Wings3d UVMapped Spheres for Download

Alright, by popular request, all the Wings3d spheres are here, uvmapped, that can be used to create sculpt files. 8/7, 16/15, 32/31, 64/63 polygon sizes.

Note that these are uvmapped with the north pole pointing north for compatibility with 3d programs, currently the exporter flips the map so that the uvmap in SL is mapping flipped - its a simple matter of flipping the uvmap vertically in SL, or flipping it in a uv editor if you feel so inclined.

Updated 7 June to fix poles mapping.

Updated 27 June to add triangulated spheres - I have left the quad spheres as well, use whatever works best for you

refixed - saw errors when baking textures, now I am CERTAIN the uvspace is perfect, so they are uploaded again. if the zip isn't named wingspherescp, redownload.

thanks, H. Now if I can just figure out how to use them

you're welcome, hope you find them useful when you do Had a lot of people ask for other uvmapped ones, as the free uvmapping programs don't do an easy job of the task.

thanks. This is apprciatied.

Lee, here's a way to use them to do do all your sculpty shaping and texturing with just Wings and your favoriate paint program. The process can be streamlined more, I think, but I am still figuring out the details of how Wings handles UV mapping.

* Import one of Hypatia's .OBJ files and save it as a Wings file with a new name.

* Select the whole sphere, right mouse click, and select UV Mapping. An "Auto_UV" window will open. We're not going to do anything with it yet, so you can close it. But it is necessary to open it once before doing the next step.

* From the Window menu on the Geometry window, select Outliner. An Outliner window will open, and it will have 4 items in it. The ones we're interested in are the texture named auvBG and the material named default.

* Have Wings create a separate file for the texture by left-clicking on the auvBG line, then right-clicking and choosing Make External. Notice that when using the Outliner window, you first have to select the line with a left click and then open the context menu with a right click. If the context menu doesn't contain the options you expect, it's probably because you forgot to first select the line with a left click.

* Have Wings use the texture for the default material by dragging the auvBG line to the default material line. In response to the Texture Type dialog box, pick Diffuse.

* The sphere in the Geometry window should now be textured with a colored rectangular grid of letters. This is Wing's default texture. Since Wings doesn't support painting directly on the 3D model, the default texture's intent is to make it easier to visually make the connection between the bitmap you'll be painting with your 2D paint program and the 3D model. (If someone feels inclined to make a contribution to using Wings for sculpties, I think they could create a more helpful starting texture.)

* Now texture your model by opening up the bitmap you had Wings create earlier and painting over the default texture. The Geometry window doesn't update in real time, but you can update it whenever you want by saving your bitmap-in-progress and selecting Refresh from the context menu for the texture in the Wings' Outliner window.

* With this technique, the bitmap you are painting is the bitmap you will load into SL as the sculpty's texture. That is, Wings is only acting as a previewer and the exporter doesn't do anything different than it does for a sculpty without a texture.

Hypatia, if you are reading this and try out this procedure, you'll see that your UV map does not align the default texture to the faces of the sphere quite right. It looks to me like Wings expects the UV map to have one fewer rows than it does. I think this is probably the source of the problem you reported earlier, where you had to delete the material from the .obj file in order to import it into Wings. (Without the material, Wings doesn't attempt to map the texture to the model.) It appears that the Wings .obj importer is more picky than Wings itself, since Wings will allow the user to map it manually, albeit with imperfect alignment.

woo hoo !!

Thanks Hypatia, but what I was really hoping for were the .UVB map files from UV Mapper Pro. (The only thing stopping me from exporting them myself is not having the $50 to spare on the cost of the full program and the export is disabled in the demo).

you can use the OBJ to remap your file as well. I do believe the classic version supports exporting and importing maps, but its been a while since I've used it. Classic is free, no demo.

edit: just downloaded classic, and it works to import UVs from objs and to export. Please use that version to do the exporting

These are exported without the material though - so that doesn't make sense.

Sounds like a Wings bug. Baked textures on the model in Carrara map perfectly on my imported Wings models in SL though, so I suspect this is purely a bug in Wings. It might be the other way around - where Wings isn't aligning the uvmap to the faces correctly. Models view correctly in Zbrush, UVMapper Pro, and Carrara.

I suspect it doesn't affect the exporter because it's only exporting vertex data, without dependence on uvmapping.

On a side note, I have to rotate the map 90 degrees also for Carrara maps. The UVmaps are twisted 90 degrees in SL, so I've twisted it 90 degrees on the model.

And for those of you who are trying to avoid the compression issues and want to do lossless. Here is the UVmapped wings3d sphere at 128. It was uvmapped in UVmapper classic with the texture exported, a template in bmp, the sculpty bmp and the obj files itself.

I thought the export was for 64/63 tops, better look again I guess. Edit: just looked - I dont see that the exporter is supporting that sphere size, you have to upsize in a graphics app. Irfanview set to not interpolate is a good choice.

but I will say, the more vertex density you get, the harder it is to work with, unless you're using an app like Zbrush or Mudbox. Which is why I kinda wish we could choose a map size independently of the model size. For some models, I'm finding texture baking to be a bit more reliable. (sharp edges come out better in Carrara ironically, because I can sharpen those edges in the program without adding more verts to them, then bake, makes it as if they had more vertices assigned.

oh I think I know.

It's probably the fact that I'm rotating the UV map 90 degrees for compatibility to SL mapping, so it's not lining up exactly to the faces in Wings. But that doesn't matter - because it lines up with the faces in SL on the map as it is exported.

I didnt upside it. I generated it in wings3d and exported it. Its pure wings 3d.
And yes, I didn't take in consideration the sl mapping because honestly, I have no way to verify that without wasting L$. My system hated SL and I can run it by itslef with small apps in the background, but no browser or and thing else.
I am working on that.
And I go agree with the map selection. Hell, I wish they would use objs but that taht isnt happening.

Doh, you're right. I'd forgotten I had that version. Problem fixed!

*starts texturing her shoes*

The bug is in my reasoning . The default texture has 32 rows. The sphere has 31 slices. Of course they don't line up.

I agree. Now that I understand the issues better, I'm planning on having the Wings exporter let you choose the bitmap export resolution independently from the modeling resolution.

I can make a lot of stuff in Wings3d that doesn't work with Omei's exporter.

My post is that your sphere is unsupported by the exporter, so people will have trouble using it.

Hypatia, I've been looking at texturing more closely. My experiments with Wings suggests that the UV mapping of the triangles at the poles isn't quite right. It seems like the apex of the triangles should be shifted so that there is only one diagonal line running from the lower left corner to the upper right. I'm attaching a picture in case the words aren't clear. The red lines show what SL actually uses, I think.

Thanks a lot for making these!

I thought that they *plan* to have a limit, but that it is not there yet, but will be soon.

Lee - the exporter only supports a few sphere types. The sphere type that Thunderclap posted is not supported by the exporter that Omei built. Nothing to do with SL.

I'll look and fix those maps Omei, thanks for pointing that out I haven't noticed a problem, but it could be larger on the smaller sizes.

hm.

looking at maps... I think this is wrong. I'll do some more tests, but in SL, that would skew the map in a really wrong direction. My maps were exactly correct before. SL does not skew the map in that direction.

We have to remember we're trying to UV map to match SL UVmapping, not to match how it is in a particular program. I'm going to check again but I'm fairly certain SL is doing it the way I've done it.

ok did a few more SL texture tests and it seems like you're right Omei... going to upload the new spheres. I didn't want to update till I was sure they were working right.

I was getting confused because for your sphere, I have to flip the texture in SL because of the exporter mapping from the bottom, while SL still textures the sphere the same way it textures any sphere, including regular sphere prims.. So I had to do some texture baking test spheres to compare and be sure that the textures really are like that. I'll upload the new ones shortly.

files are updated

Thank you, Hypatia I apologize for you still having to flip the texture. I will fix the exporter. But I'm making a lot of small changes, and I want to wait and release them in chunks rather than one at a time.

On the topic of changes, I am planning on picking up Strife's suggestion and encouraging the triangulation of the quadrangles in the Wings model. At first, I didn't see the advantage of this, because it didn't seem to improve the similarity between the Wings and SL rendering, and on the other hand it cluttered the model. But now that I understand better how to control some of the other sources of inaccuracy (compression and LOD shifts), I can see that making the diagonals explicit really does allow Wings to better reflect what SL will do. Since your .obj files are so useful (and I presumed used), I'm interested in what you think about that.

sounds good to me. I agree in that the triangulated mesh is probably better in determining what SL will do. I can update as needed. Some programs have their problems with tris (most notably Zbrush) but I think it can export a triangulated mesh.. unsure. I'll look into the Zbrush compatibility issues.

I just fixed some small errors in the uvspace (was barely off, showing up in the texture baking) so be sure you get the last one.