Using Blender for Sculpties Without Learning Blender

I'm afraid so. It only fills half the UV map and has faces behind faces, so the map still isn't a single continous rectangular surface that fills the UV layout. Did you import the example.dae into Maya to see how it should look? You can create other examples by using add - mesh - sculpt mesh in Blender then File - Export - Collada 1.4

If you use the test gui you can even do cubes, but that's under heavy development and it's used as a scratchpad for ideas, so not everything you see there will always work - the menus don't do anything at the moment.

Yeah I saw the GUI test, but I don't think cubes are in the current snapshot?(edit: right the gui isnt operational, the maps are there)
The last cube I posted was a sculpt I imported into blender then exported to maya, then exported from maya as dae and imported back into blender btw.

Anywho, I threw a few oblongs at it, and it handles it very well, even 8x512's, which really made my partner happy as she's always using Contagious Republic's 'Sculptie-o-matic'(SOM) to make make sculpts from linkset, but they have very bad bounding boxes by default, that can now be fixed!

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=OWI3J8G1 <-- An oblong from SOM

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=HZ5Z6XWN <-- Same map, via Primstar

Glad you got it going. The test gui should work for cubes, just click the sphere button to change the type. The additional sculpt shapes aren't final, they are just some I did quickly for testing purposes, but are already pretty useful.

It's just the menu's where things like File Import, File Load/Save defaults and the separation of the different types of base sculptie will go that's not implemented. The basic building stuff should work though.

For things like the chair where you already have a sculpt map, you can just use File - Import Sculptie rather than going through the Collada importer.

Two more caveats that I've found out so far. I'm still working with planes exclusively for now, btw.

1.) The Maya .dae export doesn't seem to like textures on the objects. At least my Maya 2008 installation crashes reproducably in one case. If you crash, slap a standard lambert shader on the object and retry.

2.) Ungroup your objects before export, or the import script will throw error messages. (Domino, give me a shout in the odd case you want to check that out. I presume there's no use in trying to strip all kinds of metadata from the imported file as long as people can easily save "clean" objects).

I'll post it here whenever I discover more interesting facts.

Cheers,
-L

Ok, so I am a little confused here...

I've been ed-ju-ma-kating myself on the basics of Blender; and am capable of creating simple Mesh objects.

So; right now, I have just a simple, Wire Mesh object.

I would like to create a Sculpt MAP of this object, that I can export and upload into SL.

But this process thus far, escapes me. Especially when I get to Part III of the Tutorial which is the subject of this Thread.



Ok, so... WHAT, exactly am I importing? My object is already on my screen. If I close it, and attempt to Import THAT file of THAT object, I just get a bunch of errors. So, what am I supposed to be importing?

Secondly...

Step II, of Part III.

I understand this part of Bake to SL Sculpt; and yes I have Dom's scripts. However when I do this, nothing appears in the UV View window to the right; but the Console Window reports that the Bake was successful and completed in under 0.0013 seconds.

So...

I'm a little stumped here.

Thank you for posting this!

This thread is about baking objects created in another package with Blender, so the tutorial here doesn't apply to what you are doing. If you created the original mesh with Add - Mesh - Sculpt Mesh, then you are 99% done already. If not then you'll need a solid understanding of the sculpt map format and UV unwrapping in Blender.



I'm going to assume you used Add - Mesh - Sculpt Mesh as the bake was successful. Earlier versions of the scripts used to automatically display the last baked sculpt map in the UV editor, but once the scripts supported baking multiple sculpties at once, this feature was removed as it just confused matters - too many factors affected which map would be displayed at the end.

You should be able to go straight to File - Export - Second Life LSL to save the map and a LSL script to recreate the object in a directory of your choice, or if you just want the map, you can use the combo box on the UV Image Editor to select the map image (in object mode).

If you go into edit mode and select all faces (a key) then the map for the object you are editing will be displayed (unless you have added another UV Layer for texturing.

Watching the videos at http://blog.machinimatrix.org/video-tutorials/ might help.

I created the object, basically with just a clean slate; and just placed out the Vertice Points, connected them together to make edges, and then eventually an entire Wire mesh object. Basically starting out with making a Flat Plane in the shape of a Pentagon.

The object in question, is rather simple. It is a Pentagonal Trapezohedron.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagonal_trapezohedron

Probably simple for some but I struggled with it for awhile trying to figure it out; and now that I have it, I want to make a Sculpt Map out of it.

I also, have a Deltoidal Icositetrahedron that I've constructed... which I would also like to convert into a Sculpt Map. I created it, basically the same way as I did the Trapezohedron.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deltoidal_icositetrahedron

As I said, probably simple objects for some, but I considered them quite an achievement for myself to create them, and have them geometrically accurate, so to say.... meaning that all the edges are the same basically. They were sort of, my "self test" of my capabilities on the basics of Blender.

However, I am starting to suspect that... creating these the way I did, starting with a clean slate, blank sheet, etc... and just placing out the Vertices, and playing "connect the dots" ... was probably not the right way?

Either that, or I am going to have to learn more about how to convert these into a UV Map, which if I think i understand correctly, can then be converted into the Sculpt map?

It's the toughest way to make a sculptie. You'll learn more this way, but I really don't recommend going this way for your first attempt. With this sort of shape you'll probably find it's quicker to start over than trying to get a usable UV map.



Yes. All sculpties are essentially a plane that is formed into the shape you want, and the UV map is the 2D version of that plane. So with things like the D10 shape, where it comes to a point, it's impossible to get the correct UV map unless each kite shape is made of two quads.

So I'd try Add - Mesh - Sculpt Mesh with settings of

Sculpt Type=Sphere
X faces = 10
Y faces = 2
Subdivision = 0
Clean LODS = On

After adding, create a new Image from the UV Editor 64 x 32 (or 64 x 64 to support all clients) to bake to. (The scripts create the smallest image needed for the input values)

It should only need minor editing around the equator line to get the kite shaped faces.

Bake and do Image - Import as Sculptie (on git scripts, or save and import sculptie with rc scripts) to get the full resolution sculptie with multires for final editing and rounding of edges if desired. Bake again to get the final sculpt map for upload to SL.

PS: You won't get 100% mathematical accuracy with sculpties, and I'd be tempted to stick with the low resolution map and fake rounding with texturing.. You could use your existing model and bake selected to active (for texture not sculpt map) for this.

Thanks for the advice there Domino!

Gonna play around some more when I get home tonight, and see what I can do.

Just experimented with the Sculpt Mesh settings you suggested; which is something that honestly never crossed my mind to do; though, being at Work there is not much I can do with it just yet... haha, office PC just doesn't have the processing power to handle Blender efficiently.

So I'll see what I can do when I get home!