Blender Sculptie Importer - Attached

These Blender scripts provide "sculptie map" support to Blender.

The latest version of the scripts and manual are available from

http://dominodesigns.info/project/primstar

Under releases, you can choose from the current stable version 0.5.x or the development version 0.9.x

Let me be the first then..
AWESOME!!
Thanks for you're efforts Domino, I'm sure appreciated by all.
Now lock down your maps!

Hmm. I can't seem to find a script folder for my version of Blender (2.44, Mac). I have looked in both my Library and inside the .app package for the appropriate folders... is there a Mac equivalent for this folder? And if so, do you know where it is?

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Advanced_Tutorials/Python_Scripting/Export_scripts#Creating_a_script

That's the best description I've seen of how to find it on a Mac. I'm on Windows so don't know the specifics of Macs.

I've just updated the scripts to 0.07

This release adds a scripted bake command to the Render menu in Blender. This works in conjunction with the import scripts which add extra information to the mesh which the baker uses.

This is a major step beyond any other method of making sculpties in Blender. The scripts support all 4 sculpted prim types - sphere, cylinder, torus and plane with full round tripping, no more gradually creeping distortions.. Well until SL gets it of course

I've put a plane and cylinder sculptie maps in the zip for starting points. I'll add a sphere and torus for the next release.

This is past the development stage and into beta now. Unless any one comes across a problem it'll soon be a 1.0 release

Well first: a very big thank you Domino

Guess we were all blender "sculptor" waiting for you.

Your script seams to work really well for me but i have some request for you!

-Could you script a tool for export a mesh that was not previously imported?
or and may be better (easier at last) some template starting "low poly" mesh like 8 8 or 16 16 faces. i guess a tool for any mesh created in blender would be usefull anyway (like if you use multires and or mirror ect on low poly).

-A tool (with visual infarce would be great) for seting the bake material. For example if we could get a bounding box for the xyz rvb range that we could scale independently from the mesh. A snap using this "box" could also be used to keep "in world imprecision" closest and with differents scale for the 3 axis.

-More??? humm yes! maybe some automatised animation bakin =)

Anyway i hope i will help improving your great tool!

ps: thought even more... we could also get some things like prim.blender for multi prim objects... but maybe that s too much

Yes. I'm already working on this. I've written a specific uv unwrapper that does a reasonable job of creating a sculptie UV map from any mesh (or meshes!!). I'm working on the second stage now which is a proper baking script (the current one only works with imported sculpties). This script will bake a sculptie map from any object with a sculptie style UV map. (Like the original material approach but with a scripted baker). I'm just learning stuff like gouraud shading so I can do the baking properly. Will be ready soon I hope



I've added this feature to the baking script for the next release. Instead of baking all sculpties in the scene, it will bake the selection using all selected meshes to calculate the scaling factor for the sculpties. You can add a bounding box mesh to the selection to get the effect you describe. Even without it, the sculpties would all have the same scale factor and should animate with the same centre. Selecting a single sculptie would give the same scaling as the current scripts. So Blender is the visual interface



Once I'm happy with the sculptie stuff, I'll want to bake their textures in relation to the full build. So yes, I'll be looking at normal prims and figuring out a way to create them in Blender with correct UV maps as the project progresses.

Oh and for low poly, just alter the number of verts to 17 x 17 or 9 x 9

Even better?
I'm sure some of those people that went for Maya and paid up are wishing they tried Blender a little longer.
I find Blender a powerfull tool already and making these scripts available just makes it betterer.

If we had a Karma system here there would be much "Good Karma" to you Domino!

Roll on HTML on a prim then I can post this next to a donation box

Is the zip file posted anywhere else? I've downloaded twice and my unzipper says the individual files have been corrupted. Thanks.

New version available, there's now a download link rather than having the file attached.

Watch over my shoulder and see how to use the scripts to create a sculpty of Suzanne in under 5 mins. As long as you can do vertex manipulation and know the basics of the Blender UI, you should be able to figure out what I'm doing.

http://dominodesigns.info/downloads/tutorials/blender/sculpting_suzanne.swf

Note: the planar_unwrap script has been renamed to eac_unwrap. To get the results shown in the video, where I use "Planar Unwrap" you should use "EAC Unwrap" and set the Axis to 1 for Y.

Thank you very much.

I seem to be getting only a corrupted file, when I try to download the script file. I am not sure what I may be doing wrong.

Web server had crashed, I'm on a cvs version due to needing some features from the next release of Cherokee so this might happen from time to time as the codebase isn't stable. I wasn't planning on serving stuff from it until the next stable release. Got a bit ahead of myself

I'll see if I can improve the stability tomorrow. I've just restarted the server so hopefully should be fine until then.

Domino, you are are on the cutting edge of turning arbitrary objects into sculpties. Maybe you are already there, but I just don't fully understand just what secrets you really know. I have managed to turn Suzanne into a sculpty map, and that was fairly simple. You have made life much easier for us.

My question is, when an object is planar unwrapped, how does one determine which vertice should be stretched to the edge? I noticed that there are some vertices with Suzanne that appear to be layered on the mesh, but fortunately, these are in the middle of the mesh.

Unwrapping an arbitrary mesh, I find many layered vertices, showing up as a darker blue, that need to be stretched but don't have a clue as to which one to select. In your video, I noticed the scaling of two faces on the top of Suzanne's head and did not quite understand just what and why you did that, or how you even realized what needed to be done.

Your Blender approach is so close to "Divine" that you have excited me to beyond belief.

Please loan me your brain for ten minutes. I have been using Blender for nearly three years, but I still can't quite grasp what you are doing, LOL.

And GOD BLESS YOU! There is sculpty hope!

"Divine" == "Well prepared and multiple practice runs"

In earlier takes of the tutorial I clicked around the UV faces a bit to try to show how I figured out to untwist those faces by scaling the top two corners to 0 (Keystrokes S X numpad0 Enter). Sadly I kept hitting the 5 min barrier with that part in. The dark blue faces are concave ones facing the centre of the sphere. The only way to sort them completely is to manually identify them (the back of the eye is most of them) and manually tweak that part of the UV map to untwist the faces. If you take the time to fix all of these, then you can bake textures on the main model and they will apply to the sculptie perfectly.

As the unwrap is based on spherical transforms there is an seam and two poles to the unwrap. The poles are on the Y axis with the seam on negative Z (from centre of object) so if the edges are out, that's the place on the model to explore to find the problem.

More Tips: If you are really stuck then apply a couple of levels of subsurf before doing the planar unwrap. With smaller faces some of the edge errors will be eliminated, but you'll have more points to clean up. Sometime rotating by 45 degrees (and applying) will help too as this will move the compressed parts of the uv map to different areas of the mesh.

Domino, thank your so much for your explaination, but unfortuantely, I do not speek Greek, hehe!

I realize that your mission in life is not to make a stupid blonde understand the complexities of Blender, I will, however, follow your posts, and maybe someday, get some clues as to what you just explained to me.

I really appreciate your prompt reply, even though it is probably midnight your time. I have lots of Linden$, maybe a little of that will loosen your tongue, hehe!

Yeah, it's late here. I might do another little video tomorrow. I was planning on showing how to create a sculptie from scratch that lets you work on each level of detail. Cleaning up Suzanne's UV map is a little much to do in five minutes so I probably won't cover that in a video.

Thanks Domino, I was able to get a clean copy of the scripts, looking forward to trying them out.

I am getting a Script error when I try to import a Second Life Sculptie "Python script error: check console. I am running Blender 2.44 in WinXP.

What does it say on the console?

ah, I am not too familiar with Blender, seems I don't have Python installed, I will look up how to do that, I didn't realize what the console was, lol.

Error reads:

Traceback <most recent call last>:
File "<string>", line 66, in <module>
ImportError: No module named os

Hmm, I'd not realised that by using the os module I'd made the scripts dependent on a full Python install rather than just the cut down Blender one. I only use the os module for converting the filename to the base name for the sculptie object in a platform independent way. I like that feature but not sure whether it warrants a full Python install. I'll make it optional in a future release.

Edit: now patched in 0.09 import. You can download the scripts again instead of Python

Ah, thanks, I did install Python and the older script worked, now to start trying to learn blender a bit once again.