Blender Sculptie Importer - Attached

If it's anything like Windows, then you also have to tell Blender where to find them. Boot up Blender, and drag the top viewport border down to see options. Go to 'File Paths', and change the 'Python Scripts' field to where you have the scripts.

Don't forget to save your user settings after doing this, or else you will have to do it every time you boot Blender! CTRL+U is the Windows hotkey for this, and I assume it's the same for Linux.

Thanks Keira - that did the trick. I think. Not sure the export lsl is working.... no feedback when I do it.

But thanks again.

Note, that you MUST export to an existing directory, otherwise the scripts will silently fail. Of course you will see, that the export was successfull when you look at the folder and see the sculptie-map(s), the LSL script(s) and optionally the surface texture(s)

Just bumped up against the next stopper - tried to export to Secondlife lsl - the terminal I ran blender from shows a python error - "ImportError: No module named render_sculptie" which I can easily imagine is a problem.

Check that you have placed all python scripts into your scripts directory. You probably are missing render_sculptie.py which is included in the distribution. Maybe if you messed up the download, download again and try a fresh install of the scripts ? Probably you will NOT(!!!) need to reinstall blender itself

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately the file is right there in the same directory as everything else - and blender can 'see' them - they are now showing up in the menu.

I opened render_sculptie.py with a text editor and it looks complete and uncorrupted. Standard python code.

One thing that bothers me - the blender I am running is from the ubuntu repositories - and is 2.46. I see a few references around the internet (and the quality of these references are a bit suspect) that there are people having problems with blender under the latest ubuntu 8.10.

Another thing: the error message popup tells me to look in the console - but I was only able to see the error message on a terminal from which I ran blender as a comand-line invocation. Perhaps blender is calling the terminal a console? Or is there another window I need to learn about?

Just a very stupid guess: Maybe your blender looks into another place for the files than you expect ? Maybe you can cross check that by removing the scripts, then verify that they are not available any more to blender. So you are sure, that blender looks at the right location? I have no other ideas. Actually i do not know much about blender on linux

Yes, the "blender console" is the window/terminal from which blender starts the GUI. So there is no other hidden output. At least i am unaware of such.

Hi;

I am about to explain the scripts-GUI of the RC scripts in a short manual. In the sculptie creation popup i have seen the "clean LOD" button. I have checked what it does and found that it is somewhat related to how the UV-map is calculated for oblongs with facecounts differing from power-of-2 settings. At least i can see that the rows/columns of the uv-map are not any more evenly distributed when i keep "clean LOD" selected. When i disable that button, i get almost perfectly squared UV-maps again. I compared sculpties with "clean" and "unclean" LOD in blender and i found that those with unclean LOD sometimes
get heavily distorted when reimporting the sculpt-map.

I have a very vague idea what the "clean-lod" function does. But all my attempts to cleanly describe what goes on, failed so far. I always end up in more questions than answers. Probably i am thinking much too complex and the true answer is simple ?

Maybe someone who exactly knows what goes on (Domino, are you there ?) can tell in a few simple words, what is going on here ? (yes i have looked at the script code and i have seen what is done there, but i don't get the "why" ...)

====

2 More question are about the sculptie bake menu:

What is the purpose of the "Clear" button ?
And what does "Include in Size" do ?


Thank you

Say you have picked 7 X faces. Without clean LOD the faces are distributed mathematically, so the UV Grid is evenly spaced but does not align with the correct pixels on the sculptie map. This is useful if you want to model at an odd size but want the final sculpt to have a smooth approximation of it.

With "Clean LOD", the UV layout is based on the next power of two size up. So here it would be based on 8 even spaced faces. This gives perfect alignment to the correct pixels on the sculptie map as once a column is dropped to give 7 faces, you have 6 normal sculptie faces plus 1 double width one. This gives exact model to sculptie vertex alignment so is better for precision work.



This sets the sculpt map to black before baking. With it disabled, it lets you have a model which only updates a part of the sculpt map. It can be used for using half a sculptie plane in a cloth sim to make curtains (theres an example in Area 55 spaceship) where a full model wouldn't work as the two sides push each other away. So you'd bake, mirror, mirror uv, bake with clean disabled.



That's for the RGB adjustments. It lets you select whether or not the changes you make there affect the size calculation when baking the sculptie.

Ok, that means, the pixel positions will be shifted around during final bake, because of the missalignment between the UV-map and the pixel positions in the model ? And that means, the pixels in
the reloaded sculptmap are possibly (probably?) at different positions. Is that correct ?


So here you internally calculate as if the sculptie had a power of 2 face count. then the uv-map is perfectly aligned to the pixels on the model, but since in reality there are less pixels in the model, the "virtual" pixels get dropped but that does not matter. ist that corect ?

I think i understand the use case, although i do not understand the example I have to go and look at the example. Do you have some coordinates or possibly a picture to look at ?


So this affects only the size values written down into the LSL-script ? And enabling the button means, that the rgb restrictions which would make the sculptie smaller actually would be corrected in the calculation and so the "original size" of the sculptie will
be restored in workd ?

10 minutes spent generating various face count sculpties and using the "Image - Bake Sculptie LOD" should help you see the relation. The brighter the blue dot, the more LOD levels use that pixel.



Nope, but probably worth looking at my profile for the location of the spaceship. It's only an example in so far as it's a sculptie I used that technique on.



Eg. a 0.0 to 2.0 sculptie width gives a scale of 2.0, with the min max RGB of 0 to 127 (half sized) with Include in Scale, gives 4.0, without it stays at 2.0

Again playing around and checking the results will help you understand the feature better. Knowing the effect various options have on the output opens more creative possibilities than just understanding a particular use case. Disabling "Include in Scale" is possibly the most obscure setting available. The RGB settings give a vertex step adjustment to the sculptie baking process. So depending on whether you want to say, adjust the rotation point, or fine tune the size for aligning a megaprim will alter whether or not to "Include in Scale".

So the RGB settings affect the sculpt map, and "Include in Scale" affects the LSL script.

They are really for advanced manual tuning of the results the baker produces. The vast majority of the time, there's no reason to alter the RGB settings.

Thank you for your Hints, Domino;

I took quite some time now to understand how all that is working together. By now i think, i have a good understanding on how the various features can be used and where they make sense.

I have one remaining question so far: What does the button "true mirror" really do ? In the code it says, it will "expandPixel" and on the sculptmap i see that on a 64*64 map i get always double sized opixels (2*2 pixels containing the same color) giving me 32*32 double sized pixels), while without "true mirror" i get a smoother color 64*64-field...

The effect is identical to what is named "compressible" in the release scripts.
Is that just a typo in the RC-scripts, or an unfinished section of the code ?
Wouldn't it be better to rename the button back to "compressible" and make
it enabled by default ?

I renamed it to better reflect (ha ha) when it is useful. I consider the compressible aspect more as a side effect of the feature which isn't useful in all cases. It needs very careful application to avoid problems with textures. Even on square sculpties, the 6 x 6 faces has a row and a column that come from an even pixel rather than an odd so, so there's a trade off in using this feature as it has a negative effect on texture mapping. This can be particularly bad on some of the oblong sizes.

ah...

I really thought all the time, i can just tell blender to "mirror the sculptie upon bake", but actually i never used this option until yesterday when i saw it does something else... Maybe reading the manual would have helped...

ok, so if i understand you correctly, the [true mirror] option means:

"If you want to mirror your sculptie-map, better use this option, otherwise the mirror can not be made perfect.

As a side effect your sculptie will have better compressibility-properties, but beware, this option may have negative effects on the texturing of oblongs especially when you use non power of 2 face counts"

So maybe the meaning is something like "prepare for flipping", "mirrorable", "flippable" or something alike ?

I am having a bit of trouble with the location of the scripts...I downloaded the Blender Sculpties Script, found it (after a while), "unzipped" it copied it to my desktop folder...then proceeded to open Blender & hopefully find it listed (File-Import, etc.) only it isn't there. Any "help" would be greatly appreciated at this point. Many thanks!

You must place the scripts to the correct subfolder for your blender application. Unfortunately the location depends on your operating system and on the way how you have installed blender. For a good and easy approach i the following guide:

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/07/12/the-blender-installation-guide/

It is for windows, but the last 2 minutes of the video show you how you can install the scripts mostly independent from any operating system. Watch the video and you will understand immediately what i mean.


And for more guides about Dominos scripts, you might take a look into

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/video-tutorials/

The tutorials there have been reported to be usefull for novice users...

have fun
Gaia

Why are cubes rotated by 45 degrees along the z-axis when created as cylinder with 4 x-faces and 0 subdivision levels? I have looked up the code where the meshes are calculated. Is the initial rotation choice just a matter of taste, or is there a significant reason hidden behind it ?

The initial rotations are chosen to match expectations on the UV map. Select the right half of the mesh and right half of UV map is selected etc..

Fro.m which viewpoint is this determined? Just looking at it in Blender, selecting the back selects the right side of the UV map, fro.m front view.

RC scripts should match Blender's convention of default mirror on X so from top or front it should be right. Old scripts and thus old sculpties used to use a mirror on Y to match SLs forward axis of X, but this was more confusing than helpful so I switched to match Blender expectations.

e2a: Assuming you added the sculptie from top view of course..

ahh, so simple! That makes pretty much sense... Thank you for this hint!

BTW: Are you planning for leveraging your current RC-scripts to a next release in the next time ? Or are you waiting for blender-2.5 to get out ?

windows Vista: C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\.blender\scripts

Don't have anything like this on my computer. Under my user name there is no AppData and so-forth.

Blender seems to be looking for a Python. I down loaded a Python and installed it and....still Blender can't find it.

>>>>>

If you can't find your scripts directory, then create a new text in Blender and paste the following code into it:

import Blender
print Blender.Get('scriptsdir')


>>>

I don't understand this at all. New text in Blender? In the Blender folder??? What?? where???

>>>>>

If you press alt-p ( File - Run Python Script ) then the correct directory to install the scripts will be printed on the console.

>>>

When do I press alt-p? It's not finding Python anyway, so whatever this means I sure it won't work.

V.

Here's the latest installation instructions from the RC scripts:

**** Installation ****



copy the .py files to your Blender scripts directory. The exact directory varies depending on the
options you selected during the install of Blender.

If you go to Help - System - System Information it will create a text document with the correct path in.

Go to the "Text Editor" and you should see a toolbar icon that looks like up and down triangles.

Click that and select "system-info.txt" Scroll up and you should see the directories listed.

--------->8-------------
- Directories:

Blender home dir:
/home/domino/.blender

Default dir for scripts:
/home/domino/.blender/scripts

Default "bpydata/" data dir for scripts:
/home/domino/.blender/scripts/bpydata

User defined dir for scripts:
/media/data/blender_scripts/

------------>8--------------

You can put the scripts in either "Default dir for scripts" or "User defined dir for scripts"

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Python_Scripting has more information on the text editor.

Hello,

Did all that Python mumbo jumbo. Added a scripts folder in the blender folder placed scripts in folder, followed text editor instructions. Installed it all once again and did it again. Still Blender didn't find this Python. Reinstalled Blender, still blender didn't find it. Maybe Python doesn't work with my Vista system wouldn't be the first time a program had a problem with a microsofty os.

Is there another 3d program that works with second life sculpties that you would recommend?

Thanks,
V.

No. There are others that work, but you'll be following someone else's advice by going with them.