This site:

http://a3dsculpt.blogspot.com/2008/11/creating-sculpties-with-albatross3d.html

Has the sentence:

"Then you should copy the exporter files in the scripts subdirectory of the Albatross installation directory." of which "exporter files" is a link to:

http://a3dsculpt.googlecode.com/files/exportSLS.zip

and exportSLS.zip contains two files:

exportRAW.pps
exportRAW.rc

EDIT: CRAP! I got it. Thank you SuezzaneC I had to do a refresh.

I've updated the A3D exporter to create cylindrical stitching.

A short blog posts shows an example of what can be done: http://a3dsculpt.blogspot.com/2008/12/creating-cylindrical-sculpties.html.

The plugin itself is on the project page: http://code.google.com/p/a3dsculpt

I would really like to hear from those who tried it. Any feedback, suggestion or bug report will be really appreciated.

I failed to mention that it works for planar stitching too! See the new blog post for an example: http://a3dsculpt.blogspot.com/2008/12/creating-planar-sculpties.html

(Actually I didn't realize immediately that what works for cylinders would have worked for grids too! So we can say that grids came for free )

Next stop: torus stitching.

New version of the export plugin for Albatross 3D available on:

a3dsculpt.googlecode.com

It now works with:

* spheres from 8x7 to 64x63
* cylinders from 7x8 to 63x64
* planar grids from 7x7 to 63x63
* toruses from 8x2 to 64x16

As always, any feedback will be appreciated.

RD

Those seem odd sizes to me. The square sculpties are:

LOD 0: 6 x 6 faces
LOD 1: 8 x 8 faces
LOD 2: 16 x 16 faces
LOD 3: 32 x 32 faces

The oblong ones (not supported fully until client 1.23 or later) vary from a minimum of 4 faces in either direction to a maximum of 256 faces. The total faces being no more than 1024. These should be baked to an image with twice the number of pixels as faces. So a 32 x 32 sculptie goes on a 64 x 64 image.

The number of unique vertice varies with the sculpt type, so for the 8 x 8 sizes

Planar: 9 x 9
Cylinder: 8 x 9 (9th column is read from pixel 0, same as first)
Torus: 8 x 8 (9th rows and columns are read from pixel 0, same as first)
Sphere : 9 x 8 (9th col wrapped, and entire first and last rows read from the pixels at width/2)

Hi Domino, yuo're right, the size are odds because A3D counts differently, for example the sphere 8x7 is actually 8x8 as is the torus 8x2

I've not put any thought yet on oblong sculpties, are they already available?

I just posted a description on how to create a sculptie using the A3D lathe function and a profile 2D curve.

http://a3dsculpt.blogspot.com/2008/12/creating-sculptie-from-2d-curve.html

It works similarly to Rokuro, for those familiar with it, with a finer control over the final shape.

Comments and feedbacks are always appreciated!

RD