Blender Sculptie Importer - Attached

Not directly from me. Hopefully the tutorial writer had the sense to keep the version they wrote against so you can get it from them.

The new website changes this going forward, but I've no plans to put historical scripts up. I'm not sure it would help as without knowing the specific version numbers that the tutorial was written against, you wouldn't know which of the 30 or so versions was the right one.

When I started writing the Primstar scripts, sculpties were new, through the feedback over the past year or two the scripts have evolved to support various work flows. Usually the advances in work flow have come from making the scripts work more like Blender.



This is one of those cases where the scripts now work more like Blender. Learn how to use the UV Image Editor window in Blender and you won't have a problem here.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Textures/UV/Unwrapping_a_Mesh

Understanding the effect various Blender tools have on the UV map is the most powerful knowledge a sculptie maker can have. It's really worth the time to learn how to use and understand the UV Image Editor window.

http://dominodesigns.info/downloads/blender/JoinedMesh.blend
Is there a text reference to this somewhere? I can see what it's getting at by whats in the blend file.. but is it documented somewhere?
Also; Oh wow, sweet.

I'm just rewriting the baker to handle this better. Currently it just uses a single 0-255 range over the whole mesh. The new bake calculates the grid per sculptie map instead of per mesh, and does a series of optimized maps from that.

http://www.dominodesigns.info/mail.cgi/archive/area55/20090625145002/ has rough details on how the joined mesh was made.

I assume that the new baker will preserve the positions of vertices which have already been snapped to "allowed positions" manually ?

Oh, that reminds me on one other problem: Assume i want to create a groundmap out of 4*4 sculpties all of size 1*1 meters in x,y. When i bake such a multipart sculpty-set using "keep scale", each individual sculptie ends up a tiny bit smaller in x,y so when precisely aligned on a 1*1 meter grid, we can see a gap of about 2 cm between the objects (although each object is reported to be of size 1*1 meters in the SL object-editor)...


Do you have an estimate when we can see a first implementation of the new baker? is it a matter of days, weeks or months ... ? ( as we know you, you will likely provide it 5 minutes after the question raised )

cheers,
Gaia

That's all we can do until the code is written and tested, then we will know for sure But early tests suggest that will be the case.



Hmm.. There was a discussion (on jira I think) about whether x = red / 255 or x = red / 256 should be used for the sculptie mesh generation.. That sounds like x = red / 256 won.. I guess they don't have the "if red = 255 then x = 1.0" step in there. I'll look at this when I'm next working on export_lsl (which will be during the bakemap2 stuff).



There's a branch called bakemap2 in the git repository, just do "git checkout origin/bakemap2" to get it. It's only partially implemented and has an accuracy bug in the colour interpolation at the moment.

a quick test for your info:

- Create a sphere with 4x, 4y, 0 subdiv
- go to edit mode
- in top view rotate 45 degrees (to get the bounding box aligned to the sculpty)
- bake once with keep scale
- bake another time without keep scale
- subtract both images

the result should be a black image, but this is what i found (scaled up by factor of 150):



Now that looks very very equal to my last bug reported on the dominodesigns issue tracker... Maybe that helps you to find the problem faster

edit: if i do NOT ROTATE, "keep scale bakes" and "not keep scale bakes" both result in the same sculptmap (the difference is black) So maybe it is yet another problem...

cheers,
Gaia

Did you remember to scale the object to 1.0 x 1.0 x 1.0 after rotating? Otherwise "Keep Scale" will show this sort of thing as the z height will be 1.0 and x width and y depth are 0.707 (it's the diagonals that are 1.0 on a 4 x faces sphere). So without keep scale you are baking to a max of 255, 255, 255 with keep scale it's 180, 180, 255

ok... You are right... almost
After rescaling the difference seems to be black. but it is not! I see random derivations by a value of "1" in different color channels and differing over the whole sculptmap. To visualise the effect, i took the difference again and then multiplied the image by a factor of 256 to get the following

(difference image) * 256:



So keep Scale introduces an inprecision even when the scale is 1:1:1 ?
Unfortunately a difference of 1 bit of inprecision is a lot where only 256 values are allowed

arghhh... I understand finally...:
you need to take the largest axis as the normal scale! And that explains why i see the gap in my example! So the hightmap sculpties only work as i expect if the z-axis remains smaller than x and y. As soon as my hills grow up too fast, i get the seen scaling effect and thus the gap. I am pretty sure, that my example suffers from this effect. APologize my fault here.

But anyways trying to understand what happens might have unintentionally pointed to another source of inprecsion as i reported in my previous post

Yeah "Keep Scale" really only has one use that I can think of, and that's square megaprim sculpties. For your landscape, just select all the objects and bake them together with "Keep Center" and "Keep Scale" both off. The bakemap2 branch will do the same as that on joined meshes. Bakemap2 should address any accuracy questions you have too.

Which sounds perfect ;-=)

I always thought, that "keep scale" is needed to ensure, that all parts of the landscape match up perfectly at their borders... So multi bake already takes care of that ? Is that essentially an "implicit keep scale" then ? Once more i am confused, but that won't stop me fr0m making my experiments

cheers,
Gaia

Keep Scale assumes a final primitive size of 1 x 1 x 1 for every selected object. Multibake calculates the optimal size for the objects selected. So multi bake gives grid alignment across all selected objects. Single bake gives maximum detail per sculptie but in cases like a landscape won't give perfect edge alignment.

Actually it's also handy for quick use sculpties. Like the Linden apple. That would be a good example to use "Keep Scale" on as there's then no need to minutely adjust the object to get the proper proportions of the shape inworld, just apply the sculpt map and a texture and it's done.

Is there anyone that can point me in the direction of the latest Blender to Second Life sculpty importer/exporter script for Blender by any chance?

I am writing a small reference guide about baking without/with keep scale.

/8/c7/336385/1.html#post2538479

I'd like to get some feedback about the correctness (probably from Domino ?) and understandability (from everybody who likes to help). I know pictures would be cool. I will add some to my final article on the machinimatrix blog about this topic

in particular i'd like to know:

- is the text correct ? [yes/no] (what exactly is wrong?)
- is it helpfull ? [yes/partially/no] (why not ?)
- is it understandable ? [yes/partially/no] (where do i fail ?)
- is something missing ? [no/yes] (what's missing ?)

thanks for any helping hand.

cheers,
Gaia

Hi, firstly apologies if this has been posted within the thread.

I (along with several other Mac PPC users)have been tearing my hair out trying to find the script folder for Blender on the Mac.

There are 2 reasons it is not being found....

1st, it is a hidden folder. There is a lot of misinformation on various threads stating that Mac hidden folders can be revealed with a simple keyboard combination. This is not true. Mac OSX makes it difficult to reveal these folders so you do not accidently delete a vital system file. You will need to download a program to do it, unless you really know what you are doing punching in code by hand. Go to version Tracker and get this file..

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/34132

There are other hidden folder reveal apps but several are not able to reveal blenders script folder, for reasons you will see below.

Assuming you have Blender and the sculptie script folder ready and downloaded, ( I got the script from ( http://www.masterprim.com/how-to-use-blender-create-second-life-sculpted-prim/install-blender-sculptie-script.php )
quit all apps and any additional tasks you have running in the task bar (I have connect 360 running there) now click the reveal hidden files app. This will now flick on all the hidden stuff for you while you use the finder to navigate.

Go to the main Blender folder, it should be called "blender-2.49.2-darwin-7.9.0-powerpc-py2.3" click it to open, and you should see the Blender icon and around 9 other files.

Now we come to the 2nd reason nobody can find the script folder; it is hidden inside the app icon!

Right click or Apple click the main blender icon and this will reveal a pop up window, scroll down to the third item called 'show package contents' and click it.

In the new window, click the contents folder.

Now click the Mac OS folder.

Now click the .Blender folder.

Bingo, there is your script folder.

Drag the scripts out of the import sculptie folder into here.

Quit the hidden finder app, load up Blender and you should see the scripts in the import, export and render menus.

Please consider to NOT use the scripts folder at all. It is in general no good idea to use it as add on store. Why ?

The 3 main reasons why to avoid using the blender scripts folder:

1.) If you upgrade blender, you need to reinstall your add ons
2.) If you upgrade the scripts, you must be sure that you know what to add/remove/replace from the scripts folder.
3.) If you use multiple versions of blender, you need to install your add ons in each version separately.

The highly recommended procedure is to use the user scripts folder instead. It is much more convenient as all 3 points above are solved:

1.) upgrading blender does not affect your add ons
2.) removing/upgrading the scripts does not affect blender
3.) multiple blender installations can use the same user scripts directory.

And on top of this the creation and configuration of a user scripts directory does not need any deep knowledge about the underlaying operating system. Even on the Mac it appears to be easy to set it up

watch starting from ~ minute 2:31 and you see that it is easy to do:

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

Important: If you install primstar, you no longer need to extract all individual .py files. Yoiu just drag the whole primstar folder into your user directory (the one which contains the .py files!) Thus when you need to replace primstar just replace the primstar folder. One very neat side effect is that you no longer have problems with garbled scripts from different sources. It is a very clean and easy setup at the end.

And above all we recently checked that it works for the mac as explained.
I hope that helps a bit.

have fun

no argument with that I am just helping mac owners find the folder in the first place. I have plenty of experience with other 3D apps and quite frankly the way blender works is very frustrating. These 'scripts' are more akin to plug ins (by other 3D app standards) and should be in the plug in folders on full view. Hopefully Blender 2.5 will address such issues.

Blender 2.5Alpha0 has been put out. Quite stable for me. looks good so far
Just wondering if Primstar works wit it.
Either way I haven't got my script folder to load as I guess it's all changed.

Gonna be six months before 2.5 is complete and then it'll be 2.6 anyway.
At least you can give it a spin now and start getting to know it.
I get releases from here:
http://download.blender.org/release/

No Primstar doesn't work with 2.5 alpha 0. I'm not planning to start a conversion until the bmesh and nurbs branches are merged.

http://dominodesigns.info/node/200#comment-663

Going to be fantastic when we get there. I have been a maya user, but think I will move over to blender for most things once 2.5 is further developed. My version of maya is looking a little old and I can't afford a new one.

Blender 2.5 and then 2.6 seems to be what I have been waiting 12 years for. I started trying to learn it well before NaN folded and have simply not been successful one bit. It's just been too alien. Unfortunately, the software-keyed version of Maya 7 Unlimited I used to have died with the computer that held it.. I've been without, completely, on my Linux box for more than 2 years.

2.5 is another story... for some reason I was finally able to just hop in and get started. When Primstar is ported I will be right there on top of it, sculpting my brains out. Thank you Dom for all the work that has gone into this.. I am looking forward to a version that works with a version of Blender I might finally be able to use!

I make two videos in italian language explaing the installation of primstar scripts.
Thank you Domino Marama for your work!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQCvcwQ2t4Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ht4iIYyBZVY