Blender Sculptie Importer - Attached

Some of my earliest experiments with sculpties were with nurbs. I've never used them for anything other than experimenting. My favourite workflow is a low poly mesh ( 8 x 8 or less with no multires ) plus subsurf and creasing to get sharp edges as shown in the flask video somewhere in this thread. This has the low vertex manipulation and even texturing benefits of nurbs with all the control and precision of poly modelling. In effect you model the lowest LOD and use creases to provide the info for generating the higher LODs.

I think for NURBS to be a possible consideration, a good long look should be taken at Qarl's Maya exporter which works best with NURBS. Since Maya scripts are written in Python, syntax wise there should be no problems understanding things. It's just a matter of does Blender have the same level of data interaction as Maya for NURBS. Automatically converting to a mesh and then exporting would probably cause some problems. I could see it being very annoying for instance if you made a fold that looked right in NURBS, but converted to polygons as a flat surface instead of a curved nook. As you said, a lack of LoD control.

While experimenting with Maya, I can say using NURBS for some things have been useful. They're easier to work with than polygons and there's less of a worry about the faces being pushed into each other improperly. My only issue with NURBS is I like my object's shape to reflect literal changes to the nodes I move around, rather than relative changes (knots in the NURBS surface merely influence the surface's position, rather than making that point of the surface be where you moved it).

IF ( and it's a very big if ) I was going to add nurbs support to the scripts, it would have to be through reading the nurbs surface directly rather than converting to polys. I'm not sure how the Blender api is for that, but it's a minor issue as I'm getting into the habit of extending the Blender Python API when I need to. Anyone with a Blender build from trunk R16206 or later can now set empty shapes from a script because I thought it would be useful to display the attach points as spheres on my avatar importer



That's my main issue too. It's why I prefer the subsurf + crease method as that's much more literal.

Your current baking method uses vertex info to generate the sculpt map correct? Wouldn't generating the map from the surface info be more apt?

It would be, but to do that properly requires a different UV map for the sculptie. My current scripts adjust for the problem areas automatically. A surface based bake (easily done with nodes) needs the sculptie map UVs to be different from the texture UVs. Specifically it needs the top row and right column moving in by 1 pixel. While this could work great with generated sculpties that had the two different UV maps, it makes a lot of manual stuff a lot harder to do. It also means baking to a 64 x 64 image or a 128 x 128 image would need different sculptie map UVs to get it perfect.

Generating the map from surface info is basically a variation on the material method of making sculpties and can be done without scripts. The main aim with my scripts is to make things simpler, having the different sculptie map UVs would have just complicated things.

The development branch of the scripts has been updated with better support for oblong sculpties. The import doesn't currently match the one on the beta grid as I would have to remove multires support due to the non-consistant LODs.

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

For best results turn off "compressible" when baking as this will give an interpolated surface which is better suited to the non-consistant LODs oblong sculpties have.

Leaving "compressible" on can help to maintain the shape of geometric sculpties at lower LODS, but there may be minor texture movements as the formula switches from using the odd pixels to the even ones representing the same location.

/8/9a/278017/1.html

Note: This change makes working with non-standard sizes for easy editing more difficult. You will need to resize the "sculptie" UV layer to suit the final form of the sculptie if you use this technique.

Hi;

I am modelling a sculptie using LOD1 first. Then i jump to LOD2 to make some fine tuning.
But as soon as i change the LOD level, some of the vertices of LOD1 jump to other places. When i now get back to LOD1, the vertex positions have permanently changed.
Furthermore when i continue my work on LOD2 and do not touch the "LOD1" vertices, nevertheless when i jump back to LOD1, the LOD1 vertices have again moved to other places.

So what i do now is to iterate through the different LOD-levels, until i am satisfied. My final step is then always to iterate again through the LOD levels in order to be sure, no more vertex moves take place.

But this approach is a bit time consuming. When i work from bottom up i allready know what i want to achieve, but the multires just breaks my previous work and i have to flip forward/backward many times...
Is there a way to avoid that somehow ?

What i like best would be:

first model in LOD1,
then lock the vertices of LOD1
and continue on LOD2 with fine tuning.
then lock also these vertices
and continue on LOD3

Related to this, i wonder, how i could align 2 separate sculpties at
2 adjacent sides. I just tried to make an object out of 2 perfectly aligned sculpties,
but due to the above described behaviour of multires, all my alignmentwork on lower LOD-levels gets permanently destroyed as soon as i switch to a higher LOD-level.

Is there any good way to solve this, except simply only working in LOD3 ?

Hi;

I am modelling a sculptie using LOD1 first. Then i jump to LOD2 to make some fine tuning.
But as soon as i change the LOD level, some of the vertices of LOD1 jump to other places. When i now get back to LOD1, the vertex positions have permanently changed.
Furthermore when i continue my work on LOD2 and do not touch the "LOD1" vertices, nevertheless when i jump back to LOD1, the LOD1 vertices have again moved to other places.

So what i do now is to iterate through the different LOD-levels, until i am satisfied. My final step is then always to iterate again through the LOD levels in order to be sure, no more vertex moves take place.

But this approach is a bit time consuming. When i work from bottom up i allready know what i want to achieve, but the multires just breaks my previous work and i have to flip forward/backward many times...
Is there a way to avoid that somehow ?

What i like best would be:

first model in LOD1,
then lock the vertices of LOD1
and continue on LOD2 with fine tuning.
then lock also these vertices
and continue on LOD3

Related to this, i wonder, how i could align 2 separate sculpties at
2 adjacent sides. I just tried to make an object out of 2 perfectly aligned sculpties,
but due to the above described behaviour of multires, all my alignmentwork on lower LOD-levels gets permanently destroyed as soon as i switch to a higher LOD-level.

Is there any good way to solve this, except simply only working in LOD3 ?

That's a great question! It might be better to ask it in another thread (I'm not sure), but I'm glad you asked it, because I also wanted to know.

I've been doing it the same way you describe. I've learned not to focus too much time on the lower LODs without going back & forth to each LOD to check each, often. I do like to start with the lower LOD to make a rough approximation of the shape, though.

I'm quite new to blender and this entire process, and this is all I've learned, so far.

The thing with Blender is that there are a number of different ways to do things, and the form of the sculptie will generally give a clue which is the best. Multires is best for organic sculpties and using sculpt mode.

Since I added support for the modifier stack, I prefer to use the lowest level with 0 multires and use subsurf and creasing instead. It's faster and gives clean LODs for texturing. This is the simplest and most universal of the techniques in my opinion.

Starting with 0 multires, modelling the lowest LOD* and adding a simple subdivision multires level, modelling that, add another, modelling that is a useful technique for geometric shapes too. I think this is the method Gaia wants to "lock" each level. It's only a temporary lock as each additional level is added though.

*When I say lowest LOD in this thread I tend to mean the lowest supported by subdivision ( LOD 1 - 8 x 8 ) rather than the true lowest of 6 x 6 on LOD 0.

Generally speaking, once you move up a level, you'd normally avoid working on lower ones directly again.

If you are trying to align multiple sculpties, then joining them (but don't remove doubles) to be a single mesh can help. You can split them later for baking.

If you are doing precise work and want absolute control over every single vertex then just using the highest LOD level (probably with 0 multires) is the way to do it.

If you are modeling for race tracks or other sims where the majority of avatars will have their detail settings on minimum you will need to work to the 6 faces of LOD 0 rather than the 8 faces of LOD 1 that I generally recommend using.

Hi!
My friend is trying to instal scripts for version 2.47 (he can't enter to the forum ) and he can´t. Is there a special way to install those scripts for this new version? He was using 2.46 before. thanx

Also I want to know, cause have some problems with 2.46 version ^^'

It should be the same: http://dominodesigns.info/second_life/blender_scripts.html

There's a link to Gaia's video tutorial on installation in the "useful links" on that page.

Several ways to do things... I tend to work in the top LOD, switching to lowest to see which vertices are used in the lowest LOD. I try to make the low LOD vertices the hard edges in geometric shapes.

A question on 'creasing'... I can't see how Blender's creasing makes it into the scultpy map. I think that a crease has to be some additional informaion attached to the model vertices. I don't see how that info would get to SL?

/8/60/203571/9.html#post1936182

Has the video where I first demonstrated this technique.

Short version is model using a 8 x 8 mesh, 0 multires, add a subsurf modifier and crease to taste. Bake the sculptie

Thanks, Domino!

I see why you work at multirez 0. Seeing the import of the initial sculpty and use of multirez made it clear.

thanx for the quick answer
I finally ended downloading version 2.47 and had the same problem as my friend, "blender 2.47 installer" doesn't have a script folder, that was the problem. I had to download the other version "Blender 2.47 Zip Archive" and there is the script folder and that blender runs now with sl scripts ^^

I use windows vista. I have blender 2.43 with Python 2.5. I downloaded the SL scultptie scripts and they show up in blender but everytime I try to use them..i get that silly Python error; Check console.

I check the console and it reads this:

compiled with Python 2.5.
'import site' failed; use -v for traceback
checking for installed python... no installed python found.
only buillt in modules are available. some scripts may not run.
Traceback<most recent call last>:
File "<string>", line 54, in <module>
import error: no module named import_sculptie


I have no idea what all this means...sounds to me it is saying that I don't have python installed. I know that I do...

Hi;

Maybe it is best to upgrade your blender to a newer version. I believe, recent versions of blender contain a full python installation. and i am quite sure, that Domino's scripts rely on some recent development in the area of multires. So maybe even if you can solve your python problem, you might get baking problems later. At least you won't get the full power of the scripts when using a blender-version previous to 2.46 ...

Anyways i am using blender since 2.45 and i have seen MANY remarkable improvements on this tools until now. So i would encourage you to upgrade.

Oh, UV-mapping has become simpler but a bit different from earlier versions. So maybe you would like to take a look at this area too. THe machinimatrix team has provided some video tutorials for sculpty makers, see http:///blog.machinimatrix.org

ALthough not directly answering your questions, that still might help you a bit .

That should do it. 2.44 was the first version the script were developed for and they do use features that are only available in later versions. 2.47 is the current version and 2.48 should be out in test builds within a few days.

Did you copy all the.py files to the scripts directory? If it's not a compatibility issue, then that's the only other thing I can think of that could cause that error.

>boggles<

Ok.. so.. I um, got through the first several pages of posts here, but forgive me... just waaay too much to read.

Anyway, I am very new to Blender, am just starting out with some basic tutorials but I have managed to successfully Mesh a 3 dimensional hexogonal object that I had set as a goal for myself..

I want to Import this meshed object into Second Life as a Sculptie, and.. I have downloaded all of Domino's scripts.. they all seem to run just fine. But... when I hit the Export and try to export into my file directory, it doesnt do anything... an theres no file added to the directory.

Is there a way.. to import a Meshed object with these scripts; and could someone perhaps explain it in easy terms?

I got Blender because I wanted to learn how to build things in Second Life and... these scripts sound like that make it easy/sneasy and for the life of me I simply can't figure it out!

Edit: Oh an.. bare in mind that the extent of my knowledge with Blender, as far as created objects is that of...

Make Vertice point here... Make Vertice point there.. connect dots, make line.. rinse, repeat, until desired 3D object is created... then click edges here and there, to make faces.

Bam.. object constructed.

Now.

I want to Import that, Object... into Second Life.

Edit2: For the record.. I using Blender 2.47 and running Windows XP Pro... Running Blender with its own compiled Python... I have no idea what Python is, I just know Blender needs it and someone on the Blender Forums told me that I don't need the full Python to Import/Export objects... because they "compiled it all into Blender" ...

Hi Ambrosius,
From one relative beginner to a total beginner........... welcome to the world of Blender.
Sorry but you will need to wade through some more of the forum threads, posts, blogs and tutorials before you get a real grasp - you can't just create any old mesh and import it 'easily' into SL.
Domino's awesome add-ons are for using specific Sculpty meshes within Blender, i.e. you load one up and then manipulate that into whatever shape you are after then getting the UV map of that and exporting it as a tga file.
You can however also 'unwrap' any other mesh object you've made and make it into a Sculptie map but it's more complicated and I'm still struggling to get my head fully round the process.
Start with a couple of the tutorials I found most useful :-

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/
http://iramblesorry.blogspot.com/2007/05/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love_28.html
http://amandalevitsky.googlepages.com/sculptiecrashcourse

What the process has done for me so far is give me a healthy respect for all those people who have a) understood and b) mastered the art of Sculpty making!

Good luck!


Drifter

While it is possible to make sculpties this way, it is the hardest way to do it. The pages of this thread around 5 and 6 explain why. It's also a tough method to teach over the internet as there's no single way that will always work, what you do next depends on the result of previous steps. Basically you need to unwrap the model to fill the sculptie map as a single surface.

One of the advantages of my scripts is the add-mesh-sculpt mesh option that is added to Blender. This creates a starter sculptie with the correct UV mapping, just move the vertices into place and bake.

Hey thanks for the replies guys... and yea, I obviously have quite a lot more education on this stuff to go through.

I had presumed... that it was only a simple process of constructing a 3D object in some program and then just export/import into Second Life via some scripts and such.

Sounds like I'm gonna be looking at the texture mapping tutorials for Blender next! I don't mind putting a texture around my object, save me the trouble of having to go shop all over Second Life for the right one, hah!

Then I just gotta figure out all that UV mapping I guess...

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

New scripts up with add mesh support for https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-9384

Unfortunately the latest word from Qarl was that VWR-9384 would not make it into the next release. This could mean people start making sculpties with the wrong sizes and then "legacy" content would prevent VWR-9384 from ever being implemented. Please let your voice be heard on this important issue and vote now, as tomorrow may be too late!

How do i use this script?

[edit] Disregard that, I found a in depth tutorial, and got some help from the blender guys on freenode.
awesome script btw, thanks