Blender Sculptie Importer - Attached

a friend of mine inworld was saying to maybe resize in blender somehow and then resize in world cuz im a car builder and would like to update my products into sculpts but the invisible box only seems to happen when i make the sculpts bigger so im not sure really how to resize other than re scaling in blender but im not sure if that will make a difference? i dont mean to be a pest i just wanna fix the issue thanks for your help again also and patience

When you do the bake in Blender, do you have multiple objects selected or just a single mesh? With multiple objects, the sculptie scale is calculated across all of them, which again can give a bounding box that is bigger than the individual sculpties.

Apart from that, I'm running out of suggestions, I'd need to see the blend file to figure it out.

no its just one sphere i bin using,but when i render the uv map i have all the faces and vertex's selected


gonna try what u said

yea im not sure what the deal is i notice though if i scale it one way like say on the z axis if in blender then upload it into sl the z axis in sl will match up to the sculpted prim in z axis like the invisible box is snug up against the sculpted prim ..

also i sent u a uv map in world maybe u can make some sence of it thanks

i think i figured it out after hours of tinkering the last thing i did was compare to bakes meaning i baked one as fill holes and normalize and i notice it still had the problem so i went back and baked the same sculpty as fill holes only but with out normalize i uploaded and realized it was fixed no invisible box everything was center and all

thanks for all ur help domino

Another new feature has just been added to the development branch



This simply makes clearing of the sculptie map before baking optional. It's useful for some methods of making sculpties, for example making a double sided plane type:

1) Add - Mesh Sculpt Mesh, Plane 8 x 8, no multires
2) Delete one side of vertices (make sure one half of UV map remains)
3) Do whatever with mesh (eg scale to be square, subdivide and use cloth sim over a table model)
4) Bake sculptie with Clear enabled, one half will be sculptie, other black.
5) Select the UV map, mirror on X (or Y if you deleted a vertical half) and move to the black side of the image. (tip: enable snap to pixels)
6) Bake sculptie with Clear disabled. You should now have a full sculptie map.
7) Save sculptie map. This gives a double sided sculptie.

Now that is just cool! Thanks!!

May be you could link to your post #392 or put the info in the initial post for those just joining the thread?

I think it would probably cause more confusion mentioning development features there. The plan is to give heads up on new stuff in the development version here for people keen enough to follow the thread. When a feature moves to release then it will be documented on the website. Of course I'm still playing catchup on the website documentation at the moment, but hopefully will have things in place reasonably soon

Edit: I've updated the development page to list what's different from the release version and have included a link back to the post here. It seems the best way to cover everything.

Probably. Your choice makes sense. Thanks for explaining.

GIT looked really overwhelming when I first looked at it. It is easy to use once one gets past the first OMG!

Just like Blender

hi;

I have created a nurbs surface. Then after sculpting, i converted the nurbs surface into a mesh and unwrapped that mesh (using the method described in http://iramblesorry.blogspot.com/2007/05/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love_28.html )

Now i have a perfectly shaped UV-texture (rectangular as needed)
I rename the texture from "UVTex" (default name) to "sculptie" (required for the scripts...)

Now i bake SL sculpties and ... see no sculptie-map created.

I thought, i could go this way when i want to use nurbs surfaces in first place... I remember a note in this thread about that, but i couldn't find it again... So what could i possibly have done wrong ? or which step is missing before i can bake SL sculpties from meshes, which have been created from a conversion of nurbs surfaces ? (using blender 2.46)

As a quick test I did:

1) Add Surface - Nurbs surface
2) Go to object mode and press Alt-C to Convert to Mesh
3) Got to edit mode and select all vertices
4) Still on top view, press U and select Project from View ( Bounds )
5) Render - Bake Second Life Sculpties

And it worked as expected. I didn't rename the UV Layer as that's only required if you are texturing the model. If a "sculptie" UV Layer isn't found, the scripts use the current UV Layer instead.

Well... I could swear, that i tested exactly the same workflow and it failed... yesterday. Now it works for me too ... Maybe because i restarted my computer ??? Thank you anyways. Now i can make my "from nurbs to sculptie" tutorial

Gaia,

Looking forward to your tutorial on Nurbs! Coming from an Illustrator background NURBS makes allot of sense to me . . . I enjoy all of your current tutorials! Just wanting to let you know I 'm anxious to see your new tut!

Ama

Scripts are working great Domino! and your site looks good too.. Kudos and much thanks!

-whyroc

Hi;

From what i can see, the UV-map creation process can be fully automated for NURBS surfaces. So, isn't it then feasible to add the ability to bake second life sculpties directly from NURBS ?

Despite the fact, that as far as i know, we have no multires with NURBS, it still may be a neat add-on feature for the sculptie exporter. The workflow could be like this:

1.) Create a standard NURBS surface
2.) Sculpt your NURBS
3.) render -> bake second life sculpties (the exporter recognizes the object as NURBS and creates the UV-texture before rendering...
4.) reload the sculptie to blender and refine it using multires etc...


Or alternatively ( in my opinion even better):


1.) Create a standard NURBS surface
2.) Sculpt your NURBS
3.) script: make sculpt mesh from NURBS (NURBS type determines sculpt mesh type, UV map generated automatically) Possibly creating a new object, so that the NURBS is still available for later modifications, or let the user decide to keep/remove the NURBS.
4.) refine sculptmesh as usual using multires etc...
5.) render bake second life sculptie


If i only would know a little more about programming with python and the blender API, i would give it a try. But, if i get some positive feedback for the idea in general AND at least some hints about how such a script would have to be setup in principle, then i would be curious enough to give it a try. Although i suspect, Domino could do this in 2 hours or even has it already in his queue ...

What do you think ?

Well I did have a gigantor post over my thoughts on NURBS vs. poly's, but I decided to erase it since it digressed too far from current topic.

NURBS can have their advantages, but Blender's tools here are really primitive. Ever thought of digging into Ayam? -> http://ayam3d.org/ It might be possible to import nurbs models from Ayam, while having the full feature set available to you.

If you want nurbs, why not go full monty on it :}

Hi, Domino;

I watched your video about unwrapping suzanne several times now and i tried to do the same on the avatar head (using blender 2.46). But i get some questions:

1.) while unwrapping suzanne, you did some special trick on the top of her head (and on the upper part of the UV-map). What exactly did you do there ? and why ?

2.) I unwrapped several times with different results. Sometimes the created sculptie was ok in shape, but often i got some spikes. I am not aware of where i make something wrong. I suspect, some subtle things have to be obbeyed in the uv map ?

3.) The resulting sculptie seems to distribute the vertices all over the head in an linear way. Now the head always looks ugly. But i would need many vertices at the nose, eyes and ears parts... So, is there any principle way to go so that unwrapping results in better sculpties ? I guess, the best bet would be to use "snap to pixels" and ensure, that each vertex is distributed to a different point in the UV-map ? Doi i have to take care for crossing vertex connections in the UV-map? or is that irrelevant for the sculptie baker ?

4.) I can imagine, that all body parts of the avatar have to be unwrapped once and the resulting uv-maps could be added to the avatar.blend file. So in principle it could be possible to have one uv-map for the clothing and the skin production, and another uv-map for the sculptie baking. This seems to be a mater of creating ideal UV-maps once and reuse them for ever... is this a correct assumption? Then doesn't it make sense to create these UV-maps once and make them available in the avatar.blend file ?

Top of head was selecting faces for the UV co-ords that were wrong.. The upper part of UV map was fixing these. Generally it's just the usual tweaking to get a square UV map.



Load the uv_guide.tga into the UV Image Editor and enable snap to pixels. The brighter the blue, the higher the LOD. Get the square first then pin the outside and do a normal unwrap. Move key vertices to brighter blue points. Pin those.. and unwrap.. repeat until happy with result moving down the LODs as you go.

Generally using a new sculptie and modelling around the existing mesh will be quicker. Retopo can help here. There's also a shrinkwrap branch in GSoC which offers another approach.



Nope. Do I include a low sculptie model for those who want to say make target practice dummies, or a primmy one for sculptures? Or somewhere inbetween for shop mannequins? Do we need real hands or will mittens do? Are they for new textures or do they need to match the clothing templates? Is the head fixed or does it need to do expression animation? There isn't just one reason and way to convert the mesh to sculpties, so it's not a one time job.

Where can I get the uv_guide.tga? ^^;; I can't seem to find it.

It comes in the development version of the scripts, or you can download here:

http://dominodesigns.info/images/second_life/blender_scripts/uv_guide.tga

A great set of scripts. I really appreciate them.

I'm having a minor issue with the exported LSL scripts:



SL Doesn't like the tK-1. I'm not sure if I'm mis-selecting things before export on my end. But once I fix that detail in scripts it runs fine.

http://dominodesigns.info/second_life/blender_scripts.html

Grab the latest scripts, this bug was only on a very early version of the LSL exporter and was fixed the same day as the buggy release.

While a bit late to mention it, I suppose it's worth mentioning that Blender's NURBS support is a bit lackluster. While it's more than adequate I guess for what sculpties require, I've read that the code regarding them is a tangled mess. It might be difficult or impossible to make an automated exporter for NURBS.

The LSL exporter is a welcome addition, I'm still using an older version that just spits out LSL into the console. >D
Good luck on the avatar importing. You might want to look here for some insights:
http://jacek.meratalk.com/sl-animation-for-blender-newbs/
Not sure if having a rigged up version of the model would help or not.

From what i have learned while creating the "from NURBS to sculptie" video, it is a matter of simple high level transformations:

1.) transform the NURBS into a mesh
2.) UV-unwrap the mesh according to very generic rules (it always works in the same way)
3.) transforming the mesh into a sculptie map by either using Domono's scripts

If the blender script-api is good enough for supporting high level functions, such as we used to create the video, then it should be technicaly no big deal to make an automated NURBS exporter.

The question is more: how relevant is NURBS in relation to blender and sculptie creation ? Do people WANT to use NURBS to make sculpties in blender ? Are the benefits big enough ? Will people use NURBS, if such an automated process where available, even when they also have Domino's scripts installed ?

My biggest concern is, that during the work with NURBS, there is no LOD control available. So you might end up in modifying the mesh again, after you realised, that you got LOD problems in your final sculptie ...